Why I'm Done with Live Music, I Guess

Wipers - Up Front (mp3)(buy)

For the last week I've been trying to sit down and write up a Very Best/Sleigh Bells concert.  But I've been unable to get past how miserable the show made me.  This had nothing to do with the performers, everything to do with the now-standard legion of photographers that were trying either to erect a shield of light between the crowd and the stage or inspire a series of epileptic attacks.

I've had enough of that.

Years -- years! -- ago, this page mostly consisted of concert coverage.  Going to shows was a good deal of what I did with my spare time.  Four or five nights a week, sometimes multiple shows a night, and a representative fraction of what I saw out there made it on here.  There are a lot of reasons that stopped, not all of them matters of choice.  Time, money, travel, and health concerns.  My natural laziness.  The recognition of diminishing returns.

But there was one particularly discouraging night in Union Hall's homey basement, during one of Laura Marling's early rounds of NYC shows.  Marling's a British folk singer with all the stage presence of a rotting eggplant, so it was quiet, stiff stuff; the audience was hushed and respectful.  And the entirety of the performance was overwhelmed by FLASH FLA-FLASH FLASHFLASH FLASH FLASH FLASH.  A lot of this came from one photographer, someone who might have even been with Marling's label.  When she stopped -- I tapped her on the shoulder and asked her to, nicely -- someone else started.  The only impression I left with that night were the little green dots that had been stabbed into my eyeballs.

I wondered then as now:  Why bother buying tickets to concerts if the press and pseudo-press presence is just going to make me miserable?

This is no new concern.  Others have mentioned it before, I've mentioned it before.  Nonsense has been going on as long as the technology has existed.  Please enjoy this screen shot...

...from the Dead Boys: Live at CBGB 1977 video.

It only makes sense that, in an age of Cameras Everywhere, behavioral norms err from paralyzing self-awareness toward self-parody.  We're all stars of our own reality television program.  So you have idiots elbowing out space in crowded rooms and posing and taking, then checking and re-taking, then re-checking and re-re-taking, pictures of themselves so that everyone following them on the social network of their choice -- their audience, at their show -- can see where they are and how much fun they are having.  (Twitpic is too aptly named.)  The enjoyment of live music has bonded at a molecular level with the documentation of the performance to the extent that it's okay for the audience to aggressively distract from the stage; the only outrage comes when someone else distracts you from your documentation of that same event - when they get in your shot.  For an extra five dollars, Ticketmaster will swap the band's name on the ticket for your own, that day is coming, you betcha.

There's no reason bands should discourage this; their priority should be promotion, not performance.  No one knows how musicians are supposed to earn a living any more, everything's a loss leader.  They don't sell records, we're told.  (I buy records.)  Most small bands, we're told, only break even or lose money on the road, so in the end what they want to do (other than, hopefully, get better at being bands) is get their name out as much as possible.  So that maybe one day they can be one of the dozen or so acts that makes so much money at their concerts that everyone resents their wealth.  The only reward beyond obligatory audience applause (and those people are only enthusiastic because they're justifying their own presence, the band's only great because the audience has chosen to be there) and a job well done (oh YAWN) is every Googleable mention they can muster.  A photo is a scrap of text is an mp3.  It's all advertising.  Who knows how customers will find you?  A band has to be YouTubed and Flickrd and blogged and Dugg and StumbledUpon, must maintain an active presence across every social network platform.  A band should friend you on Facebook and follow you on Twitter in the hopes that, when you take pictures of yourself at their shows, you're generous enough to let them share the frame with you.

Bands:  Tried/true way to amass mentions and ensure the best (though quality is a questionable variable, these days, quantity is the priority) pictures of your act is to load the guest list with all willing press and "press" and pros.  Nothing sucks the fun out of a room better than a waft of workplace stink, but this is your job, too!  The dupes who actually paid to get in surely won't mind being pushed farther from the stage and herded away from roped-off Very Important Freeloader sections.

For list-ordained photographers, a concert presents an opportunity to annoy the fuck out of a band's fans while creating product for self-promotion.  They may or may not be getting paid, but photographers will be building a portfolio and driving traffic to their site just as soon as they can slap their bug on a pic and get it online.  These photos of the band aren't for the band - though maybe if the subject requests permission they could use it.  These photos are Copyrighted and Do Not Post on Your Blog!-ed to imply that they're not endlessly and easily copied (which they are) or inherently redundant (because everyone is a photographer now).  And because these folks are there purely to shoot the concert, they will shoot without rest, they will shoot and shoot and shoot.  Some venues or bands will only let them shoot for the first three songs; at the Very Best/Sleigh Bells show, that means the photographers would have ruined only half of each band's set.  Luckily, there was no kind of enforcement, and the photographers got to ruin the whole of each band's set.

Still!  More people are likely to see their product than can fit in some shitty basement.  And, because concertgoers were blinded by a flash at the time, the only way they'll be able to see what was happening in front of them is by checking the photoset afterward.  Without the shutterbugs how would you ever know what a band looked like from that close up?  Other than to sack the photo pit and allow fans up there.

But then those fans would probably just take shitty cell phone pics anyway.  Someone's always going to be the worst person in the room.

And if you are taking flash photographs in a darkened concert hall, you -- barring the presence of rapists, child molesters, or a representative from FOX News -- are the worst person in the room.

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(Practical plea:  Do you have one of those attachable flashes that rises up from the body of a camera, is topped by a diffusion box?  Either cover the back and sides of the box with gaffer tape or build a hood out of blackwrap or duvateen.  Those flashes are the worst of the worst, they send the light shooting backwards and upwards, I hate you.)

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I have been the worst person in the room!

Years! ago I took my camera to shows and I took pictures there.  I enjoyed doing so very much!  Very occasionally I took flash photos.  Sometimes more than occasionally.  That crummy snap at the top of the page is one of mine, and it wound up on the band's site.  You're welcome, band.  That Arctic Monkeys show Lindsay called out?  I was part of the problem!  I rubbed out a quick one in the back.  This was when affordable cameras didn't get past ISO400, but that's no excuse.  I never felt less than self-conscious about it, and pretty soon I realized I felt self-conscious about it because I was doing something wrong.

I restricted the photo-taking to outdoor events where there'd be enough light, figuring that other people could take the indoor stuff, or not, it really didn't matter.  Newer camera models appeared with like ISOinfinity, good on us, flash pictures could stop happening.  Only they have not.

There have been times that, after reaching over rows of people who've spent a show shielding their eyes and complaining, I've asked photographers, please, stop with the flash.  Some do, some nod and then don't, some go home and blog about me being "condo-fied" and an "idiot."  (We met and laughed about that later.)  But more and more it seems like behavior that's beyond correcting.  Once people start peeing in the well, it's easier to call it a toilet than to clean the thing out.

Look:  All these worst people are not evil.  If I seemed cynical up there it's because that's the way suffering through these shows makes me feel.  A lot of these picture-takers are real fans, a lot of them do fine work.  That doesn't mean that all the inconsiderate moments don't pile up.

And I realize that there are choices for me in the matter that aren't all/nothing.  Crawl to the chatter-filled back of the room, climb to the detached distance of a balcony.  Sick of watching the show via the LCD screen on the camera that's been hoisted into your view by the dude in front of you?  Retreat to a larger, more impersonal venue where you can watch everything on giant video monitors.

It's not like I was looking to give up and get away, go hide in my headphones.  Even with all the blah bands making meh music, I still think something holy can happen when someone gets on a stage and picks up an instrument.  That's where music happens, for me.  You need to be able to look a band in its eyes to cut through the bullshit.  I love the people in the crowd who are touched, who lose themselves and caterwaul along and force their bodies beyond composure.  Love that.  In the past, when people have told me they stayed away from live shows because of all the annoying cameras, I've been incredulous. But now I'm giving up, too.

Picture-taking has also become a way to interact with music.  I get that, I understand that.  I just can't stand it.  Every time someone holds their camera over their head, it's a reminder of how gadgetry has won out over music; excusing the act by noting that it's good exposure for a band just reinforces the unpleasant notion that we're all just part of someone's PR process.  I'd much rather walk out after a show slippery with others' sweat or caked in layers of nicotine or with someone else's vomit running down my pant leg than how I left this show:  Seeing spots, my memory consumed by images of digital recording devices.

I had tickets to two concerts, two days later.  Girls and Real Estate at Bowery, Freelance Whales at Pianos.  Blew them off.  Wasn't worth it.  I have one more ticket in hand, I mean to use it.  And I'll make exceptions for something necessary.  Local H will come back to town eventually.  But other than that, I'm out.  This way you won't have to worry about torturing my delicate eyeballs and I won't have to waste half a show fantasizing about destroying your equipment.  It's no big deal, in truth I walked away a long time ago.  It's just weird to hear myself saying it out loud.

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"Seriously, will somebody tell me what people expected other than 158 minutes of apocalypse BUKKAKE? Roland Emmerich knows how to destroy himself some world and sure it isn't so much a story but a sprayfest of rapid-fire money shots but what else would it be? And what else would make it THIS AWESOME? It's like the movie has ultra-oxygenated blood and sleeps upside down in a hyperbaric chamber and eats tiger penis like it's its job because it has psycho endurance that feels GREAT in your brain."
I printed out fifteen copies of this review and ate them and waited and waited and shat them out and rubbed them all over myself because it was just that good.

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David Byrne likes adverbs.  (via)

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"To mention something that you know is untrue in order to stimulate conversation is an act of patriotism."

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"The only good use for this disc would be to use it to dig a hole for its own grave. I've seen more 'natural terror' in a bottle of bad milk. Better acting too."

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The naughty boys come home from their crazy adventures and find that their mommies still love them. (That's a plot summary of "The Hangover," by the way, not of "Where the Wild Things Are.")

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Performances are characterized by a certain nostalgic stiffness, resembling those of the TV shows ("What's Happening!!", "Alice") seen in the background, that keeps the viewer at a distance. Langella's Steward particularly feels like the product of another era, and his diabolical wizard is far from terrifying, especially when he starts quoting Sartre.

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"Does this mean that in 10 years, Cobra Starship is going to record an earnest cover of "Dick in a Box"?"

tags: concert photos  

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