Once upon a time, the only glowing objects held to the sky at a concert were lighters. These days the airspace at any given performance is clogged with glowing the LED of a thousand mobile phones. We’re so desperate to record and inform others of our musical extracurricular activities that we miss the very point of why we’re even at these venues in the first place: the live experience.
Given the ubiquity of mobile devices, apps and social media, we are constantly competing for attention – as are Snapchat, Instagram, Facebook and so on. You’d think that if you fork out $25 – $150 dollars for a ticket, you’d want to enjoy the experience, as opposed to watching it on a screen at home. But for many, we seem to be more focused on capturing the moment instead of living it.
Of course, nobody is wholly innocent. I too, have been a culprit of the film-or-forget mentality. After some concerts, my phone’s memory has been stuffed to the brim of shoddily shot footage that is barely audible due to the thousands of screams overloading the phone’s inadequate recording mechanism.
But how many of us actually go back and watch these grainy videos with poor audio? There’s nothing really interesting about shoddy phone footage, when the click of a button can bring you high-def audio and visual components online.
It’s so frustrating to see audiences watching a stage through a tiny screen. What is the point? As bad as it is for us as fellow audience members, I can hardly imagine how annoying it is for the actual artists who spend their time practising and perfecting their craft specifically for these live performances.
A thread currently circulating on Reddit recently details the account of a concert-goer at an Ellie Goulding concert. Apparently Goulding asked everyone to put away their phones for the final song with the promise that if they did, they might be in for an extra song.
However, the plea fell on deaf ears.
“3 seconds into the song the arena lit up like a night sky with phone torches on recording. After the song she commented again. She’d like no phones and people just ignored her,” wrote Ollie Crook.
Crook bemoaned that although people had recorded the concert for the past three hours, they couldn’t even refrain from not filling the last three minutes. He then reposted an Instagram of Goulding’s that her drummer had taken of the sea of lights.
Although the perpetual phone-fiend is just your run-of-the-mill fare at concerts these days, it’s important to remember that this kind of dissociative behaviour has been going on for a while. The Beatles, at the height of their popularity, could barely hear themselves play for all the screaming going on at their concert.
Seriously, it was that loud that they simply could not compete with the volume of their audiences gleeful screams. Even after they acquired powerful 100-watt amplifiers. If you think it’s implausible that a group of people could scream that loud, you have to remember how incredibly popular the Beatles were. When they visited Adelaide in 1964, approximately 300,000 people lined the streets to see them. The population of Australia at that time was just over 11 million.
Eventually, the Beatles grew tired of having to compete with the ecstatic screams of their fans and they stopped touring, concluding that their performances were no longer about the music. Fans were so busy screaming that they forgot what they were even screaming about.
And that brings me to my point. Have we become so obsessed with narrowcasting our entire music spectatorship that we’ve forgotten what the magic of live music is all about? Seriously, a Snapchat disappears after 24 hours. But if you properly engage with what’s happening in front of you, that memory lasts a lifetime.
Think about the instances where you can’t actually access your phone, like at a music festival. Now I turn my phone off as soon as I enter the festival site because let’s face it, it’s going to die anyway, and there’s hardly ever decent reception. After a few hours, I already start to feel… lighter. As if this cellular anchor has been cut loose from me and I can actually just live in the moment. Does the fact that I can’t document the event with my own audiovisual output mean I wasn’t there, or I had a worse time, or that I wasn’t as invested or passionate about the artist? No. Not even close.
As well as limiting your own live music experience, it’s disrespectful to the artists and everyone around you. How many times has an errant arm desperately trying to capture a phone video 9that is realistically just bobbing heads with some noise in the background) smacked in you in the side of the head when you were simply just trying to watch the show?
Some musicians have gotten so fed up with the practice that it has prompted them to pre-emptively request that fans refrain from doing so. Case in point was the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, who had a very specific request for their audience:
The not-too-subtle request. Image: Spin.com
Maybe it’s time to heed their advice. Instead of spending the entire concert wasting your perfect view of the stage desperately trying to record your favourite song, put your phone down. Seriously, just put it away. Someone else, with better technical expertise has undoubtedly got you covered already. You are wasting your time and your money and your life experiences.
So for next time: please put your fucking phones away.
Image: Rolling Stone
The National, Kanye West, Ellie Goulding and Mumford and Sons.
Is it the 2016 Glastonbury headliners?
No, but the answer’s even crazier. It looks like Goulding, West and the two bands are working on a collaborative album. And they’re not even the only ones involved.
The crowdfunded album is currently titled Metamorphoses, and will be in support of Global Citizen, an organisation focused on ending extreme global poverty by 2030.
The album is set to feature twelve tracks, also crowdsourced, and will effectively be a collection of stories, poems, reflections and lyrics that they’ve been collecting across the past six months from fans and activists alike via the Global Citizen website. This out of the ordinary or extraordinary collaboration’s musical essence and meaning is described by Ben Lovett, the master behind the wonderful madness, of Mumford and Sons:
Metamorphoses has the potential to break down our preconceptions of the voices of creativity, what different people around the world are thinking and who has the right to be heard. In my own life, I’ve experienced people trying to define me and put me in boxes and categories. Through collaboration we can show people how those lines can be blurred and are ultimately redundant. The artists involved in this project are some of the most genuine artists the world has to offer. Artists like Kanye West, and The National are doing something globally important that is touching people down to their DNA. And these masterfully creative people are going to be interpreting incredible submissions from people across the globe. It has been a joy reading all of the submissions we received over the past six months. I’m truly excited to see what we will create together.
Metamorphoses is set to be released later this year.
Image: UMag Mag
The Victoria’s Secret Fashion Show is good for a few things. Destroying a woman’s self esteem, providing a brief burst of motivation to eat right and exercise (emphasis on brief), and finding humour in watching the selected artists dodge overzealous angel wings and try not to stare at the model’s asses (both of which Ariana Grande and Justin Bieber were terrible at doing). This year saw Selena Gomez, The Weeknd and Ellie Goulding take the runway- in what could possibly be one of the show’s most successful years, musically.
Both Goulding and The Weeknd performed two songs (Army/Love Me Like You Do, and In The Night/Can’t Feel My Face, respectively), but it was Selena Gomez’ performance that stirred the most after-show commotion. The singer performed a medley of her hits Hands To Myself and My Girls on the runway, where both her outfit and vocal skills were impeccably on point. So on point, however, that VS fans took to Instagram to vent their frustration over what they perceived was a lip-synced performance.
Past fashion shows have seen all performers sing live, and Gomez’ performance- while remarkably spot on- doesn’t sound any different. Perhaps it would have been better if she did lip sync though, there would be less to envy.
Check out the performance below, and try not to cry:
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zTtoxL9yeXU&w=560&h=315]
As naysayers pointed the finger at Ellie Goulding with allegations of lip syncing at Saturday’s AFL Grand Final, the following night the Britpop star tossed her hair and laughed it off. “You guys know how much I love to lip sync right?” she asked a clamouring audience at the Enmore on Sunday night. An ecstatic crowd of acne-ridden selfie-posers had sold out the one-night-only performance, eager to see the glamourous songstress. After touring alongside Taylor Swift and performing at the Royal Wedding, she was unashamed to relegate the AFL uproar to just “that football thing”.
The night opened with Asta, the winner of 2012 Unearthed High and an energetic teeny bopper with the voice of a husky Motown crooner. If Ellie is a pop princess, Asta is the lady-in-waiting, surging with ambition and promise, determined to show she is worthy of the crown. She bounced around the stage in hot pants with hair-whipping galore, delivering a punchy, blasting performance that had the rest of the twenty-one year-olds screaming for more.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5hzgS9s-tE8
And they got what they wanted. Before Ellie emerged onstage the six piece band opened with Outside, her collaboration with Calvin Harris, and even before her trademark breathy timbre was heard the crowd could not hold themselves back. While the back up singers stole the show with superstar choreography of their own, the audience were literally up and dancing in the aisles of the Enmore mezzanine. When she finally came out it was to absolute rapture, her saccharine soprano belting over the heads of the screaming teenagers. At the start of the performance she spent a lot of time writhing behind a fan (not a hysterical teen fan, but a fan of the air-blowing variety) but soon she loosened up, chatting to the crowd and moving about the stage carefree, and it became easier to get caught up in the hype of the show. The back up singers were the most visually captivating part of the show, however nothing could overshadow the star’s powerful and unique voice. With a three-octave range Ellie could jump around her register effortlessly, adding depth and bounce to otherwise standard electro-pop. Her cover of Your Song was a soft moment for a singalong, while Anything Can Happen was the crowd favourite. Ellie finished with Burn and a guitar around her neck, strumming out the power chords and wishing everyone well until her tour next year. Ellie Goulding… more like Ellie Good-sing… er.