11. Solo Concert

I will not say who.

Musical taste is a difficult subject for me, because mine is bad. That’s not false modesty nor begging for reassurance. I know it’s true and I think it’s fine. I experience music like a small mole nosing its way up to the surface of the earth, drawn by incomprehensible vibrations, before retreating without any deeper understanding of the phenomenon. When you have bad taste in music you see the false sense of self that good musical taste creates in people who should be building character by smashing rocks and volunteering at nursing homes. They remember everything—album names, song titles, genres. The basics I can’t retain for a second. And they take it very personally if the good music they like isn’t appreciated or if someone points out the lead of their favorite band had sex with underage girls or something. Really demented stuff. 

After many, many charged conversations about music, I’ve given up. When people start chatting about a musician at parties, I wander away. When folks post grainy footage from a concert in an unending series of Instagram Stories, I close the app. Experiencing music is mostly a very solo act for me apart from being on the dance floor. I play it at home, in my earbuds as I walk, relaxing or raging or weeping according to what strings the chords are pulling. So I decided to buy a ticket to a show and go alone to a concert for the first time. 

I have been to a few concerts with friends. I’ve seen Dolly Parton twice. I tried going to the requisite indie shows in college to prove I was young and cool only to have a miserable time. Oh god, what a crank I am! But it’s true. Lounging is simply superior to standing and the fact that people are asked to stand packed in straight up like crayons instead of being given a good chair or chaise to drape yourself across is a scam perpetuated by the music industry. The only other entertainment where it’s considered normal to stand for hours is at the Globe Theatre, where they’re LARPing Shakespearian times. At most concert venues without seating, you have to pay extra to get into a VIP section where the best they can do is offer you a balcony railing to lean on. This is an embarrassing situation with no hope of changing because everyone acts like it’s fun. Unless there’s room to dance wildly, it’s not. 

The ticket I purchased guaranteed me a standing spot, no railing, to see a band I’d only heard on Pandora (yeah, Pandora, suck it). As you can tell by my old person diatribe above, it had been a while. Vaguely, I remembered that concert times on tickets were usually just doors, and then there’d be an opening act, and then eventually the band you actually want to see comes on anywhere between 2 to 3 hours later. However, there was no information on what the timeline was anywhere on Shakira’s internet. I decided to arrive at 7pm, not wanting to miss the people I really wanted to see. The venue was, of course, almost entirely empty. I put my back up against a column close to the stage, an incredible position that couples full body hugging continually tried to push me out of the rest of the night as the room filled up. There was also a guy who kept standing on my feet as he “discreetly” blew his vape smoke into the armpit of his jacket. In heeled boots, I could still see over them all and just started setting defensive picks on everyone who brushed against me with some firm forearm jostling. 

This position was also good because of its proximity to the speakers. The bass shook my body so hard I seriously wondered if it would give me a heart arrhythmia. It felt as though my blood was pumping along to this external current rather than the one it produced naturally. I imagined everyone in the room being forcibly pushed into this pattern, their blood pumping in synchronicity with the songs and each other.  Live performance is very powerful, even when it’s bad. I enjoy this band so I didn’t think it was bad, but I’ve seen a lot of bad performances as someone interested in improv. Everyone is going through an experience together. It thins the borders between us, in misery or in harmony.

There is a lot of social media talk lately about “third spaces,” the places we go that are not our homes or our work, like churches, cafes, bars, clubs, community centers, public libraries, gyms, bookstores, stoops, and parks. Not all of these places are free, but most of the ones that are have been gradually shut down or privatized or defunded. I don’t think concerts are the best example of an easily accessible third space, because they’re mostly not free or just straight up unaffordable these days. However, they are a great example of the power of third spaces for bringing people together in a way the home and the workplace cannot, and that union explains in part why people are still willing to pay higher and higher prices, taxes, and fee to get into them. We’re just desperate for a sense of community and connection and that’s what all the music talk I’ve missed out on over the years is really about. 

That’s a bit sad for me and my spiteful music rejection, but I was still able to go to one now, as an old person, all alone, and feel the vibrations. I left early, because I am weak. But when they played their biggest hit, I was very happy to be enjoying it live.

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• Budget cuts to public libraries in NYC by Eric Adams are so bad, even the New York Post is complaining about it. This is a good post about why it’s a huge problem. Trying to figure out what to do about it is pretty disheartening, because libraries have been fighting this all year and they lost. However, our next Mayoral election is November 2025. I find electoral politics insanely depressing, but a city is much smaller than a country and this mess has frankly inspired me to invest a lot more in local interests. Okay, end of speech.

• If you want to see Mitski in February, message me.

• Who else is worth seeing if I’m gonna become a concert head? Good venues? With Seating?