In 2023, it's tough to know what, exactly, a concert is for anymore. Does someone attend to watch a live musical performance? Or to become part of the show in some way? Or to find a setting that might be optimal to create viral content?
Is the star of the concert onstage, or in the crowd?
Online, at least, it could go either way. In part, that's because the barrier between the stage and the crowd is more porous than ever, going both ways. Recent weeks have seen a spate of objects flying toward artists, a sign that fans are seeking out ways to insert themselves into the performances they're attending. But pop stars are wise to this, too, understanding that in an era of social media-inspired invasiveness, allowing themselves to be touched by the crowd is a powerful marketing and publicity tool.
Performers might appear superhuman, but they are vulnerable, exposed. It's one of them vs. hundreds or thousands in the crowd. The barrier between stage and audience is philosophical, a shared understanding of social practice but not anything more than that. It is not impregnable.
In June, pop singer Bebe Rexha was struck in the forehead by an airborne cellphone, resulting in a black eye and stitches. The alleged assailant told police that he thought hitting her with the phone "would be funny." The incident seemed to underscore the increasingly fragile dynamic at concert venues — it's common for fans to hand performers their phones and ask them to take a photograph or video, but the flying phone was a demand and an insult. It was an insistent reminder that even in concert settings, fans feel like they're in control of their stars, not the other way around.
The Rexha incident seemed to kick off a summer of inappropriate breaches. At a London show, someone handed Pink a wheel of cheese, the day before someone else (one hopes) threw a bag (allegedly) containing their mother's ashes onstage. Both Harry Styles and Kelsea Ballerini have been hit in the face by objects thrown during recent performances. (Ordinarily, Styles' fans toss him teddy bears.) Ava Max was slapped.
Audience members have been throwing things on stages as long as there have been stages, and stage crashing is not a new phenomenon, but this recent cluster of incidents feels like a game of stuntlike one-upmanship, designed to go viral. Disrupting a celebrity — inserting yourself into their narrative — may now be the ultimate concert souvenir.
For fans whose primary engagement with culture is virtual — this feels particularly true post-pandemic, when polite concertgoing wasn't an option — the sense of a performer as a human is less firm. And demonstrating this kind of proximity to a famous person is a logical next step of the evolution from autographs to selfies. The stars are no longer out of reach; they are backdrops. There was a flash of this in the recent kerfuffle at a Miranda Lambert concert, where the singer chided some women in the crowd for taking photos of themselves while she was singing. (At least those phones weren't airborne.)