Do you like concerts? Well, you're either a blithering idiot in dire need of being committed to an asylum or a masochist.
There is something inherently unpleasant about going to concerts that I’ve never quite understood. Whether you’re a braces-equipped red-faced screaming fourteen-year-old girl at a Justin Bieber “concert” or a sad black-shirted, jean-wearing old man dealing with his mid-life crisis by using out-of-fashion slang and going to see bands that were huge when the afore-mentioned “Beliebers” were mere protein in a nutsack, the one thing that we all have in common is how shitty the pilgrimage to see our favourite musicians in action truly is.
The journey
All concerts start, of course, with the journey. One of the problems with any sufficiently large or popular band is that it's pretty much a predetermined fact that you aren’t the only one who likes them, and no matter how advanced we fool ourselves into thinking our society is, there will always be four-hour traffic jams between our point of departure and the venue parking. Naturally, no matter how much parking the venue boasts, there will never actually be enough parking. Besides, even if you do manage to conjure up the Sainthood-worthy miracle of finding an available spot you’ll never be that fucking guy who found a Lucky Place Right By The Entrance. That doesn’t happen to people like you. Ever. And so, on top of your sanity-testing car trip or first-hand experience of what a sardine feels in a tin (read: bus trip), you’ll be forced to enjoy a ten-minute walk to the entrance.
The queue
“Well,” I hear you say, “at least the awful car trip is over. We’re at the venue – it’s all plain sailing from here, right?” Wrong. Thanks to detestable society-ruining arseholes who have nothing better to do with their lives than come eighteen hours early to the venue and set up camp in the queue like refugees escaping a dictatorial regime, you’ll have to wait. And of course, you’ll spend that waiting time standing, because who the fuck brings a chair to a concert?
Security
Having spent a considerable portion of your life sandwiched between drunk foreigners and that irritating group of girls who play the songs you’re about to hear out loud on their goddamn phones while screeching along to the lyrics, it’s now time to face the security door. Obviously, there’s a problem with your ticket. It doesn’t matter how many fucking holograms there are on it or whether you have the receipt, invariably it will become the long-lost twin of that single pocket of oranges you made the mistake of trying to buy at Pick ‘n Pay, as the booth attendant attempts again and again to scan the barcode. Having given the person your life story and repeated claims that the ticket is, in fact, legitimate, they reluctantly nod you on to the security checkpoint – or as I like to call it, the “destroy your human dignity and invade your personal space” checkpoint. If you’re a woman (I’m not), you’ll have your handbag disemboweled and upturned, the black-shirted angry huge guy in the SECURITY shirt rummaging through its contents like a druid trying to divine the future from the entrails of a chicken. If you’re a man (I am), you’ll no doubt get your nuts fondled by a security guard like he’s an enthusiastic child trying to guess the contents of a particularly large Christmas present the night before he can open it, jiggling and juggling it to and fro as he wonders “what could it be, what could it be? A gun? A knife? A penis? What could it be?!"
I can’t be totally ungrateful, however. Thanks to concerts, I now know that unopened bottled water poses a severe risk to massive crowds. Who knows what clear liquid explosive those AquaVie bottles could be holding? And cameras, god forbid, let’s not let those in. After all, we wouldn’t want you to take non-cameraphone photos that do the concert any justice, no!
Finally, you’re in – time for a drink!
Having had your basic human rights violated, you make it into the venue intact save your dignity and perhaps the overwhelming feeling of self-disgust at being publically violated. To assuage your great shame at having been felt up like a try-before-you-buy prostitute, you’ll want a drink. Well, I hope you’ve taken two jobs, because concert beer is expensive. Hell, even concert water is expensive. And I hope that second job pays cash, because there will never be a card machine. Okay, you have your beer? Down it. Have another. And another. And maybe one more. You’ll need it, trust me. Drink it all right there by the bar (it took fucking long enough to get your spot, you might as well use it to the fullest). There’s no point taking it with you to your spot in the crowd because either (A) it’ll take so long to get there that it’ll be finished by the time you arrive or (B) as you try to push your way through the unmoving crowd of sneering assholes who take your “Sorry, coming through” as a personal insult against their mother, entire family, culture and religion, you’ll spill it all anyway.
Found my spot!
Once you’ve given up on getting to the front and decide to settle for a lesser space roughly as far from the stage as your car is from the front entrance, it’s time for the concert to begin, right? Well, not quite. You see, if a concert is advertised to start at eight, it’ll start at 9.30. After all, the cynical millionaires who are profiting from your concert-going experience need time to sell crappy merchandise and overpriced alcohol, and what better way to do that than to make you wait another hour or so while the stagehands pretend to still be setting up sound and lights and all that stuff that was obviously prepared hours ago?
As you stand there, you’ll slowly become keenly aware of the kinds of people who share your taste in music. Take, for example, the man standing so close behind you that it makes you feel like you’re in your own Miley Cyrus music video. His uneven, too-loud breath will waft down your neck in a warm, fetid wave of air you can’t ignore. The smell of it, however, is what really gets you. It’s a stench that can only be described as “fascinatingly awful”, a kind of olfactory car crash you can’t tear your nose from. Imagine old, musky honey, mix it with the bile-raising smell of wet leaves that have been lying in a mouldy drain too long, and blend this with the unforgettable tang of the unwashed, sweaty skin between the thighs of a fat person wearing tight nylon pants. It’s like staring into the sun, but with your nose. The first few sniffs are of awe –‘Can I
really be smelling that?’ you wonder, ‘Could a smell so horrific exist, and from what Nazi biological weapons laboratory did it escape?’ As you waver between vomiting and laughing and going insane, all the time sniffing more and more deeply in sheer incredulity (maybe I’m not smelling it right?) you’ll wonder what kind of determined, ceaseless commitment it took to get breath that bad. What kind of insane devotion did this man put into his obvious lack of dental hygiene to muster up what can arguably be called a valid reason to commit suicide in a public place? Pity you don’t have that bottled water. You could have blown yourself up.
It gets worse, though. There’s always some tall prick standing in front of you. It doesn’t matter how tall you yourself are (I’m over six foot, a fact that earns me worse death-stares than a war criminal on trial for genocide when it comes to being in a crowd), there is always that one fucking guy who is that much taller. And if you’re that guy, then the guy in front of you will put his girlfriend on his shoulders. Added to this delight, you’ll be rubbing shoulders left and right with two couples who are obviously addicted to the taste of each other tongues. I get it, people. This is a date. I just wasn’t aware I was invited to play such a personal role in it.
Finally, it begins
After the unknown tiny opening act ceases their warbling slew of unknown, inaudible lyrics, the real concert begins. And this would be a veritable pleasure if it weren’t for the rest of the fucking hellhole collective of Twitter-obsessed imbeciles we are dictionary-bound to call “society”. As you look over the sea of heads toward the act you’ve paid a generous portion of your monthly wage to come watch, you’ll slowly realise the extent to which social media has ruined this short, painful journey we call life. The concert will framed by a box of glowing iPhone screens as the masses simultaneously convert this cherished, special moment into low-resolution, crappy film complete with uncompressed sound, uncontrollable hand-shaking and ruinous digital zoom to be shared and never watched on Youtube. Basically, imagine bobbing for apples but instead of apples you’re trying to watch a screen, and instead of a tub of water you’re dunking your head into a tub of lard and Vaseline.
As Mr Tall’s head weaves left and right, intermittently blocking your restricted, smart-phone filled view of the stage, he starts to dance. Well, I say “dance”, but that’s generous. The problem is, he’s old. And he’s white. And he has a ponytail. To make matters worse, there’s a faint scent of weed in the air. As he jerks and spasms in time with every 13th beat in the music, and as the Breath Guy pokes you in the back and comments on how tall you are, could you move aside a bit please, you bite down on the urge to commit hideous crimes against humanity.
“It’s not fair,” you lament, and slowly you realise that there is no god, there never has been. It was all a lie made to make you think this chaotic, unjust world of darkness and cruelty had some kind of order and fairness to it. You slowly begin to understand that you used to think you knew what hate felt like – but only now do you grasp that that was a mere heart-warming fable of hatred. True spite, the festering worm of rage that chews down all the way into the core of your being, is something you are only now beginning to appreciate. This feeling grows and grows, and just when you think the burning wrath of a thousand supernovae exploding with incomparable loathing in your soul cannot get any worse, you spot the Golden Circle fans dancing and cheering and having a good time. All a mere arm’s distance from the musicians you’ve obsessed over for years and years, they cheer and sing, untroubled by the worries and qualms of those too poor (lol!) to afford a good spot. As one of these rich fucks gets pulled on stage (probably some fucking girl who had the ticket bought for her by her stacked boyfriend, and she’d never even heard of the band until today) you remember that one day you’ll die, we’ll all die, and all our accomplishments will die with us, forgotten and meaningless in the void that awaits all of mankind.
And it doesn’t even matter
But that’s the ironic thing about concerts. Like with any terrible metaphor that doesn't quite describe what I'm trying to say, it's always darkest before the dawn, and after (perhaps because of?) all the suffering, all the hardships and irritation, you actually enjoy yourself.
Who doesn’t have a concert moment like when Bruce Springsteen played an acoustic version of “Down to the River” and I stood with my arms around my family, remembering how that song and its profound lyrics defined a time filled with uncertainly and hardships, and you all cry and sing along in unison because that moment represented the beginning of a better tomorrow? Who doesn’t have a story like when I went alone to a Rodrigo y Gabriela concert after six years of obsessing over their every move, buying every album on the day they came out, even going so far as taking painstaking months of slow, ham-handed practice to learn how to play the guitar like them - and after all that waiting, you finally get to see your heroes in action? Concerts – be they your of favourite band or where you are dragged along to watch your knows-no-better daughter shriek as a hormone-overloaded teen scrapes the barrel of talent for the very dregs left in the primordial scum of originality and excellence – are moments in our lives where, for a short while, we are able to escape the mundane routine of our everyday lives. And as we look up to our heroes rocking the shit out of that guitar, we realise that it’s special moments like these which are worth all the difficulties that precede them.
Except maybe the nut fondling. Let’s skip that next time, please.
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