Na'an Stop

We listen to music to feel connected. Music is the colloquial poetry of our society. It reaches out in an explosion of expression that can touch a person's soul. This is not to say that all music has some deep and meaningful message or some higher value it is trying to convey; I would argue that most of it doesn't. Like most of Americans, I have heard some chauvinistic, and frankly insulting, lyrics in popular music and I have heard music that sounds no better than nails on a chalkboard.

Yet the most enduring music, music from The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, Nirvana, and even Madonna, is able to connect to audiences that span several generations. John Lennon, a member of The Beatles, created the song "Imagine" that is still played at peace rallies all over the world and is often cited as one of the most historically influential songs of all time.

I'm bringing all of this up to try and convey the importance of music to our culture to you; to try and make you think how music has shaped your own life and what role it plays in your everyday routine. Yet the music itself is only a part of the impact the music industry has on our culture. I would argue that concerts are the epicenter for connection and are a celebration of the expression of the emotions that music can bring out in anyone.

I recently attended a small concert in Boulder where a local pop-reggae band, Na'an Stop, played. This is not a genre of music I usually listen to and I was really just there to support a friend who is dating on of the musicians. However reticent I was about the music, the atmosphere in the venue was electric. As the band played, everyone in the audience focused on the music. There was no exclusion in the audience, no place for judgment or insecurity, just a collective sense of being in the moment.
To me, this is the importance of concerts. It is a place for connection, a place for release, and a place to express yourself.

Yet, in several concerts I have attended in the last few years, there has been an animosity and competitiveness in the atmosphere that I found jarring and distressing. While this is not a new phenomenon by any means, I believe it deserves to be discussed. The antagonistic mindset of concert goers is unnecessary and is hurting the music industry. I recently attended 93.3's Big Gig summer concert, and the level of disrespect and entitlement among the concert goers was something I had never seen at such a large scale (and I have attended Big Gig for the past few years). I had, at the time, blamed it on the heat and the overcrowded venue, but weren't those the same conditions for the past few years?

I watched as a girl fainted from heat exhaustion, a simple case of dehydration and excitement. Her friends swore she had not been drinking, and the paramedics later confirmed this, yet despite her obvious distress (she could not stand up and was a sickly green color) no one stopped to help. People moved slowly and reluctantly out of the way, rolling their eyes and grumbling at the interruption to their own entertainment. It took over 15 minutes to walk the few hundred feet out of the crowd and to an administrative post.

Concerts foster a feeling of community. They take emotions that are often too abstract to simply put into words and create musical representations of the human experience. Yet the ever-prevailing sense of entitlement and the self-centered mindset of many concert goers is changing the experience into a vulgar show of notoriety and priveleg.