Why I Stopped Going To Concerts
By Anthony Kuzminski
When I started writing, I did so because I loved music and film. Loved it beyond words. I loved it so much, that I almost never wrote a merciless review. I didn’t see the point. Why waste time on something that was fruitless when there is so much out there that is veiled, unheralded and downright beautiful? In some ways, I’ve lost my way in recent years. I think I write more about the business than about the art. Why is this? I’ve become jaded. I should just let the music take me away and not worry about how much concert tickets cost. While speaking with a dear friend and mentor last week, I was chiding a band who is languishing on a summer tour (in more than one way) and he asked me if I had seen the show, I answered “no”. He told me I shouldn’t put something down when I haven’t seen it. He had a noble point, but the more I thought about it, I was expressing rage over the business more than the art. Case in point, this band never gives press credentials unless you are a daily newspaper or the likes of Rolling Stone magazine. So my press credentials aren’t approved even though I write for a website with page views that are in the seven figures every month. When this happens, I usually shrug it off because if I love the act enough, I’ll pay the money. Now here’s where it becomes an issue. For two tickets to this particular show, it would be more than what I pay for one car payment. Not to mention the fact that this particular band is playing less than two hours. Thinking about this made me infuriated even more. Why? I have a college degree, been working for the same company for 10 years in a respectable and decent paying job. My wife has her law degree and yet we struggle to make the mortgage every month. Art should be a way of taking you away from those worries or helping you work through them and not add to them.
Something as simple as going to a concert has become a burden. I want to invest my time and energy into these artists and their songs. I want to speak from the mountains about their latest albums, but they make it grueling for me to embrace them. More often than not, I retreat to a DVD, the movie theater or an up and coming band at a club where prices are still reasonable. This is how bands who were once multi-platinum sellers have issues going Gold. People become disgruntled because they can’t afford their concerts and if they can’t see them in concert, they often forget about what makes this particular artist so illustrious in the first place. Seeing them on David Letterman isn’t going to remind you of their enormity. Seeing them in concert will. Sadly, the whole experience has become so corporate it often reminds me being at work. There used to be a time when one would go to a rock show to forget about your job and now you go and see your CEO and boss in the front row, sitting no less typing on their blackberries with stone faces during the whole show even the most popular songs. All of this may simply be a case of concert fatigue on my part where I’ve seen too many shows in the last decade. It may be a new found sense of responsibility, but in the end, what it boils down to is that money just gets spent elsewhere. When my credentials don’t come through, I wind up writing about a new artist or a movie I just saw that stung me, take my wife out to dinner. I still fund money into our economy, even one like this, because like everyone else, I need an escape. In the end, it’s the artist’s loss financially and artistically. It all seems repetitive to me now and the thought of spending $50 seems to be too much for most of these arena acts as they pull out the same 18 songs and add in 5 new ones. I’m no longer challenged, no longer elevated and no longer care. Rock music used to be about breaking out of conformity. But now these acts (most of them millionaires in their own right) are in bed with the devil and to please the big money spenders, they do what most of us never thought they would; conform.
