every show you go to after you turn 30 will be the weirdest experience you have ever had
do you guys know how to mosh?
i was with friends at a bar in pittsburgh a few weekends ago in the middle of the afternoon when the drunkest middle-aged man of all time invited himself over to our table, and at some point he mentioned a band he was sure none of us had ever heard of: duran duran. we—all of us 31 years of age—were like yeah dude, of course we know duran duran; he apologized for bothering us and returned to his wife before full-columbo just-one-more-thing-ing us with a second band he was sure we wouldn’t know: the smiths. my friends brought up that scene from 500 days of summer, though i don’t think he knew what that meant. either that or he didn’t process it because he was so shocked to hear that we knew the name ‘morrisey.’
i felt a similar sense of disbelief at the thought that he didn’t think we’d know who these bands were (he swooped back over a little later to ask if we knew about a third band: the cure. then he chided my friend for not being caught up on vanderpump for an unreasonable amount of time), but since that afternoon i’ve been thinking about every single concert i’ve been to since hitting my late 20s and how they’ve only gotten continually weirder. ‘kids a decade younger than me couldn’t possibly know about any of the music i listened to when i was their age,’ i told myself before rolling up to surf curse’s sold-out show circa 2019 where my friend and i were the only ones in the room without X’s on the backs of our hands—as if i was totally unaware of the concept of optical networking technologies, let alone the recent trend of roulette-like excavation of deeply supressed indie rock moments for tiktok syncs.
the more i think about it, the more it makes sense—i was listening to the unicorns when i was 13 years old, who am i to institute this sort of ageist gatekeeping? but at the same time, the more i think about it, the less it makes sense—where were literally any of the other folks in the greater chicago area who were jamming buds and sad boys in their dorm rooms a decade ago that night? it felt like such a distinct demographic at the time: a less urban-outfitted subgenre of john dwyer fanboy; it was the guy i met at a wavves show in 2010 who made it a point to tell me he was mostly there to see the band christmas island open. does he have a family now preventing him from going to shows, even the ones that wrap up before sunset? is he prowling bars, plastered, asking kids with fake IDs if they’ve ever heard of ty segall?
i had another concert experience recently that also brought to mind this demographic line of thinking: taking up have a nice life’s publicist on an invitation to see the band play at the house of blues. i don’t know a whole lot about this group (despite what a certain citation on deathconsciousness’s wiki page may have you believe), but it seemed like an odd choice of venue for them (i spoke with their publicist before they took the stage—seems like the show came together somewhat last-minute and all the other clubs were booked). looking at HoB’s website now they’ve got owl city and senses fail coming through in the next couple weeks. i’m not seeing any other powerfully self-loathing, jarringly depressive, shoestring-DIY goth-rock bands that initially gained traction on 4chan on the calendar.
but the first of many surprises i encountered when i rolled up that night to what i’d assumed would be a nearly-empty room spotted with mid-30s loners suffering through the day’s 100-degree temps to rock a reverentially funereal (yet relaxed with age) goth look for a band that potentially saved their lives a decade and a half ago was that the venue was already nearly at capacity as the opening band was taking the stage. it was a local instrumental metal trio, stander, and the room—predominantly much younger than me, predominantly dressed very much for the weather—was going wild for them. it got even more surreal when sludge-metal duo ragana took the stage as a full house (and an over-eager lighting operator clearly hired for the venue’s EDM sets) warmly received snail’s-pace riffs and blood-curdling screams for 30 minutes.
and the night just kept getting weirder—even after i accidentally had a full conversation with thou’s drummer at the bar in which he revealed to me which anonymous avant-garde black metal outfit he’d recently joined.
when HANL took the stage they looked and performed like rock stars rather than the basement-dwelling gremlin i feel like when i listen to their music. i was pretty far from the stage, but they appeared old enough to be a legacy act reforming for a set at darker waves fest later this year, making it even stranger that the pit in front of them was made up of bodies moving in a uniquely gen-z way. usually i see these exaggerated fist pumps and other rap-derived hand motions paired with the worst pop song i’ve ever heard clumsily—to my ears, as an old—interpolating rap, rock, and other genre shrapnel in equal cringey part with an undeservedly cathartic chorus to create a mess of influences that i can’t possibly process because i’m trying to follow them all to their incompatible root like a dan flashes shirt rather than taking it in as a cohesive musical statement.
and those songs usually aren’t about bloodhail or waiting for black records to come in the mail (one kid was shouting ‘emptiness!’ between songs all night, either as a song request or a declaration of a vacant soul). it occurred to me that ‘vulnerable’ has become the buzzword for a very common category of young musicians whose press releases i’m least likely to read (see: white kids on major labels pushing the boundaries of appropriation. their name’s always just like….PAT! or some shit). what is have a nice life if not earth-shaking vulnerability? what is surf curse’s massive tikitok hit ‘freaks’—which conventionally attractive zoomers once used to soundtrack clips of them smirking while pointing at their various diagnoses—if not anthemic self-deprecation?
speaking of my inbox, i’ve seen the term ‘ugly pop’ floating around for a while now, which appears to be a self-assigned genre term for zoomer musicians who, per their follower counts and the comments littering their thirstiest-trap IG posts, are objectively very popular people mining similar territory of quote-unquote vulnerability to unknowingly satiate the depression-to-content pipeline constructed by their labels as the, sure, equally ‘genre-defying’ (to pull another buzz term from the PR trough) HANL. the term makes me think of my english professor’s definition of postmodernism as being the guy at the party who says ‘great party!,’ causing everyone to suddenly think about the party and therefore lose interest in it.
i can charlie-kelly-corkboard these seemingly disparate corners of pop culture together all day, but it’s just so jarring to see the opposing ends of the spectrum interacting in one room: middle-aged men banging out tortured post-punk music as a backdrop to the traumas of their frontman—inexplicably doing some irritated variant of the watusi all night—while a sea of kids born two generations after those traumas were inflicted enjoy the best night of their life crowdsurfing up to the front rail where the intimidatingly jacked HoB staff collects them, holds them in a gentle pieta-like pose for a moment, and whisks them away.
to tie this back into my original out-of-body experience, i can better understand the pittsburgh gen-x-er’s disbelief now that i can see how the smiths and the cure likely originally appealed to different demographics of individuals who liked this same music for different reasons than people their age 40 years later do. we have less context for these bands, having likely discovered them through internet radio, our parents’ CD collections, or our tumblr crush’s feed, so we weren’t really clued in to the specific fashions (or dance moves) that accompany their music. on a deeper level, it was probably easier to connect with the emotion in these artists’ songs before it was crystalized behind the dense aesthetic of the period the music was released within.
as a postscript to this story, the week after i saw HANL, and at the invitation of the same publicist, i saw the band chastity play a set at a less-surreal venue, though perhaps one equally ill-fitting of their deceptively heavy pop-punk sound that gets particularly rowdy in a live setting. curiously they were one of the opening bands for something called ‘hockey dad’—which sounds like the punchline to a tweet about contemporary indie-rock band names—and after accidentally showing up early enough to catch a set by what i can only describe as the most gen-z band i have ever seen (indie/funk fusion led by an extremely gifted pop vocalist dressed like a combination of every girl in my eighth grade class who got the crowd involved during every song the way a headliner would while frequently leading us to believe that this was the most meaningful moment of their entire life), four guys at least a decade older than that band come out on stage and absolutely pummel this poor, unsuspecting crowd with abrasive sounds they clearly had no idea what to do with.
‘do you guys know how to mosh?’ chastity’s guitarist asked rhetorically with a very different tone than the guy i met in the pittsburgh bar before riffing into the next song and immediately learning to his surprise that no, their audience really didn’t. while another recent experience at a home is where show affirmed that certain subcultures among gen z have giddily received the torch for this type of ritual, that band could ultimately find themselves playing house of blues to a venue full of their kids’ generation who will be doing whatever it is their own pop-cultural moment deems necessary to do within a live-music setting.
and i am going to be there—so, so, so drunk—when they do.