The hill I will die on: Going to a gig is an endurance test | Sasha Mistlin
Muddy sound systems, pricey tickets and a strong chance of getting showered with someone’s stale beer – give me a nice sit-down in a cinema
Muddy sound systems, pricey tickets and a strong chance of getting showered with someone’s stale beer – give me a nice sit-down in a cinema any time A few years back I went to see one of my favourite rappers, Earl Sweatshirt, at a venue in north London. The sound was so muddy I couldn’t tell which song he was playing. The setlist lurched between his old and new stuff in a way that did justice to neither.
The bloke in front of me filmed the entire thing on a phone he was holding above his head for an Instagram story that will be watched by no one. With 45 minutes remaining, I wished I could leave. With 15 minutes left, I decided that making it to the nearest kebab shop before the rush meant more to me than seeing the end of the set.
As a culture journalist, I’ve been to a lot of gigs. Most of them were endured rather than enjoyed, and I secretly think it’s only the most extroverted (or simply least self-conscious) among us who actually feel otherwise. This is the dirty secret of the music industry, which has tackled economic headwinds mainly by transitioning out of actually selling music and into live events.
This feeling has occasionally caused professional embarrassment for me, since I am forever inventing reasons to turn down what is supposedly one of the main perks of the job: free tickets. Sasha Mistlin is a commissioning editor on the Guardian’s Saturday magazine Continue reading...
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