Five minutes following, you've already forgotten the name of the opener. Although the main band has prepared these songs for months and are currently preparing on stage, they look like they do not want to be there. The once-friendly audience condenses, as profound boredom mistaken for fatigue sets in among the restless crowd. Who is everyone texting? - the great mystery of our age. Radiohead takes the stage, echoing the historic tone of belligerent British skepticism. The group sings about individual awareness and free thinking to an audience all wearing the same $40 tour T-shirt. Our concerts are out of harmony; hear the discord of our times.
Music has ascended to the top of our cultural charts. Like literature and movies, today's music somehow ranges from brilliant artistic achievement to songs that are actually embarrassing to listen to: "I wanna be a billionaire so fricking bad," sings one tune. The most damning case against music is made by just turning on the radio.
The incredibly dynamic issues in music are inaudible to the average listener. The concert, however, we are more familiar with. Though the Internet displays our intellectual climate, nothing reveals our generation like the concert experience.
More than the tie-dye shirts, the wayfarers, hookahs, hip shoulder bags, a renewed interest in Eastern philosophy (is every first-year student seduced into taking Tibetan Buddhism?), and mass-produced Bob Marley posters, our 60s fetish culminates at the concert with the addition of music and drugs. Instead of the promised Dionysian experience - musically lowering our guard and uniting us in some communal encounter - concert crowds become aggressive, inspiring a paranoid claustrophobia.
I did not live through the 60s, or at least not in my current incarnation, but I imagine it differed from today's false reenactment. Sold back to us by the preceding generation, the 60s are cliche. The independent has become mainstream; conformity takes on the guise of non-conformity. At concerts especially, we receive the grass without the grassroots, the outfits without any political message. The 60s nostalgia is our latest attempt at a fa
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