The Digital Age Killed Live Concert Crowds

September 6, 2008, roughly around 7:30 p.m. in Madison, WI

Long medium brown straight hair hung to the waistline of her red suede jacket.  Motionless, she stood, hands at her waist, fingers hidden under her hair, looking at The Black Keys, a two man band rocking the blues so hard my heart felt electrified.  My legs sprung into jumps and hops, sending my body up higher and higher.  My arms pumped out the rhythm of the drums.  I looked over to my husband.  His head shook back and forth, his hands beating with the drums on his thighs, and his hips rocking.  

The red jacket girl stood still as a stone statue in front of me.  I approached her from behind and stated in her ear, “Honey, life is too short to not move a little.”  This middle-aged womanly face glared at me from behind the curtain of hair.  Her stern face looked like stone too, which only verified to me that this woman is too rigid to be in the middle of an amazing live performance of hard core bluesy rock.  

To further prove to myself that she was a sad case of a girl with no groove, I scanned the rest of the crowd around me.  I found myself shocked to find very few people moving their heads or dancing in any small fashion.  The most common movement I saw were people taking a drink from their plastic cups of beer or pulling a drag off their cigarettes.  All ages of people, all shapes and sizes, all colors, all stood with their eyes zoned out like they were watching a movie or a stupid sitcom.  

Is this one of the syndromes of the digital age?  The more I saw these expressionless, emotionless faces, the more I worried for the quality of life of today’s people.  The more I wondered how many days or months passed them by without them ever caring.  I looked at the rigid red jacket lady in front of me and saw her take her boyfriend’s kiss to her forehead like a dead tree responding to a woodpecker.  This concerned me too.  How stiff are these people in bed?  How coarse are they at work? to their children? to the people who serve them food and coffee? to fellow drivers on the streets?  

I looked to my friends who were all wildly dancing their hearts out, calling out to each other, “Man that is off the hook!  These guys are amazing!”  My friends are rock climbers, extreme campers, snowboarders, and other such fun types of people who grab life by the horns and ride it out with all senses engaged.  I knew they savored the Jack they snuck into the event, tucked into a sock under the pant leg, and they still rubbed their tongue around the pockets of their mouth where that Honduran cigar still stashed its dark smoke.  

I knew my husband and I would be sore the next morning from riding our bikes and dancing with our younger friends, yet the chance of making love before or after a meal of pancakes was high.  I knew that the next time we get together with these friends we will still talk about what a phenomenal concert we saw, even though what we will really mean is that we heard it, we felt it, we consumed the music.  

I scanned the faces of the others in the concert and deduced that, to the motionless people with zombie faces, this concert was just another click on the remote control, another cable channel, another movie at the theater, just another pocket of time they shutdown and run on sleep mode.  

I shook my head and continued to dance myself to exhaustion knowing that this may be the only time I see these two men live, feeling their hearts pour out into their music, and I make myself lucky enough to enjoy it.