If you are an impatient person, you have already clicked on the video below before reading this. If this is the case, you probably also think I’ve confused My Morning Jacket with Daft Punk – two very different bands. I haven’t. The video below is a preamble to the point I want to make about the state of shows these days.
I saw My Morning Jacket at the Kool Haus (shity-est name of a club ever) and a flood of thoughts struck me – hence episode 1: the video camera.
I’m now old enough to have recognized a significant cultural shift in concert going – the evolution of the camera. It used to be that cameras weren’t allowed into venues altogether. Now, they’re so pervasive I suppose it just got too hard for security to stop them all. The ability to film the experience we are having has become so much simpler than before.
It used to be kids held lighters up until their thumbs were sore and dangerously hot. Now, this is only ever done ironically (I actually saw some at MMJ). Now, the lights you see dotting the crowd are from cell phones and digital cameras. The first reason for the video below is to show you what I’m talking about. The second reason is to show you how bitchin’ that show looked. Watch it now if you haven’t yet, and imagine being there and getting properly pumped up.
Something I found interesting when I first saw this video was the comment left by the person who had posted the video, “shoegazzzer”. He said, “The opening to their amazing set. After about a minute the curtain draws and near the end of the video the audience went mad so i had to turn the camera off and get into it! The build up was so drawn out they really wound us up.”
Watch when the song finally kicks in at about 3:01 – look at the cameras. All those steady spots of light can hold themselves properly still no more, and the urge to dance kicks in. Fuckin, eh. It should. If you watch the video again you notice that the camera through which you are watching the video does not start dancing at the 3:00 mark. But, as he says, “I had to turn the camera off and get into it!” As much as I as a viewer may want the video to continue after this point, the fact that the guy was incapable of recording further is proof of how good it must have been.
Were he to hold on to the camera longer, it would only be because whatever he was in the process of recording were not sufficiently forcing him to do otherwise – i.e. dance. Shouldn’t that be the goal of any show you go see – that it is so moving that doing anything other than giving it the full attention of your entire body is impossible? Imagine how long a camera would last in the pit at a hardcore show; people are definitely committing their entire bodies there.
This leads me to an apparently clear conclusion – if you are filming a show, you can’t be really be getting into that show. Either that or the camera itself is preventing you – holding you back – from getting into that show. Think about it – how could that “shoegazzzer” not start to jump after that build up? I’m sure he wanted to, but he felt an obligation to what he was filming. I’m glad he did because now I get to see it, but him filming played a role in holding his body back. Do this enough and I’m sure you wouldn’t enjoy the show as much as possible. There’s reason being the camera man is a job: it’s something someone is paid to do while everyone else just gets to enjoy the show.
I’m not suggesting people put down their cameras – that’s like trying to stop a tidal wave with your hand – they are here to stay and I don’t think they’re all bad at all. This observation does not require a conclusion in which I tell you how to feel about all this. But is recording an experience something done at the expense of experiencing it as thoroughly as you could be?
P.S. The irony here gets thicker when you consider the show in the video itself, daft punk’s whole robot persona thing, and that the “lyrics” of the song building and crashing together are “human” and “robot.” I just blew my own mind, by the way.
