The Nu-Normal #13: Swing and a Mitski
Some errant thoughts on smartphones at shows and gig phenomenology.
In this week’s column, we’ll take a look at some Music Twitter Drama™, the rigours of culture writing, and the philosophical implications of ever-increasing technological advances disrupting previously sacred artistic zones. It’s going to be fun—I promise!—and I’m also going to gleefully put on my “Big Brain” hat (gotta put that philosophy degree to work somehow), so stick around and buckle up.
In other news: You can now access The Pitch of Discontent in the new Substack app for iPhone. (*Long, sustained sigh for Android and Google phone users*) With the app, you’ll have a dedicated Inbox for my newsletter and any others that you may subscribe to. Click the link below to download:
Emails will of course remain the primary method of distribution for the newsletter; however, the app does provide a slightly better user experience for non-desktop reading. I’ve been using it this week and have no complaints thus far. So give it a shot if that’s your thing. Now, on with the show.
What’s a Mitski?
Let’s start at the beginning. Back in late February, Japanese-American singer-songwriter Mitski posted a lengthy tweet thread asking her supporters to avoid using phones at her shows and to embrace the live music “moment.”
I’m not terribly familiar with Mitski’s music or her cult of personality, but to this outsider observer (also a fellow music fan and casual gig attendee), it seemed like a very sane, polite, and rational post. Surely the kind of thing that wouldn’t elicit unwarranted backlash, waves of entitlement, and hasty deletion…
Nah… Who are we kidding? This is Twitter. People, of course, completely melted down about it for days on end and the post has since been scrubbed from the hallowed feed. However, thanks to the powers of the Internet, here it is below, fully restored in all its transcendent, middling glory:
Arguments For…
As one would expect, this type of casual ask and conversation drew takes of all shapes, sizes, and temperatures.
The vast majority of fan commentary ranged from “Yeah, we love you Mitski” sycophantry to “How dare you! You work for us” entitlement, with some truly awful racial slurs thrown in for good measure. (Twitter does indeed suck.)
In perhaps the most thoughtful and nuanced reporting on the Mitski saga and the larger issue of Phones-at-Shows in general, the Los Angeles Times had a great piece that focused on fan responses at a recent Mitski gig, with a number of other high-profile artists weighing in.
My favourite quote in the piece comes from electro-pop artist Chelsea Cutler, who manages to cut right to the heart of the issue without slipping off either side of the argument:
“I don’t feel like a content creator, I feel like a musician and a performer,” she lamented in her post. “I don’t know how to keep up with how insatiable our content culture has become.”
...
“The point of social media is to make you feel like you should be somewhere else and with other, cooler people,” said Cutler, who has since replaced phone time with surfing and making crafts at home with her girlfriend. “When you’re online, it’s really hard to feel satisfied in your present moment.”
I think this notion of live performance conceived in of itself as a form of content—a purely transactional commodity potentially devoid of any greater symbolic or spatiotemporal meaning—and the tensions this idea exposes, is crucial to understanding both Mitski’s hesitancy here, along with the contemporary backlash that informs much of our artist-fan relations in the digital age.
…And Against
Conversely, one of the more recent and interesting takes I saw on this issue came from culture writer Steven Hyden at Uproxx:
Despite acknowledging that he tries to restrain and limit his own phone usage at shows, Hyden argues that fan-made smartphone videos serve a dual purpose:
1) Equivalency of access, in that they make the live performance of focus accessible for people who would otherwise not be able to attend or enjoy said performance; and,
2) Historical record, of the unfettered documentary variety:
“The era of phones capable of shooting decent-ish video is still relatively young. We can’t fully appreciate yet how these amateur-made mini-movies will affect how music history is written. But it seems clear that the ability for anyone to collect sounds and images in the live-concert wild will inform how the music of today is remembered many years from now. These videos won’t have to be filtered through the perspectives of filmmakers or journalists with their retrospective biases. It will be raw data available for anyone to appreciate in the future. All because the person next to you took out his stupid phone last night and filmed the set’s hottest banger.”
While I can agree with certain aspects of Hyden’s argument (e.g., “having the ability to revisit great performances of the past also has obvious merit”), I feel that Hyden’s response is perhaps a willful misrepresentation of Mitski’s core grievance (e.g., “There’s an assumption, I think, on the part of anti-phone artists that people who shoot video of a concert are more enamored [sic] with their phone doing something cool than with the music”).
This brings us to…
Phenomenology of the Gig
In her second tweet, Mitski outlines that her issue is not phones being a simple form of distraction—although that is certainly a by-product of their usage for the user and everyone in their near vicinity—but that phones often act as a physical barrier that must be overcome between her as-artist and the crowd as-audience.
Using your phone to film a song or an entire set involves creating a deliberate technological layer of obfuscation between what’s happening on stage and your own perception and awareness of that activity. Put simply, it robs you of the full experiential impact of live (read: happening right now, in the moment, the realest of real-time) performance which, in turn, diminishes the communal presence of the performance experienced as performance.
In phenomenology (the study of experience and consciousness), philosophers often talk about the “tactile body” as a way of thinking about the implications of touch as an experienced sensation mediated between the body (and consequently the human subject) and the physical world.
There’s also an entire subdiscipline of postphenomenological research concerning technological mediations, exploring how technologies mediate the relations between human beings and the world. It’s an area that sees a significant overlap across ethics, epistemology (the study of knowledge), and metaphysics or ontology (the study of being).
Suffice to say, this Mitski saga and the divisive response to it is a perfect example of technological mediation in the wild.
The Verdict
Look, ultimately, if you want to pull out your phone and take a video of a show, that’s your right and prerogative as a free agent.
However, it’s also an act that’s highly contextual. Pulling out your phone to video a heavy hardcore band from the front row, while simultaneously dodging sweaty stage divers, flailing limbs, and the pent-up malice of the crowd killer is an entirely different setting from snapping a short Tik Tok of the long-hair hippie doing pub covers of “Khe Sanh” at the local. Words are things and context is key.
What this conversation highlights, I think, is how individual actions in traditionally communal spaces (both creative and professional) have impacts that aren’t constrained to the individual in any meaningful way.
Mitski’s tweet was not a demand or an order. No one was talking about confiscating or banning phones at shows (although other artists certainly have gone that far, with mixed results). It was an artist attempting to voice their preference on how to get the very best out of their live performance, how that performance should be experienced, and a justification for the reasoning behind that preference.
Yes, people are free to make up their own minds, choosing to respect the artist’s wishes or not, and that’s the main takeaway here: respect. If an artist I enjoy and love and pay money to see perform tells me to keep my phone off and in my pocket, I’ll likely do so—forgiving considerations of emergencies, logistics, etc.
But I am not all people—I am but an island, marooned on the sea of my own solipsistic ignorance. I cannot control what others think, feel, or do, and nowhere is that better illustrated to me than in a now-deleted tweet thread.