He appeared out of the pixelated heavens, hundreds of figurative feet tall in front of a burning roller coaster and on the ocean floor, morphing into a cyborg and straddling an entire planet. Sure, the Travis Scott Fortnite in-game “concert” would still have happened without the coronavirus lockdown — it was an elaborate and extraordinarily trippy premiere for the Texas artist’s new single, which debuted at No. 1 on the Billboard chart last week. But under our new virocracy, this marketing stunt became something more than an ad for a rapper that was also an ad for a video game that middle schoolers play. It was maybe the largest shared, live-ish popular music event we’re liable to get for a while.
The cerebellum was still vibrating about an hour later when another, very different concert-not-a-concert rolled around. There was no shortage of other options on that Thursday evening in late April: Take a spin around Instagram, YouTube, or Facebook on a typical quarantine’s night, and you’ll find an embarrassment of vexingly imperfect attempts at producing some mass simultaneous experience of art that exists only in the moment. The next stop on my kitchen-table tour would be Sharon Van Etten’s Instagram, where she sat in front of her computer and played a recording of an unfinished track, a choir blast of unsparingly grave low soprano over apocalyptic piano trills.
Even through a laptop, the effect was overwhelming, almost paralytic. For a moment, I felt I could peer into other kitchens where other people felt similar anxieties dissolve. Van Etten sat with her eyes closed as the music played, perhaps feeling the weight of both the plague and her accomplishment all at once. She explained that finishing her new album would require lots of in-person recording and production that can’t be done at the moment, while promoting the record would necessitate the kind of live performances that might not come back for a while. Van Etten was practically in tears discussing her backup musicians, who she assumedly won’t see for a while: “I’m thinking about the people who are so far away,” she said.
The evening’s third live musical adjustment to our horrifying reality was a weekly Instagram Live from the goth country singer Waxahatchee and her psychedelic indie rocker boyfriend, Kevin Morby. From Morby, we got an acoustic cover of Guided By Voices’s “The Goldheart Mountaintop Queen Directory,” appropriate given the song opens with a line about “cold hands touching my face,” face-touching being something we’re probably not allowed to do ever again. Music’d out for the time being, they patched in a random couple from Utah: “We’re building a pizza kiln in the backyard!” one of these peppy strangers declared, a rebellion against plague-wrought despair that was as moving as any of the actual music I’d heard that night.
Back in the before-time, in a period that loses its definition and its reality with every passing day, live music was perhaps the critical element of a major American city’s cultural life. The swift and comprehensive death of the concert offers grim indication of just how thoroughly the coronavirus has erased those literal and figurative avenues for social intercourse that we once referred to as “society.”
Live venues were among the last places whose product could only be consumed in one way and in one location, as well as alongside one’s fellow human beings, kindred spirits in quest for the musical sublime, or, failing that, a fun night out that actually makes some demands on one’s stamina and higher appetites. In a homogenizing world, music clubs still retain something of their immediate context, surfacing local talent that reflects local tastes and preoccupations. It is at clubs such as Elsewhere, a multilevel, industrial-chic labyrinth of performance spaces not far from my apartment in north Brooklyn, where ideas are shared, relationships forged, and identities built. Not all is lost, though: In April, the venue hosted a festival in a replica-Elsewhere built in the video game Minecraft. Beloved emo act American Football headlined.
A few such experiments have been notably disastrous: Fairly or unfairly, seemingly no one was happy with Stephen Sondheim’s 90th birthday celebration, which fell victim to a cascade of technical snafus. The Air and Space Museum’s excellent “Space Songs: Through the Distance” YouTube program, which included specially prerecorded performances spliced with short talks from museum curators and former astronauts — effects wizard Dan Deacon was a highlight — made a good argument for just forgoing the live element altogether.
But at their best, and even at their worst, the performances have shown us sides of our musical heroes that we might never have glimpsed on a non-COVID timeline. Would Randy Randall of No Age have leaned in close to his laptop camera, raised his fretboard vertically, and walked his Instagram followers through the devastating riff to “Teen Creeps” had the virus never struck? Even the nonperformances have been revealing. The much-anticipated recent rap battle between Bone Thugs N Harmony’s Krayzie Bone and Three 6 Mafia’s DJ Paul was called off for vague reasons, thus forcing Mr. Bone to stall for time on Instagram Live. Today’s rappers tend to be aloof figures who trade on their otherworldly weirdness — recall that god-sized CGI Travis Scott from earlier — but Krayzie Bone is from an earlier era when the gift of gab was essential to an MC’s self-presentation (to the point where one of the great rappers of 20 years ago was, in fact, named Gift of Gab). Merely watching Bone talk proved riveting. “This is gonna be real, real big for the culture,” he promised of the postponed confrontation with DJ Paul. “It has to be done the right way.” Damn straight it does, I said to myself — stop this charade!
When they really work, remote concerts unleash the alluringly half-demented inner voices of artists newly liberated by the feeling of the end times. Post Malone and Blink-182’s Travis Barker ripped through 90 minutes of Nirvana covers in a recent YouTube broadcast, a grinning Post sometimes playing lead guitar and always delighting at pushing the vocal reverb just a tad further and higher than good taste might dictate. Hardly a second of it failed to achieve awesomeness. “What next, Andrettes?” asked Jennelle Monae, who consulted with a mannequin wearing a face shield during a thrilling Facebook Live performance. Monae, dressed in something akin to a white, Tyvek bodysuit, shimmied and moon-walked through a rose-washed sound stage, nailing her hits with no less enthusiasm than she would have at an “actual show.” “Alright,” she said, the huddle now over. “This one is dedicated to all the folks who are locked inside. I’m locked inside, you’re locked inside, too.”
“People miss music, man,” the New York super-promoter Peter Shapiro told me in the midst of explaining some of the new, multicamera or fan-focused tweaks to livestreaming he’s deployed lately. “They see how important it is.” Indeed, it would be a horrific setback to both American civilization and the human spirit writ large if the remote concert gains ground on the traditional live experience. This is one area in which the virus cannot be allowed to win.
Corona concert-hoppers are sometimes seeing and hearing things that have the spontaneity and spiritual power of live art, but it’s rare to see a full band, the sound is often spotty, and you are inevitably staring into a computer screen, interacting with no one and, in fact, often meditating on the unbridgeable distance in front of you. No one will look back at any remote concert as an event in his or her life. There are no higher questions about life in play, as there can be during that once- or twice-in-a-year show that seems to split open reality itself. Instead, the remote show is a stopgap, one of our million little tactics for staving off an even more acute sense of breakdown, or for lessening our guilt at wasting the blessings of the former world. Somehow, the shows reflect how far we’ve fallen in recent months while proving that even in some adulterated form, live music can save us from falling even further than this.
The artists seem to feel this way also. The shows remind fans that their heroes aren’t really colossi, but human beings who are, as Monae said, making the most of being approximately as locked in as the rest of us. Among the best of the Instagram performers are the Duluth-based husband and wife who front Low, a band whose 25 years of intense and often arresting, prayer-like, down-tempo noise rock is just waiting to turn into some fortunate reader’s next musical obsession. They’ve been broadcasting from their living room for a half-hour every Friday afternoon, almost as a form of group therapy. In their last performance, they debuted a new song, then gave their fans a quick pep talk: “Hope you had a good week,” drummer and vocalist Mimi Parker said. “It’s alright if there were some ups and downs.”
They then launched into amazing whorls of guitar, eerie and huge. The comments rolled in from around the world: “Ola from Portugal!” “You’re sounding great here in Edinburgh!” “So much power in two people,” “Ok now this is proper pedal porn!” And then a final user comment before the feed cut off, one that hinted at what we have to look forward to once this pestilence is behind us, while also explaining why even an imitation can be so soothing for fans and musicians alike: “I love how everyone here knows this is the most special place to be right now.”
Armin Rosen is a New York-based reporter-at-large for Tablet Magazine.
