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.