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This op-ed from news and politics editor Lexi McMenamin explores the recent onslaught of fans throwing objects at musicians during live concerts, and how we got to this kind of behavior.
In the last few weeks, the trickle of occasional headlines about a random tossed item at a concert — starting last year with Harry Styles, more recently jumping from Bebe Rexha, to Ava Max, to Kelsea Ballerini, to Pink, then Drake, then again with poor Hazza over the weekend — became a worsening stream. Outlets like Rolling Stone weighed in, understandably striking an aghast tone; last week, Adele herself “dared” audience members to try throwing something at her. But how did this all start? What the hell is going on?
I’ve been regularly going to concerts since middle school, whether at Madison Square Garden, a Massachusetts suburban house show, or a range of venues in between. I started regularly attending shows solo — a fraught choice for a gender-marginalized person, one I only undertook after years learning crowds — about five years ago. There are certain concert-related milestones I keep in my top ten life experiences, like seeing Frank Ocean tour on both Channel Orange and Blonde. All this to say, I love live music, so it’s really killing me to see how a space that could be safe for audience members (a hope many performers have expressed, but which has been struggled over for decades) are becoming so unsafe for those on stage.
One possible explanation says fans are doing it for attention (something I’ve heard off the record both from other concertgoers as well as from touring musicians) and, relatedly, in hopes of going viral on TikTok. There’s something to this; anecdotally, at the last sold-out show I attended, I was on the floor of the venue and couldn’t actually see the performers because everyone’s phones in front of me were blocking the stage. In the current video-focused era of social media, with text-based apps crumbling and TikTok remaining reliably supreme, concerts are grist for the content mill. Another reasonable assumption is that, in an era of rising parasocial fixation, musicians are struggling to reassert the boundary between themselves and their fans.
Obviously, throwing things on stage isn’t a new concept. In the 1970s, women threw their bras at Elvis; in my own experience, I remember bras and flowers getting thrown on stage at concerts in the late 2000s and 2010s. One time in the mid 2010s, while one of my favorite musicians was performing at a music festival, someone threw their phone on stage; without getting worked up, he simply refused to give it back, and the show went on. That was about it. The vibe was fundamentally different. Crowds certainly weren’t perfect or consistently safe — not for people of color, for women, for queer and trans folks, or those living in the intersections, depending on the scene. But there was a healthy sense of shame that — for all besides the rare intoxicated or ill person, or the occasional kid — kept most people in check, humble, and courteous.
But the recent consistency of performers, and especially women musicians, getting physically attacked by audience members suggests a darker underpinning to this tension. In order to understand how we got here, we have to look at the conditions that led to this moment. As writer Noella Williams explored in a reported op-ed for Teen Vogue last summer, by 2021 the festival circuit was crammed with eager concertgoers overcompensating after the end of state-regulated lockdowns. Initially, images of packed-tight, largely unmasked crowds caused concern on social media, given that the patchy vaccination rollout was only a few months in.
There’s something to be said about how quickly the concert industry attempted to rebound, underscored by the necessity of an organizing campaign throughout 2020 to ensure industry workers suddenly out of employment and lacking a safety net could survive. While the return of live music might’ve seemed like a boon to those who’d lost work, employers didn’t typically account for the public health concern of putting workers back in person while the effects of long COVID were — and remain — unknown. Last fall, a report from Variety spoke to several musicians, like Santigold, about choosing not to tour due to the financial burdens placed on artists, who can no longer juggle the other responsibilities of their job with incurring debt to finance their tours.
All this was overlapping with the arrival of a generation of concertgoers new to the experience, both those previously too young to attend and those who “post”-COVID didn’t want to miss out or were craving something different. Crowd safety usually falls to paid private security (who are often also being exploited, hired without proper training at low wages with risky expectations) and to concertgoers who don’t trust their neighbors. As explained, prior to this current rush of highly viral object-throwings, you could still see the unruliness and lack of decorum towards others in 2021.
A May 2023 episode of NPR’s (recently, disappointingly canceled) podcast Louder Than a Riot focused on 26-year-old rapper Rico Nasty, and a 2021 incident where a crowd member threw a bottle at her head while she was on tour opening for Playboi Carti. The rapper’s broader tour experience was defined by the harassment from Carti fans, while the headliner publicly said little. Without a doubt, as Louder Than a Riot asserts, this was misogynoir.
The winter of 2021 brought the horrors of Astroworld, where 10 people died and countless were injured in a crowd crush seemingly caused by mismanagement and lack of preparedness. (Just recently, Travis Scott avoided criminal charges over the event.) In my fifteen years of regularly going to shows, I can neatly divide concert experiences into before and after Astroworld; suddenly, it was normal to watch a musician interrupt their performance three, four, five or more times to confirm a crowd member wasn’t passing out, fearing the worst. It’s now normal for musicians to intervene from the stage and impart a peacemaking message before restarting a song. This is a net positive in my opinion, certainly an improvement on the dismissiveness I’ve seen from some (mostly male) acts towards crowd responsibility, and feels more in line with mosh pit ethics influenced by the punk and metal scenes, for example.
As the media slowly moved on from Astroworld, the other dynamics complicating the experience of live music continued, or even twisted shape yet again. By March 2022, New York City had lifted its proof of vaccine requirement for concerts; this was just one example of many state and local governments following the Biden administration’s push towards “going back to normal,” as covered by Death Panel’s Beatrice Adler-Bolton and Artie Vierkant. That summer, survey data from LendingTree found a number of its respondents planned to go into credit card debt in order to attend blockbuster tours like Harry Styles’s. By the fall, media was tracking the enthusiastic rush back to concert venues.
As has been explored at length by others, there is a necropolitical exchange at play as the COVID pandemic continues and yet many people have embraced our state-mandated “return to normal.” The obvious exception is those who still cannot safely physically attend events because of the lack of mask mandates and, honestly, because of apathy from those who find it easier to not mask. That apathy is merely government-sanctioned, which means we don’t have to buy into it, though it can feel easy or even natural to do. We just saw how the lack of COVID protections made Pride events, which always, always have music, exclusionary to communities like the disabled.
The weird resentment and anxiety developed under the pandemic is structurally caused. Everybody needs a job, the few places with jobs are union busting, and layoffs are constant. COVID stimulus checks, the student loan pause, and emergency safety net policies created a sense of security through the possibility of savings for people who’d never had them before (yes, I used some of mine to go to a festival). American capitalism’s death drive dismantled it as soon as it could begin exploiting its laborers.
Musicians are let down by this unwillingness to acknowledge the continuation of the pandemic, too. Last week, Ella Williams of Squirrel Flower (who I’ve seen live a few times, most recently opening for Lucy Dacus in 2021) tweeted wondering why there’s little coverage of musicians like herself, Chicago’s Kara Jackson, Kimya Dawson, and others “who care deeply about c*vid safety, and why we're trying so hard to keep ourselves and our shows safe.”
Live Nation, the company behind Astroworld fest and countless others, is a perfect example of the kind of capitalist greed behind the music industry; you may recall it’s also the company under congressional scrutiny for their industry monopoly causing deranged ticket prices and inciting a Swiftie online riot. Like I said, none of this stuff is new: While Swift may be Live Nation-slash-Ticketmaster’s current nemesis, Pearl Jam went head to head with the company in 1994 over their industry impact.
And of course, the current bad vibes prioritizing profit over everything else aren’t specific to the music industry. Politicians and shitstirrers are blaming marginalized communities for everything. The backlash to the social movements of the last decade is obvious if you follow the news (or are living, like most people, at the mercy of those headlines). They want us to feel like crabs in a bucket, desperately trying to climb over each other, trapped over a stovetop as they turn up the heat.
The inspiration for Louder Than a Riot’s final season, before they ever knew it would be their last — or how it would come to an end — came from host Sidney Madden, who was focused on the idea of a scarcity mindset. In the final conversation of the show, producer Sam J. Leeds observed, “If you're operating from a place of scarcity out of fear, you're just going to keep recreating that same thing over and over again.” Leeds connected this to the suppression and dismissal of abolition, a political movement that asks us to imagine otherwise from what we’ve seen, in the mainstream. In a January 2023 conversation with Teen Vogue, organizer, writer, and abolitionist Andrea Ritchie named “scarcity mentality” as a direct contributor to people’s inability to imagine alternatives to policing.
It might feel like a reach, but just as much as abolition is about policy and systems, it’s also about what we owe each other — how, as Ritchie’s co-author abolitionist Mariame Kaba put it in that conversation, we live in a society, whether you like it or not. That means seeing musicians as people and not indestructible entertainment inside a screen, impervious to a thrown object; acknowledging music industry workers as people deserving of consistent wages and healthcare without being pressured into unsafe conditions; seeing your fellow concertgoers as people you’re responsible to look out for.
You never know when you might be the one in need of a stranger looking out. Shit happens fast in a crowd. I’ve had my breath snatched from my chest by a sudden crowd crush, I’ve fainted alone and feared what might happen, felt my phone die in my pocket with no way to get home; but I’ve been leant a portable charger, had an unopened water bottle passed my way from the barrier, been kept safe by the kindness of others. So if I lost you with abolition, then maybe start by chewing on just treating others how they want to be treated. In today’s political moment, it’s more radical than you think.
