With Anderson .Paak doing a DJ set before.
But Don told me I completely missed it, last night they had Polo & Pan!
Huh?
So I’m in Vail, Colorado, not the epicenter of entertainment, but you wouldn’t know that based on tonight’s crowd.
I’m gonna let you in on a little secret, they keep making twenty year olds. If boomers were at tonight’s show they’d be both impressed and depressed. Thrilled that the spirit is still alive, upset that they’ve been superseded and left behind.
Now the paradigm is passé. You know, the Renaissance, starting with the Beatles and ending with Spotify, with MTV and Napster in between. It was one long continuum. Now what?
Well, you’ll never find out reading the news. Because the news tells you what is happening after it blows up, not on its way to stardom. For that you need to be online, hooked-in, part of the community. We live in the information society, but it’s very easy to be out of the loop, but if you’ve got the right friends…
We were backstage and Don was asking people how they learned about Polo & Pan. Each one told the story of a friend. It was not radio, it was not Spotify, as a matter of fact, it’s not even about the track, it’s about the experience, the live show. You can read all about the “hit” acts, manipulating the weekly numbers, but you’ll be out of the loop, almost like in the sixties, when there was AM and FM. AM is the Spotify Top 50. FM is everything else, and there’s a lot of it.
And then there’s Stromae. A Belgian act. Polo & Pan is French. This never used to happen. Used to be that the English and European acts played to us, those in the U.S. Now it’s reversed, American kids are open to what is happening overseas. Acts that are uncompromised, doing it their way, to a great degree completely under the mainstream radar. But boy can they sell tickets!
So the headliner tonight was Big Gigantic. Two guys. A drummer and horn/synthesizer player. With a ton of production, top-notch. The assembled multitude was moving, the amphitheater was elevated. And most of America was out of the loop.
One can say that Big Gigantic is dance music. But it’s more than that, the show was an experience. And the twentysomethings in this outdoor venue, some standing in snow, were dancing and totally into it. Not that different from fifty and sixty years ago.
You can’t get this online. You can only get it at the show. Which is why live entertainment is burgeoning. It’s Saturday night, youngsters don’t want to stay home. While their parents, my generation, if not even younger, are going to bed at nine or ten their kids are out living the life. Yes, the oldsters, who believe getting up early is the way to win don’t know that everything worth knowing about culturally happens after dark.
And in L.A., most of the backstage experience is work. It’s anything but the party the hoi polloi believe it to be. But tonight it was a hang with laughs with the act and even their progeny. There were no airs, after all it’s just about the music, what happens on stage.
It’s easy to be jaded, especially after three years at home.
But tonight I was inspired, there’s a whole world out there. And it’s not beholden to the usual suspect media. It’s bottom-up instead of top-down. And in today’s multifarious universe people don’t care about their status vis-à-vis you, the pecking order had a giant hole blown through it. You’re in your own world, and oldsters can’t comprehend this, they think it’s still a monoculture.
As for the money… The acts tonight were handsomely compensated, but looking out at the crowd I realized no billionaire would get this reaction. Not Elon Musk, never mind the heads of the Fortune 500. They’re rich, but they don’t embody what the musicians do. Something of the moment, that’s more about feel than facts, which touches your body and soul. This is the power of music. And it’s as strong as it ever was.
That’s what I learned tonight.
