The Covid Pandemic, Concerts, and Individualism
By Liam Dwyer, ‘22
Has America’s rampant sense of individualism caused concerts to be less safe?
In August of 2021, Hurricane Henri caused lightning to crack the sky and threatened to cancel my first concert since the pandemic first began. Yet there I stood, shielded from sheets of rain by a thin plastic poncho, mere feet away from the members of the indie folk band Wilco.
Since then, I’ve had the luck of seeing many other artists live. However, disregarding the vaccine card checking, mask wearing, and Covid restrictions on concerts, there’s still something different from concerts pre-Covid: the people.
At 100 gecs, the crowd was packed so densely at the front I had trouble breathing. At Yo La Tengo, couples around me consistently disregarded mask guidelines, and at The Garden someone repeatedly tugged at my clothes.
Now, after a violent crowd crush at Travis Scott’s Astroworld festival which has led to 9 deaths and countless injuries, I’ve posed questions about my strong emotions towards live music.
Is this nothing new? Was it really like this before quarantine?
Lockdown created such a paradigm shift in culture, particularly in the United States. My physical self was trapped indoors, but the development and rapid prevalence of technologies like Zoom or social media apps like Instagram and Discord kept me in touch with friends and family.
The early days of quarantine showcased America’s capacity for camaraderie, hard work, and compassion within our communities.
One personal example of this was in the summer of 2020, when my dad and his friends would regularly play music in the street for our neighbors. It was lively and fun, and I felt more connected to my neighbors than I ever had before quarantine.
I struggle to remember how hard it was to be isolated inside for as long as we were. Even getting the vaccine feels like it happened ages ago.
But that doesn’t mean it didn’t happen, and it doesn’t mean we can’t carry learning from that hardship. The ways we strengthened our communities during lockdown can still teach us today.
On the opposite end of this is what diminished our communities during lockdown: a lessened connection to social atmospheres and environments that we don’t control.
While I was making new connections in the digital world, interactions outside my bubble in the physical one became few and far between. Going to the supermarket was a momentous occasion.
I struggled to maintain a sense of “we” when the only people I interacted with were people I’d already known prior to the pandemic. Lockdown made me more focused on what I wanted and what benefited me directly - what I mean by this is that it made me more individualistic.
At its core, individualism is a set of values that involve disregarding collective thinking and instead focusing on personal freedoms and autonomous action. Studies suggest that certain economic systems can drive individualistic values in societies.
Additionally, individualism emerged most prominently in European and Western cultures, and has been spread through Western hegemony or globalization.
Studies show that countries with higher levels of individualism were more likely to see greater amounts of cases of COVID-19.
The United States is one of the most individualistic countries surveyed on this scale. The way we’ve promoted a return to “normal”, favoring the wallets of those on top over the lives of our working class, is a perfect demonstration of said individualism.
I think this applies completely to concerts too. Not only are people eager for a return to normal, expecting that concerts will be just as they were before Covid, but they feel more entitled to the experiences they were stripped of.
An element of American Individualism that plays into concert experiences is social Darwinism. As explained by the American Museum of Natural History, social Darwinism is a view of Charles Darwin’s evolutionary theories about survival of the fittest through the lens of social structures which misuses “a purely scientific theory for a completely unscientific purpose.”
Applying animal behavior to human behavior leads to the view that weaker populations are undeserving of the privileges that a loosely defined “superior” population achieve.
Let’s apply this to a concert. Imagine you showed up early to see your favorite band. You get in when the doors open, and wait right at the front until the headliner.
Then, when your favorite band comes on, people push past you, driving you away from the stage. The idea that someone strong enough to push people around deserves to stand wherever they see fit is super frustrating.
When I asked Gordon Cross, CEO of local music promoter Mike Thrasher Presents and owner of the Hawthorne Theatre, if there’s a different sense of what concert-goers are like after Covid, he erupted into laughter.
“Yes and no. There’s a lot of pent up demand… but there is a resistance by a percentage of the population on vaccination and wearing masks,” said Cross. He noted “there is a tension in the community that wasn’t there before Covid.”
Cross spoke to the big picture of reopening: “All in all, we’ve had a very successful fall, but it hasn’t been without its challenges and security have been the ones to bear the brunt of most of it.”
“We’ve had significant problems in recruiting quality staff especially in the security area. There just aren’t many people willing to do that job anymore,” Cross stated.
This isn’t just a social Darwinism problem, nor only a individualism problem. It’s a problem with America’s culture and values on the whole.