Life vs Text

Not too many years ago, back in the days of needing to actually pick up the phone if you wanted to know who was calling, you could go out for a night on the town and let loose. I'm mean really let loose. Let it all hang out. Get crazy stupid all under the auspice of having a good time. And unless you were a celebrity being hounded by photographers and journalists, you were able to enjoy your good times in relative anonymity. Only you and your companions the wiser.

This scenario is impossible today in the age of Twitter and Facebook or whatever other social sharing vehicle you subscribe to. You can't go out and dance like no ones watching because everyone is watching and texting, posting, updating everything. Complete strangers know that you can't cut a rug to save your life.

Before, a lack ability would not have precluded a person getting up and shaking it for a band that was playing their hearts out on stage. They would have gotten up and wiggled their goofy asses up and down all over. And they'd have had plenty of company. Fools of a feather and all that jazz. But now we are faced with the reality that perfect strangers and people we really couldn't care less about can keep tabs on us even if we aren't the ones doing the posting, etc. You are no longer free to have a good time. You are a slave to fear and inhibition. Just how many teens laughing at a YouTube of you trying to do the cabbage patch while three sheets to the wind to the soundtrack of some garage band doing their best Mats impersonation will it take before you crack? Not as many as you think. Come morning you realize the alcohol fueled error of your ways.

Who does this all really hurt? The bands, that's who. In an era when persons no longer seem to think that applause, even polite applause are necessary or worth their effort, bands are left with empty spaces out front where people used to dance and listen and clap damn it!

Now all the posting and sharing isn't going anywhere. It's not going to stop. Maybe it will turn into something else. But it needs to be controlled and refined. Often, the only thing one can post as happening now is that someone else is posting that you are posting. No one is actually doing anything about having an actual connected musical experience. Embrace the moment and have a good time. Abandon the need to control your image as regards people you may never meet or care about and take charge of the image you have to show to the people making an effort to entertain and excite you. It's a feedback loop of intense proportions. If you have a good time and show it, the band plays harder, you feel it even more. You see where this is going now. That's right you might even 'score', whatever that might mean to you personally, because everyone around you is so turned on by how turned on you are.

Obviously this doesn't apply to the cool kids, the finger snappers and shoulder hugging wall flowers whose only raison d'etre is to be seen at the right functions. They can't be moved by anything but self validation, comparing themselves to some magazine ad or some other crap. So I'm talking about all the rest of us because we matter too. We make up the majority of people that consume music with a passion. We aren't necessarily the pretty ones or the cool ones, but believe you me, come end of day we hold a lot more weight in a bands bankability than you might think.

So go out and get happy. Proffer a collective FA to the masses and have a good time without needing to worry about the social media consumers and exhumers. You matter because you are there. Show the people, the bands, that care, that you care too. They will love you for it.