5 August

I’m pretty critical of gigs. To explain why. As a teenager and young adult, I was passionate about them, found them thrilling. Now they mostly bore me. Partly because they haven’t evolved a lot, they’re still using a lot of the theatrical innovations of the 1970s, just with better gear. But it’s a social and cultural thing as well, because to me they may be the best indicator of a massive shift, in my own lifetime. Rock/pop gigs are for teenagers. That’s who they were invented for. My parents didn’t go to gigs, and I’d have found it ridiculous if they did. They grew out of them. It’s adolescent culture, adolescent territory. I don’t think we notice that even one generation ago, adults didn’t much go to gigs. They came from a cultural moment where there were clear separations between adolescent and adult life. That separation is now mostly gone. I think about how weird it is, that everybody from age 12 to 85 now goes to gigs, regularly. It’s not so much the gigs that are the problem, it’s the loss of separation between adolescent and adult life. I post about that a lot, how high school/adolescent culture became all culture. Societies now think in adolescent ways, in everything they do, because their entire culture was re-made as a giant high school. (Also as somebody who’s always been passionate about music, becoming an adult for me is also about putting it in the proper place in your life. Which isn’t at the centre.)