7 November

I have literally less than zero desire to attend any stadium gig. The only reason you would go is the reason they exist. To give people the experience of being in a crowd, responding to a current viral trending artist. The true passion here is the viral trend, this is a celebration of social virality, our deepest passion. The sound is crap, the performances are always crap when the scale of the event utterly dwarfs performers, and you have to watch a screen to see anything. These are social phenomena, not musical performances. The countercultural substitute for public life, where teens of all ages gather to try to replace the void where the public once existed. The only place they feel any sort of ‘we’. The proof of this is that every trending artist now fills stadiums like the Accor, multiple times over. The culture began with Beatlemania nearly 70 years ago, now every trending tour is Beatlemania. Social mania, it’s in the name, now entrenched. This is the kidult culture I often write about, the culmination of the 60s countercultural revolution, which replaced public life with teen life. Every teen between the ages of 13 and 95 will howl you down for saying it. We don’t like our own culture examined.