Like many people, I’ve found the recent trend of fans throwing objects at musicians to be fascinating and bizarre. It happened to Steve Lacy. It happened to Drake. It happened to Cardi B. It happened to Harry Styles several times. This isn’t exactly a new phenomenon, I remember hearing about the trope of women throwing their underwear towards male performers when I was a kid. Undoubtedly, there has been no shortage of high-profile instances of popular artists getting things thrown at them as of late. And there’s also a difference between throwing something to someone and throwing something at them.
I’ve been trying to understand why these concertgoers do this, and why it happens to some artists, particularly popular ones, and not others. I suppose if it happens at a basement show to some third-tier indie rock band at a smaller venue, it’s not going to get big time coverage from Pitchfork or Stereogum. I suppose in some cases, perhaps fans doing weird shit like this at shows is helping some publications stay afloat and keep page clicks up as the journalism ecosystem continues to crumble.
Common justifications include the assertion that people don’t know how to act at a show after the pandemic put everything on hold for a while. But depending on where you live, it’s possible that there has been two years with little to no additional restrictions or health measures to stop shows from being scheduled. Another assertion is that throwing stuff at performers is some manifestation of “main-character behaviour” exhibited by members of Gen-Z, but I feel that is an oversimplification of the matter. And I’m not sure that there really isn’t any greater amount of main-character behaving types in this one generation than there are in previous generations.
What is worth keeping in mind is that music performances are spaces in which social norms are often transgressed. Within the contexts of genre and music subcultures, there are differing norms at various performances. Push pits would be encouraged and expected at a metal show, but not at an indie folk gig. Spin-kicking, two-stepping, and stage-diving are common place at hardcore shows, but be wildly inappropriate for audience members to do while attending the opera. The arena pop gig has its own norms and expectations that throwing things defies, which is proven by some of the reactions that big stars have had. But I have to wonder whether the seating and/or standing arrangements of these shows deny the potential for more audience participation. Maybe people would dance if they had the room to do so? Is an ability to express oneself beyond watching part of the reason for throwing stuff?
One thing I do wonder is whether this behaviour is impacted in part by how various types of fandom and fan behaviour are rewarded by the music industry, and how fans are expected to interact or not interact with stars. The image of the star is one propped up by all kinds of mythology that is collectively created by record labels, music-adjacent corporations, media enterprises, and the masses. With magic words such as talent, and hyperbolic nicknames bestowed upon artists such as “Mother,” “The GOAT,” “The King of Pop,” or “The King of Rock and Roll,” there is an overwhelming insistence to explain that these are not regular people, these are extraordinary people gifted with musical, artistic, and creative abilities that most will never have.
Frank Ocean reminds us on “Futura Free” that he’s just a guy and not a god. But not everyone listened to him, hence why so many got so upset that he had a bad performance at Coachella. When you think someone is a god, they can do no wrong in your eyes. But Frank wasn’t happy that his elaborate ice-skating-featuring stage-set up wasn’t going to work the way he wanted it to, and his performance was underwhelming for a lot of people. It was disappointing for many, but when you’re a regular person, you’re bound to disappoint people or yourself at some point or another.
The reality is that none of these musicians, the ones you love or the ones you hate, are any more special than you and I are. They are regular-ass people, but the pop music industry would be doing itself a disservice if it admitted that. Sure, it is beneficial to the industry for popular artists to be relatable, but it is implicitly asserted that this relation occurs between ordinary fan and the extraordinary star. Even the often quoted phrase “they just like me fr” still comes with the notion that no this person really isn’t like me. But in reality, it is the image or the persona that is made to be extraordinary, not the person playing the part.
Throwing stuff at people is not normal behaviour in most situations. But standing on stage in front of a bunch of people is not a thing most people do commonly either. The stage is kind of a bizarre construct that acts as a physical manifestation of hierarchy, wherein which the person or people on stage are made to be of a higher status than the likely greater number of people on the ground. As that stage grows taller and more people are on the floor below, this grandiosity and sense of importance is further inflated. The music industry needs people to believe that this is true because extraordinariness and importance makes one musician or group more marketable and profitable than others. And people do believe this enough that it works, or even if they don’t, they will still play along.
The pop star image props up this illusion to no end. Beyond the stage, there are the glamorous photo shoots, the costumes and highly curated fashion statements, the Instagram posts of lavish parties or vacations to distant places, or lyrics about possessing pricey commodities or the affection of the most desirable and attractive people. And there are the barriers. There is the physical barrier of the guardrail, separating the stage and floor, and lined with burly surly security guards. There is the backstage and green room – out of sight to establish the entrance and exit of the performer as pivotal moments in the concert’s plotline. There are the limousines and private jets that they are whisked away into. And the reclusive yet luxurious life they live away from us, in the company of other stars and away from the masses. The star might not be able to just go outside and mix with the normals, because the normals won’t act normal. But it is precisely this image making and drawing of boundaries that leads people to do abnormal things. Fans of popular entertainers aren’t supposed to act normal, particularly regarding how they interact/don’t interact with the performers they admire.
I remember a formative fan experience for me was when I went to see the band Chastity play a show in Edmonton back in 2019. After the set, I went over to the merch table to buy a shirt. I recognized the person working the merch table. It was the same dude who wassinging and screaming on stage a few minutes earlier. I had only started really going to shows a few years ago, and this began to increasingly include ones at mid-sized venues. But this was my first time talking to someone in a band whose work I really admired. Still being new to the DIY ethics of indie and punk, it was one of the moments where I really came to the realization that there was no separation to be made between performer and audience. I didn’t have this understanding before because I didn’t grow up around musicians or with people tapped into grassroots art and music scenes. What I understood as regular people activities didn’t include the practice of making music, that was left to the musicians with enough clout and industry that I was hearing them on FM or satellite radio or seeing them pasted to the front page of the iTunes store.
As I started going to local shows, it became much more real to me that playing music was a normal-ass thing that normal-ass people can and do do. It would be bizarre to develop some para-social relationship with them or create an image of them as a deity in my head when I knew that it was quite likely I could see them bartending at a local dive, hanging with their friends at the bowling alley, or buying a pack of strings at Long and McQuade a few days later.
Knocked Loose is a very popular hardcore band. They’ve played huge festivals and toured with very popular bands outside the genre. But they got their start in the local Louisville hardcore scene. Their first music video was filmed at a gig in a basement venue. They toured a fuck-ton, and the members worked day jobs for as long as they needed to keep things going until they didn’t need to any more. Much of this information can be gleaned from the interview their vocalist Bryan Garris did on the Hardlore podcast. A large portion of it takes place in the restaurant he used to wait tables at, while fronting the band. Meanwhile, when perusing the Knocked Loose subreddit a few months ago, I saw a post in which someone asked if people preferred how Bryan looked with shorter hair or with longer hair. A seemingly innocuous thing to ask, but would you ask the same question if you only knew Garris as a server at a restaurant you go eat at occasionally? Are you gonna ask other restaurant goers what they think of the server’s new haircut? And are you gonna throw a shoe at a line cook?
Probably not.
I don’t want to insinuate that as an artist reaches a certain level of popularity that there will be people brought into the fold who only know how to connect with musicians by bestowing them with some idol complex that necessitates talking and acting differently about them. I don’t think there is some inherent tendency towards cringe that people adopt when they like popular things in the way that they do, even my pretentious elitist music snob brain wants to jump to that judgemental conclusion sometimes. But I do think that perhaps there is no stand-in that the reddit poster can look to as a peer to Garris, and think about why they’ve developed such a keen interest in the hair of a guy who only recently quit his restaurant job to be a full-time musician. Is this poster attending local smaller shows; what is their proximity to a scene where the line between attendee, performer, merch/support person is not so cut and dry? Or have their concert experiences consisted of festivals or the relatively large-scale metal tours that Knocked Loose has landed support gigs on? The ways in which concerts play out, and how other fans talk about musicians and music is going to differ, online or in these physical locations. The same is also going to be the case for the gigs where shit is getting tossed at performers.
I wonder if the stuff-throwers are aware that it is weird that the culture industry manufactures the images of stars in the way that they do. Perhaps they understand how bizarre it is that there seemingly has to be this weird superiority complex to legitimize popularity. I’m curious to know whether the removal of the performer-as-star from the masses is something that began before weird fan behaviour, or whether it is this divide that enables weird behaviour. I would think that the latter is the case, as capitalism and feudalism before it drew lines around factors such as gender, race, class, and religion to determine who deserves material wealth, respect, and idolization and who doesn’t deserve this things or deserves less of them.
But I do think that rather than conducting interviews that reveal the down-to-earth personalities of the stars or these performers letting the curtain down on social media to “connect” with audiences, seeing musicians perform at shows where there are much less measures to suggest that they are anymore important than you is maybe one of the most successful ways to cultivate less kooky forms of admiration and performer-audience interaction. Throwing stuff might be weird behaviour, but it points out how absurd the whole spectacle of big-scale concerts and industry-influenced mainstream music fandom has come to be.
One other thing I haven’t seen discussed regarding these shows is the quality of the shows/performances? Are attendees having fun? To what extent might boredom be the cause of throwing something in order to add some drama or spectacle that might be missing?
I hope to answer some of these questions in future writing I’ll do on the topics of fandom and performance spaces. Until then, go to a show, and let me know if anyone says or does something wacky.