About eight months ago I moved out. I had the wonderful
opportunity to get a room in a house with three other students who all studied
in my home town of Spijkenisse and Rotterdam. It’s a big room in a noisy house
and we, the residents of this shelter from the cold, are typical students: We
love pizza; we don’t clean anything besides our rooms (at least… I clean my
room and the kitchen when the mood takes me) and the walls are thin as paper.
It’s also cheap, so the decision was as easy as counting to three.
The house where I used to live has a TV and a radio, both of
which were on pretty much all the time and we mostly watched MTV Brand New or
listened to Q-music on the radio. It was a nice way for me to stay up-to-date
with everything the “mainstream” music industry threw at us, the plebs. When I
moved out I made the decision to not buy a TV (there’s fuck all on) or a radio
(I have a huge library on my PC) and as a result of that I became horribly
unaware of the goings on in the music industry. I picked up on my favourite
mainstream artists via social media like Facebook or Twitter, but I hadn’t seen
a music video or heard a live studio performance in a while. I’ve also been
slacking off in keeping up-to-date with the artist that were just entering the
top 40 and so I decided to look up some live performances of some of my
favourite “new” pop artists. I watched a few BBC Live Lounge performances and
intimate acoustic sessions before I looked up footage from the most recent tour
Ed Sheeran did in Ireland. And I was shocked.
Let me say this first: I consider myself a fan of Ed
Sheeran, in that I’ve seen him live twice and I’ve listened to his CDs loads of
times (I still do sometimes, but I’ve listened to it so much when it first came
out that I’ve become a bit desensitised to his stuff). He’s good at what he
does and consumers around the world recognise that. All is well, one would
think. The thing that got me though was not his new-found worldwide fame, but
the response the ones who made him famous gave to him. When I saw him live the
host of the evening kindly asked us to keep it down because, after all, we’re
dealing with one guy playing an acoustic guitar on stage. The (mostly female)
audience were happy to oblige and the gig went off without a hitch. It was a
pleasurable experience for me, except for a few girls in waiting in line when
we were waiting to enter the venue who were having an animated argument over
who Mr. Sheeran would pick to go out with, given the chance. Mildly annoying,
but nothing that could invoke one of my rare but fun rants that my friends have
come to know and (dare I say it) love.
Fast forward to today. Here I was, sat in my little room,
perusing the interwebs and coming across a tour diary by Ed Sheeran. Like I
said, I like the guy. I think he’s a pleasant chap and all that so I watch the
thing. The change in fans and fan reaction to him is enormous. Gone is the
intimacy of the set I saw just over a year earlier, gone are the people who
mostly liked him for his music. Instead of the kind of fans that made my first
live experience with Ed Sheeran so pleasurable, they were replaced by hordes
upon hordes of screaming, arm-wailing, obsessive teenage girls. The amount of
sound they collectively produced was so loud that it was hard to hear just
which song Sheeran was playing. What happened? Why did it happen?
It’s not that I mind teenage girls being there, of course
not. Sheeran is getting the attention he rightfully deserves and he works hard
for it. What I don’t get is the disrespect his fans show towards him by
actively blocking out any sound he’s trying to make. They relentlessly scream
during the songs and yet somehow manage to crank up the volume when the song
ends. How is this guy able to concentrate? And why is there nobody in the
audience who seems to mind that they’re not getting what they paid for? Of
course I understand why his fans are like this. It’s partly the folly of youth,
the extreme amount of youthful enthusiasm that only young girls seem to possess
(again, nothing completely wrong with that outside of this context) and it’s
also Sheeran’s image that attracts these kinds of people and their reactions.
But I can’t help but look at this from the perspective of a musician who has
played live and acoustic. If something like this were to happen at one of my
gigs I would’ve packed my stuff after song one and walked off stage. There’s no
room for concentration and to me it would feel like they were only there for
me, not for my music. But this kind of behaviour is not unique to the likes of
Ed Sheeran. It happens in other sub-cultures too, albeit in a slightly
different form. I talk of course about the metal scene, where people mosh until
they are either tired or someone leaves on a stretcher. Or the endless
discussions about what is “good” metal and what is “bad” metal. And don’t you
dare say that you quite enjoyed the last Linkin Park record or that you think
that the newest Slayer album was a bit so-so. You’ll be keelhauled! It’s this
kind of behaviour that makes me avoid going to concerts like that (and I love
Killswitch Engage as much as the next man).
I’d love to hear your thoughts! Have you had any bad
experiences with fans of a specific type of music/artist? Join the discussion!
~Chris
