Twenty years ago, in Village voiceIn an annual poll of music critics, one of the authors quoted the future as saying: “Then who’s going to pay the $ 300 seat for the Backstreet Boys to reunite at the AOL Hard Rock Cafe in 2020?” When that happens, the public entrance pit ticket for the Backstreet Boys’ summer tour on July 21 at the Giffy Loop Live Arena in Bristow, Virginia will carry you $ 300. Other than the fact that this show didn’t happen, there was no DNA tour left. No one did the tour.
Instead, he was trapped like the rest of the Backstreet Boys. These five are one of the weirdest music moments of the year: Elton John’s Live-TV Covit-19 Benefit In April, when the BSPs zoom in on “I Want It That Way” from their private homes. No need for “reunion” – they just released their number one album last year. . Their goofy beds. It Was Absurd – that’s the beauty of it.
On “I love it” day, it may not be the way we want it to be. As Mick Jagger sang when the Rolling Stones returned to do Zoom Live-TV courses, you can not always get what you want.
This year the Phantom went underground. By 2020, being a music fan means listening to yourself more than ever, because the corona virus has devastated the country and our lives. Being a fan in 2020 was crazy in completely new ways because everything about pop life changed overnight. We do not hear “WAP” at the club or at a party. We don’t see our favorite new songs live. We do not have a shared public experience of music. Loneliness became an important reality of life, and music reflected it. For many of us, music is important for how we connect with the outside world. But music in 2020 Became The outside world, because public spaces were scarce. It was a shared experience when we really needed it.
Pop music got a live replacement throughout the year. Haryana has created a fantastic album called Grande Positions, Basically a grinding-club thirst trap. It really incorporated the Year in Pop Phantom – a sex-frenzy fantasy, lovingly crafted by people who don’t do any wild and crazy things in songs. Remember Haryana who sang “Break up with your boyfriend, I’m bored”? She does the same, and this year there was something heroic about keeping that spirit alive.
Cardi B and Megan Fire Stallion have dropped their favorite summer sex jam, “Wap,” which announced the presence of a whore in the house. When “Wap” hit the top spot, it replaced Harry Styles’ “watermelon sugar” – I like it: two songs on the same subject, two songs that are musically different, but at least all of the two infamous hits of the year are Hot Girl Summer. Part of the timely realization of “watermelon sugar” was filmed by Hawk on the beach in January, before it was locked, with the introduction: “This video is dedicated to touch.”
Two of my favorite albums this year, Dua Lipa and Jesse Ware, shut down disco fantasies that were self-consciously designed to evoke neon glitter-dance-site sweat that only fans from a distance could imagine. There was something beautiful about it, like the Busby Berkeley musicals of the Great Depression – not really an escape, but a shared communal desire.
Everything about being a music fan in 2020 was very different. You would not expect a Buckery show to be a place where people would take their lives to listen to “Crazy Pitch” at a Supersperter festival. Hell, “Super Spreader” sounds like it should be the name of a buck song, doesn’t it? But the Sturgis motorcycle rally in South Dakota in August was basically a nutrition-viral benefit concert designed to counter the notion that there is any kind of public-health emergency in which a few bands you might have thought would perform better: Smash Mouth (yes, what a comment) , Lit, 38 Special, Quiet Riot, Night Ranger. It may seem ridiculous to catch you saying “I was disappointed in Bakery’s moral choices”, but it was that kind of year (and I ride hard into Bakheri’s anti-Iraq war era). Smash Mouth, before this was the 2015 Colorado kick, where the singer shouted to the crowd to stop throwing bread crumbs, “Now we’re all together tonight, we’re human again. That cow dung!”
Unfortunately, by the fall, South Dakota was completely wiped out by viral infections, which led the country in cases and individual deaths. By November, there were more Govt deaths in South Dakota than in South Korea. Your brain is smart, but your head is dumb.
I got reminders of 2020 shows where I grabbed tickets that never happened: the ticket master sent me the worst email subject line of all time: “Stephen Malkmus has been canceled.” Dave Kroll, always a Mens, spent a video drum battle with a 10-year-old girl across the country – and, as he proudly admits – lost. Miley Cyrus sang in Pink Floyd’s “Wish You Were Here” SNL – Very perfect for her voice, perfect for now. Paul McCartney called it “Rock Down”, a dairy way to put it, but he spent his idle time on the farm, creating a spontaneous album that would not have happened otherwise as Taylor Swift did. Artists have abandoned home recordings that sit on hard drives.
Audiences had to fill the void to share the experience of those ceremonial fans from the Versus battles to Bondcamp Fridays. Manchester’s Charlotte’s UK rock star Tim Burgess made his Twitter listening feasts, which turned out to be a surprising therapeutic method for music fans all over the world to listen together, with live-tweets along with the artists. Rock stars, long lost, or isolated, or simply seemingly forgotten, came out of the woods – like members of the New Order, who had not spoken for years, squeezing each other on Twitter. They all knew that this was the biggest audience they would receive throughout the year.
From the Summer Black Lives Matter Rise to the November Victory Celebrations when Joe Biden and Kamala Harris toppled Trump, dancing in the streets was part of the musical cultural uprising. Within an hour of being invited to Pennsylvania, I was in a Brooklyn park in the sunshine on a Saturday afternoon, stuck in the middle of a spontaneous dance party (everyone wore a mask, no one talked about it). A psychedelic jam trio is playing, the first live band I’ve heard in eight months. DJ He exploded the “YMCA”, the keynote of the disco anthems of the 1970s, and the song that Trump bizarrely stated as the theme of his personal campaign-rally. DJ “” Seventeen Edge. “It all felt weird, with a lot of fear and a little bit of hope. In other words, pop dreams are always created – and a moment to go into 2021.