So You Want to Go to a Concert: The Ever-Changing Environment

           Everybody has a different kind of taste in music and could perhaps have a different taste in concerts. A person who loves heavy metal music may not particularly enjoy himself or herself at a Coldplay concert. Your typical Coldplay concert is mellow, calm, and quiet. While this is by no means bad, it’s not exactly the experience that, say, an Avenged Sevenfold fan is looking for.

A mosh pit

            As I explained in a previous post, the behavior of the crowd will change depending on the band, but often, the environment will change as a whole. People will form one entity that is constantly moving up and down, back and forth, and in any and all directions, moving in beat with the music. You’ll think to yourself, “surely the crowd will tire out soon and calm down.” While it’s possible, if you’re at a Rise Against concert, for instance, it’s not slowing down.

            Crowds can be scary. The roughest concert I’ve ever attended was an Arctic Monkeys show in a bar. It was a lot of people in a very tight space acting very energetic for the full two-hour concert. People would slam into each other, practically fighting, and the band went on like it was nothing.

They never noticed the violent activity. This would have been a shock, but a couple years before, when I was in mid-high school, I saw the punk band the Offspring in a House of Blues. It was the first concert I had experienced where the crowd acted in such a wild manner. It was honestly scary experiencing that the first time because I didn’t know how to take it.
Kaitlin Smith, an avid fan of metal band Avenged Sevenfold, said, "I was at their [Avenged Sevenfold] concert, up high, and it was just wild, seeing the crowd act the way they did. I knew that if I had been in the middle of it, I would have been scared."
Smith also allowed me to use a video she took of the crowd at the concert.

Then, I notice that not only do genres apply to the behavior of the crowd as a whole, but so does the maturity of the band itself. Back in the 90s, Green Day was probably a wild crowd. I saw them in 2009 and the crowd was as calm as could be. They were jumping and dancing, sure, but they weren’t acting like they were at a punk concert.

Even the Foo Fighters concert I attended blew my mind. When people would get too out of hand, Foo Fighters singer Dave Grohl would actually ask the crowd to calm down as to not make the people around them uncomfortable.

If you’re the type of person who would rather smile and take in the music instead of throwing yourself against a wall and other people, research your concert, so you don’t end up like some shmuck retreating to a Fray concert.