No Live, No Music
4 minutes
As technology advances, music becomes easier and easier to access. You also rarely hear a flawed note anymore: recording technology makes every song sound perfect. Yet we have become harder to move. When you can no longer tell whether the sound on a record or digital stream is becoming more real or more artificial, return to the live show, return to music itself, and feel its purest power.
Translation is never quite equal. We translate live into Chinese as “live performance,” but that misses some of the word’s sense of being alive. At a concert, everything is alive.
The singers and bands are alive. They are no longer disembodied sounds hidden in a cold music player. They may cry when moved, hold back when their voices are strained, forget the words, or sing off-key… When the people on album covers, magazine covers, and posters come alive before us, we understand them a little better.
The fans are alive. They can applaud, cheer, or boo, judging the performers with their hands and voices. They can even become the stars of the show: look at those pogo dancers and exuberant stage-diving queens.
The music is alive. It may rush or stumble; it may change style and rhythm so you do not recognize it at first. Tonight’s solo may be completely different from last night’s. A performance that reproduces the recording exactly is not live. It is dead.
The live show itself is alive, like an ecosystem. It creates an atmosphere. Like a butterfly flapping its wings in the Amazon, one whistle from a corner can change the current in a venue. Who knows whether the next sound will be thunderous applause or a storm of boos?
No live show, no music. That is the magic of a concert, an extraordinary moment no matter how advanced recording technology becomes. We are looking for that shiver of the first scratch followed by a wild thumpa-thumpa, a jolt that shakes the soul.