By Lekshmy Sankar | 24-Jul-2018
I was at a String Cheese Incident concert this week. One of my favorite parts about concerts is people watching - every concert attracts a particular type of audience. This weekend, my friends who have 'normal' jobs in real life (e.g., tax attorney and an engineer) flaunted their best hippie outfit. I was indeed not an exception with my big feather earrings and an outfit I would probably only wear to a Cheese or Dead & Co. concert. When I was there, I really couldn't help but wonder - does everyone have a concert persona?
I think people dress up and project a different persona at concerts because music empowers people to have fun. Take that a step further for a live show, and you're surrounded by like-minded individuals who have also escaped their "normal" life to listen, dance, and experience music. In some sense, these are safe spaces to be whoever you want to be or not want to be for a couple of hours. It's a place to celebrate life, you, and a community that you are part of.
A recent study published in the Psychology of Music explored the connection between habitual music engagement and subjective well-being. The study explains the relationship between music and our happiness. It found that people who attended concerts or engaged with music by dancing scored higher on the happiness index. The findings help us understand how music is involved in emotional regulation. In fact, another research project found that only sex and sports beat concerts and theatre on the happiness scale.
I am a bit of a music junkie and have attended hard rock to acoustic to rap to local bar dives to sitar to NextVR concerts. It really doesn't matter what the lyrics are about, the mood of the music, or even if the song is about death, people change when you're blaring music. The underlying mood is amplified in a similar way as a resonating glass breaking when an opera singer hits that special note. And if the blaring music is being played live, the crowd feeds off of the energy and each other to amplify an already great thing into something truly wonderful and unique. Music is an amazing elixir that ties us together in ways we might not expect.
So to get back to my original thought, what causes a tax attorney and an engineer to turn into total hippies? Are you familiar with the concept of running amok? Running amok refers to the "sudden mass assault against people and/or objects usually by a single individual following a period of brooding that has traditionally been regarded as occurring especially in Southeast Asia's Austronesian cultures but is now increasingly viewed as psychopathological behavior." I'm not making the comparison between going to a music festival and becoming psychopathic. But there's something, isn't there, in releasing our cares and worries and energy after a long period of monotony. It's cathartic. It's refreshing. In many cases, it's exactly what we need after brooding over our 9-5 jobs for weeks on end. Is the festival of going to a concert, of dressing up, and of letting go serving a deeper need for escapism? A much-needed release of energy? Blowing off of steam? Or is it related to a deeper tribal/cultural need of finding like-minded individuals to share a special moment? Or are we simply just rocking out? What do you think?
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