So We Won't Forget

Why do we film concerts?

One to remember

Writing it down now

So we won’t forget…

Never enough paper

Never enough letters

So we won’t forget…

Every minute

Every hour

So we won’t forget…

Say you remember

For I think I’ve lost it…

Khruangbin, So We Won't Forget

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It happens under the midday sun at outdoor festivals as often as in warehouse raves in the moonlight. Both screaming hordes of boy-band fangirls and the hardest of punk rockers do it. Artists old or young, acts popular or underground; scan any concert crowd and you’ll find bright rectangles illuminating the heads of the showgoers: amateur concert videographers doing their best to capture a moment.

This phenomenon manifests in different degrees, of course: some folks simply snag a few seconds of their favorite song, while others attempt to film what feels like the entire concert. I’ve even seen the elusive iPad concert videographer make an appearance, much to the dismay of all those standing behind them.

I totally understand grabbing a quick video of some spectacle or hilarity—pyrotechnics and lasers at a high-production EDM show, let’s say, or bizarre crowd antics at a jam band—but I find that someone in the crowd will be filming the stage at any given time, regardless of what’s happening.

At a small music festival this weekend I conducted a convenience survey (n=6) with some of my friends that consume a ton of live music. Almost everyone admitted to taking some videos yet rarely, if ever, watching them after the fact. And before you try to call me out on it—I fully admit that I’ve done my fair share of concert videography myself. Why! Why do we all film concerts even though we never watch the footage?

These phone (or iPad…) videos never render the effect of the lights, the quality of the music, the emotions of the crowd, or the atmosphere of the venue in quite the way we experience it. The infrequent times I have reviewed my handiwork after the fact, I, at least, am usually disappointed.

Good live music has such an emotionally powerful effect on us, though, that I think we can’t help but feel a deep desire to do what we can to capture the moment. There is a reason that religions, universally, use music to create profound feelings in their congregations. Musical gatherings evoke the closest thing to communion with a God we get in any otherwise-secular lifestyle. The only reason people aren’t taking videos of Gregorian chants in Catholic cathedrals or of soulful gospels at Southern Baptist churches is social convention.

There is a mixture of desire to share with those who are absent what we are feeling in that moment, the communal sensory and emotional experience being shared along with hundreds or thousands of others, coupled with a need to be able to relive the memory ourselves: memory and desire. It’s human nature to want to capture magic in a bottle, to trap the genie in the lamp, to hold onto a special moment as best we can.

I don’t fault anyone, myself included, for trying to capture these moments using whatever medium available. Words, pictures, videos—they are all imperfect, and always will be, and that’s okay.

I hope that people will learn to leave the iPads at home, though.