I try to not wade into beef or current online discourse. I don’t think it’s the best avenue for my energy and the discourse isn’t timeless. But, I saw a way to hate on “Scene Documentarians” and got to the google doc as quickly as i could. Do I think these are bad people? Probably not, but the jury is out. Am I over seeing every single show and festival in the scene filmed from 3+ angles? You bet.
*putting on my best RJC twitter account voice* IT’S LIKE THIS AT EVERY SHOW NOW BUT IT’S HELLA PEOPLE IN THE CROWD WITH IPHONES. I DON’T NEED A ZAPRUDER FILM OF THE FUBU GUY STAGEDIVING.
On Monday, someone tweeted a response to a video of a band playing Sound & Fury. The tweeter lamented the lack of stage presence from the band and that the crowd wasn’t reacting in the 57-second clip posted to the timeline. Hardcore twitter got in a tizzy about this person’s take, and got up in arms about defending some band that they may or may not be friends with. That being said, nobody actually talked about the clip, which showed 15-20 people all standing far away from a band, nodding politely. A couple of guys danced around, but this wasn’t an awe-inspiring set.
I went and looked at the full video and it wasn’t ALL that bad, but it wasn’t flattering. It was filmed at about 1:10 PM at a festival where the gates didn’t open until 12:30 and those gates put you right at the foot of the stage to see Raw Brigade, who opened at 1 PM. The band in the video is at a disadvantage. They get some reaction towards the end after the band on the other stage stops.
I checked around and this band has 12 full-set-length videos on youtube, all within the past 12 months. Several of them are good quality, most of them have better crowd response. The video posted yesterday has less views because it’s now six months late to the party. No offense to the guy who shot it at all, but what does this do for the band? What does it say to the viewers who don’t have context like I do? That they have maybe 15 fans in California?
Far be it from me to discourage anyone to do anything. I sincerely believe that doing something, literally anything, is the first step to doing anything great. We make that leap, we learn, and we move on to something new. We find a new challenge in that activity and make a move to be better, to master the skill. Or we move on to something else after we find that we’re not fulfilled by the current task. That being said: Please stop filming shows with your iphone. Stop bringing your big-ass camera to take pictures at small shows.
This isn’t to say that you’re bad at what you do or that you’re a bad person, but we’ve hit an apex in terms of documentation and now we’re on the downslope. Everyone is documenting every show, for better or worse. It’s usually worse. The vibe has shifted and is now untenable. It’s beyond the pale. Every time I go to a show, I see two or three people with DSLRs at the front of the stage, snapping away for most of the gig. Everything really interesting will happen within the first five minutes, most of the time. You’re really gonna stand there for 15+ minutes taking pics? At big shows with photo pits, you’re lucky to get 10 interrupted minutes, let alone 5. Besides, you’re not going to get anything different in those last 25 minutes unless you really need a pic of a sweatier frontman.
I know what you’re thinking. “Wouldn’t bands appreciate these photos? Don’t we need to have evidence of all of the cool stuff happening in our scene?”
I guess? I’m not even saying this from a gatekeeping perspective of “Keeping people in the dark,” but c’mon I don’t need a video of every last show from some band with one EP as they tour from coast to coast in small rooms with four fans at each show. I don’t need the play-by-play of every person who stagedives. If I see a video of someone having an off night, and it’s the only video of them on youtube, I might skip the show when it hits my city. You, as a purported documentarian, have a service to your subjects as much as your scene.
Do some shows need to be documented? Absolutely. I still go back to watch the HOAX set where they play in a cave on a beach. I also love the HOAX set where they play in a recycling factory. This captures a band in a performance art piece rather than its typical arena. Besides, those videos are cool, and a video of some local opener called LifeXReason playing to four people inside of Stinky Pete’s in Lincoln, NE just isn’t.
The other reason I hate all of this is that a lot of amateur photogs have a bad sense of self-awareness. It’s a skill that is developed over time as you shoot more, and being in a big crowd of people who are jumping on you is not conducive to development. The person with the camera shouldn’t be paid any attention, lest their presence alter the behavior of those around them. Instead, some guy with a camera is jamming it into every band’s face and making it a moment for them to pose. That’s not documenting, that’s doing a photoshoot.
I have a bunch of stories where some guy trying to “document the scene” infringed on my good time. Some guy clocked me in the nose with his forearm during a Militarie Gun set at Trans Pecos, his hand holding a Canon DSLR. At a Blood Incantation show at Market Hotel, a man stuck his phone over my head and in front of my face to take a video. I had to watch two songs of Nothing at Saint Vitus through some other guy’s iphone since he was filming and stuck the phone between the heads of the two people in front of me. Right in front of my face, I had to watch some guy film two full songs of poorly-framed video from an iphone in the middle of the crowd! It sucked! I actually just found this video on youtube and it’s horrendous.The guy edited it to look even worse and threw a bunch of cuts and weird zooms on it to make it “more exciting” or whatever. I hope this guy has the worst day of his life soon. I’d see this sort of behavior here and there for the rest of the year, but the whole thing really came to a head when I went to Sound & Fury in July.
I enjoy seeing Fiddlehead live and went up to the front to watch their set. I was off to the right and behind a fair amount of people, but I had a good view and I wasn’t going to have to catch anyone stagediving. This was ideal. Do you know what happened right before the band started? Some clown with an iphone on a selfie stick put it up and hovered it around 6’-10’ in the air for most of the set, mostly in my line of sight. I had to squirm around to see the set like I was doing the pee-pee dance for 40 minutes. It absolutely sucked. Again, total lack of self awareness leading to the detriment of my personal experience. At least people on stage have the decency to be up there and not among the unwashed masses. I went online a couple of days later to see that the guy in front of me had uploaded his set. The sound sucked and the visuals were stale. He has 5100 views to this day. Was it worth it, you clod?
After that night, I started asking myself, “Who is this poorly-shot video for?” If the project’s stated mission is to document live music, is it doing anything that someone else isn’t doing with a press pass? No, it’s not. And it’s making my life worse in the process. I don’t want to watch a show with your phone in my way. I’m not trying to live my life through your viewfinder.
If there’s one thing that the Listen Up, Nerds Newsletter stands for, it’s progress. I’d never hate on something without putting another, better option forward. With that in mind, here are some things that I think would be valuable to take photos of:
Birds
Cool rocks
I dunno, what about a cool car? Like a 1980s Land Rover
Have you ever seen those street performers in Times Square? Those guys take great pics
A guy dunking a basketball
All of these are culturally significant as much as any hardcore show and might be more visually interesting! Please consider this and give it a shot. Namaste.