[Dixielandjazz] Getting the audience involved

[Stephen G Barbone]

I guess this is where it is in audience involvement. Obviously we OKOMers will not go this far, but perhaps we might learn a thing or two from this article. (See next to last paragraph and note also, a few paragraphs prior, that good time music, without a touch of resentment, doesn't make it with the young)

Cheres,
Steve
Thundering Mosh Pits and All the Free Hugs a Teenager Would Want

By Jon Pareles  - NY Times - July 22, 2012 

UNIONDALE, N.Y. — Suburbia goes punk for a day when the annual Warped Tour comes to town, as it did here on Saturday in the parking lot of Nassau Coliseum. With more than 100 acts on 11 stages — five large ones, others little more than a club-sized PA system — Warped has evolved to offer targeted relief for the pangs of adolescence.

Hormone surges, insecurity, tormented romance, family tensions, frustration with authority, thwarted idealism, the urge to put cuss words in every declarative sentence — Warped addresses them all, with mosh pits in motion all day and salvos of double bass-drum pedals. At this point, it’s an institution, with a coterie of recurring performers and its own crowd rituals — among them offers of “free hugs” body-painted on people’s chests. For all its clamor and its ritualized, channeled aggression, Warped is pretty wholesome.

In its early years, the tour revolved around punk, hardcore, thrash-metal and ska — the kind of fast, high-impact melody-defying music favored by the skateboarders who patronize the main sponsor, Vans. (Warped always includes a skateboarding ramp and a stunt exhibition.) Hip-hop soon joined the noisy roster. (This year’s show had rappers rhyming all afternoon in a spot amid the merchandise booths at pavement level, along with a few, including Machine Gun Kelly, on the larger stages.) And over time, to the commercial benefit of Warped, pop infiltrated all those styles, which have also borrowed from one another — perhaps, in part, through mutual exposure on Warped tours.

Warped’s center has also moved from aggression to singalong self-affirmation, as long as the music still makes a mighty crunch. Bands whose songs are essentially straightforward pop ballads — among them, on Saturday, returning Warped punk-pop favorites like All Time Low, New Found Glory, Bayside and Taking Back Sunday — punch them up with galloping rhythm sections or guttural outbursts. Meanwhile, even the hardest-barking thrash or hardcore bands — like, on Saturday, Miss May I, Vanna and Every Time I Die — are also likely to include yearning, clear-voiced choruses: the vulnerable heart behind the adolescent rage, and a pop toehold within the furor.

Sleeping With Sirens closed out one of the main stages on Saturday, although this year is its first Warped Tour. It had things all ways at once: pummeling momentum, neat melodic hooks, crooning, screaming, fresh memories of youthful traumas and the songs to exorcise them. Kellin Quinn, the band’s lead singer, has a high tenor — reaching into countertenor range — that’s perfectly pitched for the hundreds of female voices that sang along with him as he vented.

“How many people out in the audience had a mother or father that wasn’t there for them when they were younger?,” he asked, then had the crowd vow to do better when they raised their own families. It was the lead-in to “A Trophy Father’s Trophy Son,” which begs for answers from an absent father: “Why are you walking away? Was it something I did?” The song was a pretty waltz, beefed up with frenetic punk guitar and drums and eventually topped by Mr. Quinn unleashing a hardcore screech. Earlier, he had joined the thrash band Pierce the Veil onstage, singing and then barking again in the furious song they’ve recorded together, “King for a Day,” reinforcing his punky credibility.

The Warped Tour changes incrementally year to year, keeping its mosh-music core while testing out other styles — which leaves some bands playing, on the smaller stages, to audiences that wouldn’t fill a  basement. This year’s lineup included a stage featuring reggae-tinged bands, a tent where solo songwriters struggled to be heard against bands blasting from a nearby stage and even a traditionalist Irish band complete with button accordion — Skinny Lister. But lean indie-rock or good-time music without a streak of resentment didn’t gain traction with this year’s crowd. What did was music that sounded ironclad, kicking against obstacles from within or without.

As electronic dance music has surged into pop, it has also moved into the guitar-dominated Warped lineup. Breathe Carolina, a band from Denver, made electropop that Warped can love: with two vocalists, yearning and screaming; with synthesizer tones that used dubstep’s distorted buzz; and with occasional blasts of metallic guitar. “I wish you well/You won’t drag me to hell,” one song proclaimed.

Tonight Alive, a band from Australia fronted by the singer Jenna McDougall, drew a dedicated knot of people to a smaller stage. Its songs are ringing, upbeat punk-pop carrying one of Warped’s favorite attitudes: triumph against any and all odds. “I’m not about to give this up/Giving up was never enough,” Ms. McDougall sang, getting close to a crowd that already knew the song, belting it as if she was on her way to a main stage next year.

In a way, Warped works as a microcosm of the current music business, down in the do-it-yourself trenches. Honoring the short attention spans of pop consumers, sets run no more than 30 minutes, even for headliners. Physically, Warped is set up as a labyrinth of merchandising booths, leading to and clustered around the stages. Most of the booths are branded and manned by the performers on the bill; the half-hour onstage is a fraction of the time spent selling merchandise and meeting fans. It’s social networking in real time, and in an era of freely downloaded music, fledgling acts know that a well-designed T-shirt — often with a slogan that the band repeats onstage — may be worth as much as a good song.

Warped makes visible the ways that a 21st-century music career is inseparable from nonstop marketing; its bands definitely aren’t rebelling against capitalism. But the hugs are free.