Indeed Brian, phones did not exist in 1996, but neither did AI… a rant:
It’s really shitty to be four songs into a concert and to suddenly have the frontman of a band you love greet you in Spanish, only to speak four words and then go “well, this i have to say in English”, and begin scolding and threatening you for using your phone. Really ruins the experience for a few songs while I manage to shake the bad mood off.
Listen, I would understand and respect the no phones policy if they did it truly based on the principle of living in the moment and wanting to see people’s faces instead of phone cameras while playing. If they did it out of a criticism of the consumer culture that has made us so dependent on phones and of such short memory. I believe those are fair enough principles and complaints, I do believe we rather uselessly record too much of our lives (my dad works in the venue industry and has told me so many times that like 80% of concert attendees never rewatch their videos…) and that living in the moment, hearing the songs and letting them pass through you, is truly the magic of concerts. However, I don’t think that that’s why Brian enforced this; three things really stuck out to me tonight:
“Steal”: I don’t remember the exact quote, but during his preaching, Brian yelled at some point something along the lines of “stealing the music” or “stealing the show” or something like that. As a marxist and sociologist, I would say “slay queen!!! Defend your work!!! Don’t let them steal the value you created with your labour force!!!”. However… Girl… Unless you’re paying all of your workers exactly what their labour is worth, which we know you’re not, as you’re working with Ticketmaster, owned by Live Nation, you don’t get to talk about the theft of anything. Technical marxist rant aside, what the hell do you mean by “stealing”??? All of us here paid to be here, and no one is skipping a concert because they know they can watch it on youtube or twitter. What exactly are we stealing from you? These videos are mostly for us, for us to remember such a special night; a woman beside me started saying to her friends “I don’t give a fuck, I just don’t give a fuck, I was listening to this when I was twenty of course I’m recording this” the instant they began the song after his speech — indeed, many of us record to remember. Do you truly believe yourself so godlike that you think us recording the show is some sort of theft???? Theft is what the global north does to the global south and what housing speculation does here in Madrid, not us recording you (i am of course being dramatic and petty).
The AI video before they began playing. Are You Fucking Kidding Me? Gosh… you must really miss the nineties if you’re willing to do an AI video of yourselves when you were young turning and walking away from a camera dramatically. If you’re such luddites, why the hell are you using this? If you’re so worried about the theft of your concert or your image or your art why do you not care about these machines processing your faces? Why do you not care about the well known fact that a lot of art theft has occurred in order for AI videos to get this good? Cringey, absofuckinglutely unnecessary. I, too, can pay for chatgpt plus and have it make me a personalised video of you two playing the exact songs I would like you to, with live edits it would make out of videos of your concerts, with Steve playing the drums, but I of course, won’t. That would be theft (and horrible).
His repetition of the phrase “we didn’t have cellphones in 1996”. Okay Brian, I get it. I didn’t get to live that period but I get it. However, again, it’s so telling that he kept repeating that phrase: he’s not bothered by the phones themselves, by how it worsens the experience to him, he’s old and antiquated. And I would respect that if it wasn’t so evident that it comes from a place of ego and self entitlement. We paid to be here Brian, we have kept you fed and swimming in a few millions for, indeed, thirty years. Once again, I’d get it if it came from some different, actual principle, but it seems to simply come from ego.
Don’t get me wrong, I generally loved the concert and kept thinking throughout that I never want to miss a Placebo concert in my life, and that as long as they tour, I wanna go see them, but it is such whiplash to be having the time of your life and to suddenly have the guy who seemed so cool, progressive, shamelessly queer and sexy and avant garde in his youth threaten you by yelling that “you’re getting two warnings, and I, right now, am giving you the first one, because, what you don’t know is that I can see everyyyything from here”. oookaaayyyyy……. and that was essentially all he said. Stefan spoke before him and once after (in near flawless spanish, I must say), and nothing else. So many things going on in the world… they can afford to publicly speak of one, to carry that controversy with them and perhaps become disliked by some music execs whose religion is money and who won’t really stop booking them if they speak up for, I don’t know, Palestine maybe, and to gain the deep respect of so many people, not to mention, help bring even more attention and money to the Palestinian cause, but instead ‘no phones’ is the hill they choose to die on. Alright.