Chula Vista, CA. July 16, 2009
I am sitting with 19,999 other half-interested fans at an obscenely large amphitheater so close to the international border with Mexico that you could chuck your cell phone and hit one of those morose burros painted to look like zebras for the tourists. It’s summer in San Diego, the weather so perfect it seems artificial. Everyone’s placid, tipsy but not drunk, swaying in their seats to Coldplay’s gently affirming brand of pop rock. The whole event could be mistaken for a Shakespeare in the Park production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Or a Harvest Crusade service.

I’m in a VIP booth with three friends: John, Dave, Brian. VIP at the Cricket Wireless amphitheater means seven or eight plastic chairs of the sort you can find at any Target, plus two patio tables that make getting in and out of the booth a stand-and-let-pass sort of effort on the part of everyone in the booth. Not that I’m complaining; another friend seated way to the left and a dozen rows behind us paid $150 for his seats, which in the time of $500 U2 tickets is itself a bargain. That we’re in this booth at all is the end result of a complex series of favors among an ad agency, Clear Channel Corp., and a certain well-known burger chain. (John and Dave are sons of a successful franchisee.) A guy from the agency’s here too, but he’s keeping to himself. Dave promised his father he’d buy this man a beer, but the guy’s stoned out of his gourd and locked in some profound state of ennui. He probably comes to this box all the time, so the novelty went out for him long ago. And at $12 per cup, plus tip, there’s no sense in buying him a beer he won’t drink anyway.

All night a feeling has been building inside me that I can’t quite decipher. What I know is that I’m strangely detached from everything going on around me. I can’t engage. There’s a persistent aura of unreality to the whole thing. The music is too perfect. The weather. The placidness of the crowd. This is a rock ’n’ roll concert, so where are the unruly fans storming the stage? The fistfights? The (literally) deafening music? And what’s with those videos playing on the JumboTrons? Try as I might to watch the band, I find my gaze drifting to one of two colossal screens flanking the stage. I’m far enough away from the action, VIP status notwithstanding, that it’s hard to make out any detail. And even if I could, the whole experience is being turned into a VH1-worthy music video on the fly and fed to those Orwellian monitors in real time, complete with cross-fades, soft focus, color effects, etc. Here’s Will Champion, crisply hitting his drums to the Coldplay Beat. (Dave, lifelong drummer and musician, tells us on the way into the VIP parking lot, which means only that it’s closer to the entrance than the other lots, that such a thing actually exists. Coldplay has its own beat, just as Steve Tyler has the Tyler Shuffle and Lady Gaga the fresh-from-the-harem look.) Cut to Jonny Buckland on the guitar, just in time for the pivotal chord change. Over to Guy Berryman on bass. He’s sweating! Then Chris Martin. On and on it goes. And if the JumboTrons bore you, you can watch the whole experience on the scrim behind the band or follow the giant balls descending from the shell above them, the sight of which elicits a huge roar from the crowd.

What I’m waiting for, though I don’t yet know it, is a moment that will tidily encapsulate what is a muddled-up sense that something is deeply, inherently wrong with this spectacle. But for now I’m tipsy, enjoying the music, trying not to think too much.

Did I mention the cell phones? As darkness creeps down from the hills into the amphitheater, thousands of bright white screens become visible, held over the owners’ heads for a quick pic or movie or live transmission. I’m just as guilty (if not totally without shame) as anyone else. John, a commercial photographer with an old-school respect for the live event, scolds me every time he sees it come out of my pocket. And what am I doing with it? Texting my wife a picture of the concert I’m not engaging with. I want her to know that (a) I wish she were here and (b)…What is b? Why bother to send her a picture at all? To make her envious? My motives aren’t altogether pure.

Which makes me think — promised I wouldn’t do that — about why all these other people are taking pictures. Isn’t it enough to be here, on a glorious summer night, listening to inoffensive, infectious songs that we all know by heart? No, apparently. We want to document, record. Prove to our friends and ourselves that this night took place and we were either lucky or determined enough to be here. (Check out YouTube and you can pretty much watch the entire concert in three-minute cell-phone-camera bursts.) Chris Martin makes his point — is he sniggering at us? — when he calls for the lights to be turned off and instructs all of us in the particulars of the “Mexican Wave.” Why it should be Mexican I’m not sure, but we dutifully turn on our screens and stand on cue, creating a rolling wave of light. It’s actually quite beautiful, like bioluminescent plankton rolling in the nighttime swells.

A couple of weeks later I’ll be at a BBQ in my old neighborhood, chatting with a Disney exec about the cell phone-mediated concert experience and how I like listening to the live CD better than the concert itself, and he’ll become very animated (no pun intended). He’s just come back from Bonnaroo with his teenage daughter and her friend, and those girls spent the whole time texting! It was unbelievable! The whole purpose of going to a concert is to listen to the music, not send cryptic msgs to ur bff! But as he talks, his outrage morphs into an extended disquisition on how he and the other execs at Disney are keen to monetize “tribal” experiences like concerts but haven’t quite figured out how. He says all of this with a straight face and no apparent irony.

But back to the concert. Part of the VIP package to which we’ve been treated is access to the VIP lounge. My imagination runs riot. I envision the champagne room at Cheetahs Las Vegas. A Korean cognac bar. A ’50s jazz club. We’re skipping the opening acts to check it out, so keen is our interest. A security guard stops us at the entrance, has us slap on our special holographic VIP stickers. Good sign. But as we descend the staircase, what we find isn’t a hash bar or opium den or even a cozy lobby. In fact, it’s not a “lounge” at all. It’s a concrete courtyard familiar to anyone who’s attended public school in California, only here they serve alcoholic drinks (the same as can be purchased outside the lounge) and Hooters-level appetizers.

People are milling about or sitting at high tables, noshing on buffalo wings or little plates of shrimp swimming in a putrid butter sauce. John brings a plate of these to our table. Various corporate sponsors have booths, but the big player seems to be the Sycuan or Pala or Valley View Indian casino (I don’t remember which), which is operating under the illusion that the VIP lounge is awash in high rollers. It’s not. The entire thing’s a gimmick, a put-on, and I feel sorry for the poor souls who paid real money for it. They’ve been monetized. Commodified.

Midway through the concert now. The lights go down. That gnawing feeling is building, the sense that I’m not really here or that the band isn’t really playing. I should take a moment to say that I’m an unabashed fan of Coldplay. That’s probably not surprising for a white male asymptotically near his dreaded 40th birthday, but I’ve read enough vitriol from music critics to make me question my taste. The last time I remember a band being so uniformly detested on the one hand and adored on the other was in the sunset years of the Beach Boys. But I don’t pretend to be an expert on music, of any kind. My tastes are promiscuous to the point of tastelessness. As I teenager, I was mortified by my secret love of Michael Jackson’s Bad. All that dancing and falsetto. I should have been listening to more serious music like Ratt and Winger.

The lights are down, and the band is running up the steps to a platform nestled in the cheap seats. For once the audience is focused on the experience rather than the television show. You can feel the anticipation. Where are they? What are they doing? Suddenly they appear and break into a cover of “Billy Jean.” Michael Jackson has just died and the crowd eats it up. Cell phones pop up like salutes at a Nazi rally. Then an odd thing happens. People not 50 feet from the band start turning in my direction. I look over my shoulder to see what they’re looking at. It’s the JumboTrons and their tight close-ups. I start feeling self-conscious, and soon enough, I’m staring at the giant screens too, in a twisted form of self-defense.

The entire night has been a study in cognitive dissonance. I feel like a kid with Asperger’s, desperately trying to integrate all my senses into a unified experience. I can’t. It’s overwhelming. Too many lights, screens, sounds, plus the incessant static of my own brain as it tries to cope with the overload, to reason its way out. I know that this failure to be in the moment despite all these distractions and messages coming from every direction is what marks me as a member of yesterday’s generation, those who grew up without cell phones or computers or Kindles in houses with a single TV. We’re obsolete, and we’re only in our 30s. As evolutionary theorists hasten to point out, it’s not survival of the fittest; it’s survival of the most adaptable. If I were a mammoth I’d be sinking into a bog right now along with the saber-toothed tigers.

“Billy Jean” is finished, and the band is back on the main stage. I lean over to Dave and hint that now might be a good time to leave. The concert’s nearly over, we’ve heard most of the good songs. Let’s get out before the crush. But he won’t bite. In fact, he threatens never to invite me to another concert again just for asking.

I slump into my chair, slug some water. The young drunk girl the next box over strikes up a conversation. It’s hard to make out what she’s saying, but she’s beautiful and lissome and a welcome distraction from the noise of the concert. Something about being newly married, about kids. It takes me back to my 20s, to concerts before video screens. Rush (although they had lasers). The Cult. (Guns N’ Roses opened.) MexFest. The Pointer Sisters (my mom’s idea). And I think of that crazed fan cutting the power to Bob Dylan’s concert because of Dylan’s newfound affection for electric guitar. What that must have been like.

Then a girl in front of me holds up her cell phone to take a video. Onstage, a roadie has placed a video monitor next to Chris Martin’s piano. It’s playing a live feed of Chris Martin as he plays. I look to a JumboTron. It’s a close-up of the singer and the monitor. Then I look at the girl’s phone. She’s taking a video not of the stage but of the JumboTron. And it occurs to me that at that moment, I’m watching a feed of a feed of a feed.

There’s a two-foot-long German word for what I’m feeling right now, I’m sure, but I don’t know what it is. All I know is that the steady drone of unease that’s been with me all night is lifting. I’ll have time to think it over later, when the concert’s over and we’re waiting out the traffic, tailgating, with a married couple parked next to us. I won’t reach any grand conclusions, but I’ll recognize that moment as the point at which I gave in. I was finally in the moment.
— Richard Oesterheld