TikTok concerts and the commodification of music 🎶

There’s been a growing trend of people posting concert videos where the crowd, I hate to risk sounding like a fucking boomer, just plain sucks. People say that they had other audience members actively shush them while they’re singing along, some saying that entire crowds barely knew the words to the most famous songs. Generally just concert behaviour that doesn’t pass the vibe check. I’ve personally seen a comment (with a fair number of likes) which said “I pay to watch the artist, not to hear everyone singing along”.

A lot of people have been blaming this on teens who’ve never been to gigs, suddenly coming out of the pandemic and rushing into them with no real sense of what you’re supposed to do at them. I’m sure that’s true, but I also want to get ideological up in here.

Of course, the problem is also—drum roll—capitalism. As with every ill in our modern world. Here’s the thing: when we commodify our culture, all it becomes is product. It’s content that we pay for to consume, then toss aside. The realationship is no longer between art and enjoyer, it’s between producer and buyer.

I guess you could argue that that’s been the case since the day art was subsumed into industry, and I’d agree with you. I’d also say that perhaps this is the further logical extension to it. Buying tickets to a gig is now buying the audio-visual experience of seeing and hearing the artist live. It’s an individual, rather than collective, experience; you pay for yourself to consume the artist live, instead of paying to gain entry to a shared space of musical joy.

Anything outside of your individual enjoyment of the live act is therefore detrimental to the experience. Singing along, which used to be an expression of appreciation from the audience and the artist, becomes a nuisance. Dancing, which to me feels inseparable from the gig experience, becomes a distraction that stops the people around you from achieving maximum consumption efficiency. We need maximum value!

That’s why we get people recording gigs too, right? Not to get too boomer-y here, because I also record little snippets and bits to remember the experience. What about the people who record entire songs, spending 95% of the gig with a phone up in the air? How do we see that behaviour through this lens?

I’m going to Glastonbury Festival next year, and I’m not going to lie: it’s expensive as hell, and my wallet hurt even paying the deposit. It’s very hard not to see it economically. How can I maximise the acts-per-dollar ration? How can I make sure it’s the most worth-it experience I can have? But ultimately, that’s going to take away from my experiencing it, so I’m going to try my best to be there appreciating the moment, clichés be damned.

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Hungry for Spilt Gravy? 🍿

Twitter’s been absolutely gushing over Spilt Gravy On Rice. Being real: we’re deprived of big films that deal with “taboo” topics, and there’s clearly an appetite for it—it’s refreshingly honest, a “breath of fresh air”, it’s got an “openness” that might not be for, and it’s a “good show. Well done. 4/5.”

So when I watched it, I was expecting… more. Let me be super clear here, because I don’t want to be a hater for the sake of it. I’m sure Spilt Gravy was groundbreaking when it debuted as a play over a decade ago. It does touch on some really important topics in a very honest, open way. It deals with stuff that is never talked about in Malaysian cinema, so much so that it took over a decade to even get it past Malaysian film censors. I have to applaud it for that.

I think, though, that the popularity of the movie is really more an indication of the absolute dearth of this kind of content rather than the actual quality of the film because it’s just—and I really really hate to say it—not a good film.

Spilt Gravy On Rice is so wildly afraid of letting subtext be subtext, that it plays everything at an 11.

I see what the film is trying to do. Paint a picture of a T20 Malay family, and situate them within wider society. Naturally, they all brush up against bigger social themes—liberalism, class, gay identity, race. It would be weird if they didn’t! It really started to tire me out, though, because the movie gets really didactic about this. Every social issue gets a Big Question moment where a character explicitly ponders the theme, spelling it out.

Even though everything is painstakingly spelt out, ironically the movie doesn’t actually give these ideas enough room to develop. It touches on the themes, but these explorations lead nowhere. I want to see these characters living these issues and see how they interface with them. We don’t really get that, because the film is very preoccupied with talking about them instead of showing the characters living them.

It also means that despite spending so much time with these characters, I felt nothing for their relationships or for them as people. We spend 2/3rds of the movie talking about Big Issues, and when the movie pivots into its final 1/3rd, focusing on the family drama, it feels hollow because the actual humans in the movie have only really been lightly sketched in.

I applaud this movie for trying something and talking about things we have collectively brushed under the rug. But I also think it’s a great example of why we don’t need a film censorship board. This movie took over a decade to make it through, and required countless rounds of revision and editing and re-cutting that in the end no one really knows what the original would’ve been like.

A lot of that was due to the sensitive topics discussed, but people want to see that! People want to see movies that talk about taboo topics openly and honestly. It’s what most everyone who loved this movies loved the most about it.

So, when a movie finally comes out that does touch on these things, it feels the need to Talk About It (A Lot). There aren’t a lot of films that touch on these things, so Spilt Gravy needs to be the one that makes up for all that. That’s far more than a single film can do. Abolish the censorship board, let filmmakers tell honest stories, and maybe we’ll get one that succeeds where Spilt Gravy didn’t manage to.

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