U2 at Sphere is the nightmare future of music

"Wow, that IMAX movie was amazing! What's that? U2 was there too? Huh, didn't notice."

We have finally reached peak "I go to the concert to watch a screen and not the band."

That’s what I thought when my timeline filled up with shots from Sphere, the huge IMAX theater/eyeball launched by an evil billionaire in Vegas that opened with some Irish band in the pit playing the soundtrack to a post-modern Fantasia flick that scrolled by on a screen which wrapped around more than a pair of Coach Prime sunglasses. Everyone who attended was very impressed by the movi–, I mean, concert and dutifully posted about it online, which is now the main metric of success for any performer. (See: T. Swift and her newfound love of football.)

U2's creative director (honestly, I didn't know bands had those) had an insightful (and also kinda savage) line about the show: “If people get bored, they can even watch the band.” Ouch. But hey, it’s like Don Draper says:

Sphere is obviously impressive and as a fan of psychedelics, far be it from me to 💩 on a cool light show. Plus, massive screens are a necessity for the big-scale venues a band like U2 plays. I get all that.

But I’ll tell you what Sphere isn’t: rock ‘n roll. Because staring at a screen – or, even worse, pointing your phone at a screen – can never be rock 'n roll. It is empirically NOT ROCK. No one ever says, "Remember that time we were all pointing our phones at that screen together? That rocked!" But that’s exactly what everyone at Sphere was doing.

Similarly NOT rock: Mark Zuckerberg’s avatar talking to Lex Fridman’s avatar in the Metaverse for a podcast. Zuck’s floating head reported photorealistic avatars will be the future for remote work, gaming, and social interactions. Groovy! I’ll have my chatbot talk to your chatbot to schedule a virtual reality convo that’s virtually fascinating. (Related: You can just substitute “not really” for “virtual” from now on.)

Sadly, photorealistic avatars will be the future of music too. Did you know ABBA is on a (virtual) tour called Voyage? Since launching in May 2022, the show has sold 99% of seats and makes $2M a week. And unlike pesky musicians, virtual avatars never age and can play anywhere/anytime without requiring amphetamines or someone removing the brown M&Ms from a bowl backstage. So get ready for more Metaverse-chorus-verse performances moving forward.

Our whole world is getting faker and rock ‘n roll is no exception. For example, one of U2’s faux backdrops looked like a massive amphitheater on a distant planet…

U2 at Sphere.

…which reminded me of Pink Floyd: Live at Pompeii, an incredible concert film that you should watch while high later tonight.

Pink Floyd: Live at Pompeii.

Legit playing in an ancient amphitheater ain’t the same as dialing one up on a screen though. It’s the difference between someone playing an actual guitar and someone playing Guitar Hero.

Actually, there was a rock star named the Fly who once sang about this kinda fakery:

🎶 You're the real thing
Even better than the real thing, child 🎶

Backstory on the Fly:

Based on a combination of Jerry Lee Lewis, Jim Morrison and the televangelist Jimmy Swaggart, The Fly became a character Bono used on the group's Zoo TV tour. Wearing huge sunglasses and black leather, it was a parody of an egomaniacal rock star.

That’s interesting considering how, at the end of the Sphere show, Bono showered love upon the executive class:

At the end of the night, Bono began cataloging his thanks. “I’ll tell you who’s one hard worker — Jim Dolan,” Bono said. “You’re one mad bastard.” He also thanked Irving and Jeffrey Azoff, Michael Rapino, Guy Oseary, Jimmy Iovine and other executives.

First, you hate the Fly. Then, you pretend to be the Fly. And eventually, you become the Fly. Achtung, baby. Achtung indeed.

(As a long suffering Knicks fan, I refuse to let this damn orb be James Dolan’s get-out-of-PR-jail-free card, no matter how much he spends to rebrand himself.)

Speaking of propaganda, you know who especially loved the Sphere reveal? Tech entrepreneurs! They were oohing and aahing about the, um, immersivality of the immersiveness. Anthony Pompliano wrote, “Next time someone tells you that humans haven’t built anything noteworthy in centuries, show them this video from inside the Sphere from last night’s concert.” Take that, Mies van der Rohe.

Alexis Ohanian X’d, “So smart…Every IRL event has to be an experience to justify the money, time, and effort from fans — reimagining what a concert venue could look like that's designed for every seat in the house will become the standard, especially now that the tech allows it.” Get it? Seeing one of the world’s biggest bands sing and play their instruments is no longer enough of an experience. We must reimagine concerts.

And that makes sense if all you ever do is see music acts in giant stadiums/arenas, which is, admittedly, a bit absurd. You go to see a band at one of those cavernous spots and the only way you can actually see them is on a giant screen – and if you’re just going to watch them on a giant screen, why bother going at all? It’s so damn comfy at home and you finally figured out how to work the Sonos after 3 hours on the phone with customer support. So yeah, if attendees are going to be a mile away from the action, there probably does need to be something to hook our ADHD minds.

However, you don’t have to see bands inside an airplane hangar. You could also go to a small venue that doesn’t require a light show or fancy pyrotechnics. Sometimes the secret to having a powerful experience is to go smaller, not bigger.

This is what tech guys always miss in their obsession with scalability. To them, it’s a defeat when something fails to scale. If your app can’t compete with Google, it’s just a lifestyle business. If the I.P. can’t have sequels, the movie’s not worth making. If it can’t be massive, it’s not worth doing.

But huge is the opposite of human. Massive venues change the relationship between audience and performer. Even in a comedy club, the front row sees a totally different show than the back. The further away you get, the more the crowd might as well be watching from the Metaverse.

To the tech cognoscenti, humanity is an obstacle to overcome. That’s why they keep throwing AI, the Metaverse, Vision Pro Goggles, and assorted algorithms at us, while never acknowledging the compromises these things require of us. I get how all those tech advancements are remarkable. I'm just not convinced they’re good for our souls.

Intimacy doesn’t scale. To venture capitalists, that’s a problem. But to normal humans, that’s why it’s so valuable. The bug is the feature. Plastic roses “scale” much better than real roses because they don’t actually live. Only that which dies can truly live.

I know, I rant about crap like this all the time. It’s not that I’m anti-technology as much as that I’m pro-humanity. And each time I see the hosannas for something like Sphere, I feel like we’re drifting further away from real-life, in-the-room, human connection.

“C’mon, dude. What’s your beef? That show was clearly badass.” Sure, the LED lights were amazing. But in every shot of the show I’ve seen, the crowd is overwhelmingly viewing the goings-on through their phones. Audience members aren’t even filming the musicians, they’re filming the screens above the band. It all seems a lot more Cirque d’iPhone than rock show.

What you point your phone at is what you worship. It is the object of your devotion. And in this case, everyone was pointing their phones at the screen. It was a feedback loop of pixelated devotion, proving screens are what we worship most now.

Papal inaugurations: "The times they are a-changin'.

Don’t get me wrong, I’d love to check out the visuals at Sphere sometime. But I don’t think it’ll feed my soul the way rock shows in smaller venues have. Concerts at places like Lounge Ax, Metro, Empty Bottle, Double Door, Mercury Lounge, and Bowery Ballroom changed my life. They transported me to a place that had nothing to do with screens and everything to do with people in a room connecting. Rock ‘n roll twisted me like a corkscrew and set me on my life’s path.

I remember being pressed against the stage barricade, dead center, right in front of Eddie Vedder as Pearl Jam (fresh off their debut album) opened up for Keith Richards on a New Year’s Eve show at The Academy, a tiny venue in NYC. After the show, Eddie handed me the champagne he was drinking and I kept the bottle on a shelf for months afterward.

I remember using my fake ID to get into Lounge Ax, a tiny strip of a club in Chicago’s Lincoln Park, to see Polara open up for Guided By Voices. Ed Ackerson from Polara swirled his guitars and then GBV’s Bob Pollard high-kicked his way through “Smothered In Hugs” while tossing cans of Bud into the crowd.

I remember seeing the White Stripes in front of a few dozen people at the Empty Bottle, being shocked at how two people could make such a ruckus, and then telling everyone I knew they had to come see their next show in town. So did everyone else who was there – we all knew we’d just witnessed a lightning strike.

I remember seeing Leonard Cohen live at the Beacon Theater and thinking, “If this is what church was like, I would understand being religious.” It wasn’t just the poetry of the man’s songs, it was the humility and grace with which he conducted himself onstage.

I remember seeing a duo named Awaré earlier this year in an abandoned church in Mexico City. It was somewhere between folk music, psychedelic ceremony, ecstatic dance, and EDM. Sometimes the audience sat, sometimes we danced, and sometimes we sang – every step of the way, we were in it together though. If you took your phone out, you felt like a fool.

Actually, one of the first bands that ever made me clock the transcendent power of a rock concert was U2. Early MTV would endlessly show Bono planting his flag in the fog during the band’s Red Rocks concert filmed during the War tour. “This song is not a rebel song. This song is ‘Sunday Bloody Sunday.’”

Number of video screens at venue: 0
Number of people on their phones: 0
Number of incredible performances: 1

I’d trade 1,000 nights at Sphere to have been at Red Rocks that night instead.

To me, that’s what a rock show is about. Being present in the moment, experiencing something together in a room, something holy and true. Good luck getting that via pixels. Those can only deliver something virtually holy.

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🎯 The Golden Bachelor looks like a commercial for blood pressure medication.

🎯 Suggested t-shirt slogans based on the success of those "spiritual gangsta" ones: spiritual drill sergeant, spiritual deep state, spiritual military industrial complex, and spiritual organized religion.

🎯 Men's rights activists and feminists are two sides of the same coin – I mean, if you believe in the binary thinking that coins have sides.

🎯 Confusing tonic and seltzer is anti-semitism.

🎯 Shroom tip: When you're tripping, it's okay to MAKE a call – but never TAKE a call. They seem the same but they are totally not.

🎯 I enjoy how equal pay activists couldn't care less about the plight of male models.

🎯 Ketamine is horse tranquilizer? No wonder horses are so chill. (Vets too.)

🎯 Amazing that Buddha wound up with way less followers than Jesus. Dudes with guts are always a better hang than dudes with abs.

🎯 Somehow, Matthew McConaughey is a dope, has dope, and is dope.

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🗯 The Traffic Test (from How to Pick Your Life Partner).

The Traffic Test is passed when I’m finishing up a hangout with someone and one of us is driving the other back home or back to their car, and I find myself rooting for traffic. That’s how much I’m enjoying the time with them.

Passing the Traffic Test says a lot. It means I’m lost in the interaction, invigorated by it, and that I’m the complete opposite of bored.

To me, almost nothing is more critical in choosing a life partner than finding someone who passes the Traffic Test. When there are people in your life who do pass the Traffic Test, what a whopping shame it would be to spend 95% of the rest of your life with someone who doesn’t.

🗯 Gurus give bad advice because the tools you need to get from 0-50 are not the same to get from 90-95.

Almost everyone has more pain and resentment and fear in the beginning.

Which is why they use it.

Once you’ve achieved enough success and validation from the world to not be fuelled by that any more, that’s great.

But that doesn’t mean that people who are just starting out can achieve the success you now have by using strategies which you only accessed after becoming successful…

“You need holistic balanced drive” is pushed by people who already benefitted from their resentment-fuelled obsession for half a decade.

The best question to ask is not “how does my favourite guru say people should behave to achieve success?”

Instead ask “what did my favourite guru actually do when they were at my stage?”

🗯 A group of mountain bikers bumped into King Charles III while he was strolling through the countryside in Balmoral, Scotland.

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🗯 Why do people turn to smartphones during social interactions?

We predicted that phones would provide some initial benefits; but, over time they would increasingly undermine the enjoyment people would derive otherwise by connecting with others. Contrary to our hypothesis, phones failed to confer any detectable benefits. Instead, participants who had access to their phones reported worse overall subjective experience and socialized significantly less (on both self-report and objective measures) compared to those who did not have access to their phones. The findings from this registered report cast doubt on the possibility that people are making sensible—albeit myopic—choices to use their phones, suggesting that people may be acting against their own best interest when they use phones in social situations.

🗯 Paul Simon talks to Howard Stern about spirituality and life after death:

Thanks for reading. I truly appreciate it.

Rock on,
Matt