Over the weekend, DeuxMoi, the notorious Instagram gossip account known for its celebrity sightings and blind items, shared an Instagram Story post featuring a screenshot of a message from a reader who reported seeing comedian Martin Herlihy getting a drink alone at Phoebe Bridgers’ concert at Barclays Center. Bridgers’ tour restricts phones, so the reader’s account had to stand in for the clandestine photo that might otherwise have accompanied the sighting.
“Phoebe’s great, but going to a phoebe show solo seems a little sad,” the reader wrote. Another attendee had asked Herlihy for a hug, which he gave, but the reader dismissed the encounter as “a moot point since no photos!”
The internet has summarily ridiculed the (thankfully) anonymous user, who, in psychoanalyzing the decision to attend a concert alone, both confirmed the reason for no phone policies at shows and illustrated how ingrained the surveillance-driven ethos of these invasive little devices in our pockets has become.
“Cannot imagine anything more lame than opening the Instagram app and messaging Deuxmoi,” one X user posted.
The reader also makes an unforced judgment error. Going to concerts alone is decidedly not sad. Beyond the fact that Phoebe Bridgers is probably the ideal concert to attend by oneself, going out to see a show alone is one of life’s great pleasures.
Of course, it’s a grand experience to meet up with a bunch of friends at the show, or dance in the embrace of a significant other, but being at a show alone offers a more personal kind of intimacy that, increasingly, is hard to find.
For one, at least in an ideal world, you’re able to blend into the mass of the crowd, whose attention — again, in an ideal world — is laser focused on the stage, a shared object of adoration that finds you in communion with complete strangers, enraptured in something near-religious and sometimes even explicitly so, the human spirit dialed to a frequency that alone or in a group you get to tap into for a brief moment, experiencing the oneness of all things — unless you’re staring at your phone or looking around for celebrities to call out.
The post about Herlihy calls to mind the return to concerts of the early post-COVID era. When concertgoers became notorious for all manner of anti-social behavior, from throwing random stuff on stage to shouting disruptive comments during sets, that many concluded was a result of spending so much time in isolation. Even as the world has gotten more accustomed to live events, the more pernicious tendency these days is the constant surveillance from people on their phones, hoping the real world experience unfolding in front of them might have some cultural value on the clout web.
It’s the kind of thinking that forges a self-conscious stance that can’t imagine enjoying a concert alone. How can you enjoy anything, to say nothing of quality time with yourself, if you can’t for a second imagine your life unfolding anywhere but on a feed.
