Before I went to bed last night, I already knew that Beyoncé had crawled inside a robotic vagina on the opening night of the Renaissance tour in Stockholm. I knew that she had flown on a bedazzled horse called Reneigh, dressed as a cyber bee in a nod to the BeyHive, opened with a surprising string of ballads, and perturbed fans by apparently not dancing as much as they’d hoped – or was it that she had a leg injury? I was 1,400 miles away and I didn’t even go looking for this information; it just came to me ambiently as I clicked around my regular diet of culture sites. Vulture, Rolling Stone and Pitchfork were among the outlets liveblogging the show through the medium of embedded TikToks and tweets from those at the Friends Arena. My lucky friend Jeff was one of them, posting from the front row: when I watched his Instagram Stories, I too was close enough to almost get a strand of Beyoncé’s wind machine-blown hair in my mouth during Break My Soul.
I don’t mind knowing the ins and outs of the Renaissance tour before it hits London later this month. (Admittedly it’s kind of my job to know.) But for many Beyoncé stans, these dispatches are tantamount to spoilers: as if her hair flicks and song segues were plot points out of the latest Marvel film or episode of Succession. Online, many fans are declaring that they’re muting hashtags and any accounts liable to give the game away before they get their own chance to see her in the flesh; our reviewer, in his five-star rave, spoke to one man who had travelled from Brazil in order to get the freshest possible perspective: “I want everything to be a surprise,” he said.
How has spoiler culture come for gigs – which especially at stadium level, are more or less the same every night? In a way, these complaints are a weary acknowledgment of the fact that any conversations about banning phones at shows now seem about as antiquated as the notion that the Gutenberg press was ungodly. That genie is long since out of the bottle: one viral TikTok from last night showed a man who had jerry-rigged his phone to the front of his head so that he could livestream for friends, presumably keeping his hands free to do Lil Uzi Vert’s Just Wanna Rock dance along with Beyoncé.
Major tours are now designed for social media: in January, creative director Tobias Rylander told us that his staging, including for the 1975’s current At Their Very Best show, has become increasingly “Instagram-ready”. And superstar social media #content – whether about Beyoncé, Taylor Swift’s current Eras tour, Lady Gaga’s Chromatica Ball – is cheap SEO bait for pop culture websites. What happens on stadium tours has become the latest watercooler moment: what did it mean when Swift and the 1975’s Matty Healy, who are reportedly dating, both recently mouthed “this is about you, you know who you are. I love you” at their respective headline shows?
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Older music fans might argue that documenting gigs means you’re never in the moment and can’t really enjoy them properly, though for a younger generation, fandom has become a participatory endeavour, particularly at massive pop shows. Filming key moments affirms your presence, but sometimes plays a wider purpose too. In an age of ticketing sale catastrophes, expensive dynamic pricing and the fundamentally limited physical capacity of an arena, many fans can only afford to watch from afar. Although those who bought tickets may argue that spoilers undermine their hard-won investment, those illicitly broadcasting from the room are democratising the experience for those at home.
A particularly young generation came of age during the pandemic, where you could only see live music through a livestream, and that expectation of access hasn’t gone away (not least among fans with disabilities, and rightly so). There was outcry when Frank Ocean’s recent set at the first weekend of Coachella wasn’t part of the official livestream, so one teenage musician in the front row took it upon herself to broadcast the whole messy affair. Thousands of viewers tuned in (including, reportedly, Lorde, whose own shows have been pored over in this way). “I felt that I had not only witnessed but participated in something significant – not in spite of but because of the spontaneous stream,” critic Jenn Pelly wrote of the experience in the New York Times.
The musician, 18-year-old Morgan Lee, also didn’t seem to mind the virality, and was interviewed by Pitchfork about her experiences. Maybe personal microfame is another motivation (if your clip is the one to go viral, you can always drop a self-promotional link in a follow-up tweet), though creating a communal, open-source archive of an artist’s work seems like the greater project for fans here – the latest iteration of a pastime as old as pop itself, from personal scrapbooks and zines to meticulous Geocities clippings sites.
With acts such as Beyoncé and Swift, who seldom give interviews and maintain tight control over their images, it’s in capturing the unscripted moments at shows that we witness previously unseen flashes of personality, like Swift mouthing “what the fuck!” when part of her staging didn’t open on time at a recent show. It can capture moments of artistic evolution onstage: Rosalía debuting her song Despechá, which became the viral hit of last summer before she had even released the recorded version; Lorde telling fans that after the mellow Solar Power, she was approaching writing “bangers” again. For chaotic artists such as the 1975, fan footage captured the vicissitudes of Healy’s mood as he swerved between eating raw meat onstage, kissing fans and admitting, in the wake of a recent scandal, that his “asshole era” was over. You might scoff at the documentation of apparent trivialities, but think how much money Bob Dylan fans spend on his Basement Tapes series to hear micro-variations on a beloved song; how Beatles fans hunger to chronicle every minute of their existence. Fandom is about intimacy.
The idea of spoilers raises questions about what the live music experience is in 2023. Part of going to a big pop show used to be about playing into the illusion that this highly rehearsed endeavour was a uniquely individual experience – one that might be undermined by knowing too much in advance. But a setlist isn’t a plot, and any super fan who’s been to see an artist multiple times, whether Status Quo or Harry Styles, knows the joys of witnessing microshifts in how they approach a song, or in the performers’ moods: I once saw the National play five times in six days, my own personal test match of melancholy, and in time, my adrenaline synced to their arrangements. And since pop stars have grown more human in the age of social media, there’s every chance that each date of a big show will reflect where they’re personally at that night, whether they cry, swear or slip up.
That’s part of the joy of attending concerts, too: the experience depends on what you bring to it, the air in the room that night: what psychologist Richard Gerrig termed “narrative transportation”. Whenever Swift’s Eras tour hits the UK, the amount of content I’ve already consumed means I won’t be surprised by her outfits or setlist, but I know being there screaming along with my “Swiftageddon” WhatsApp group pals will induce a rare high that no amount of pre-seen TikToks could steal. And often what you’re expecting to have an emotional response to isn’t the trigger at all. When I saw Paramore at London’s O2 Arena recently, I thought it would be Hard Times that got me after I listened to it a lot during some recent … hard times. In fact, it was Hayley Williams doing a high kick that jolted the tears out of me. Why? Who knows! I don’t even remember what song they were playing, but I remember the chest-punching feeling of that moment: a little reminder of being alive that no amount of forewarning can spoil.
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