11concerts to be happening at all, or how
much our precautions mattered, crowd-
ed as we were in these halls, periodically
pulling our masks down to swig the beers
for which we made sure to tip the bar-
tenders handsomely.
On video, though, things seemed
diff erent. Photographers and videog-
raphers continued to capture concerts
as the unruly spectacles we all wanted
to remember, and I kept falling for it.
Watching videos from Sunny Singh,
who archives hardcore punk videos on
his YouTube channel, hate5six, I would be
thrilled by the sight of a churning moshpit at a show by Kentucky’s Knocked
Loose. Then I would return to shows
that felt like a panopticon of politeness.
I began to wonder: Was everything good
happening at the shows I wasn’t going
to? It was only after attending some of
the same shows as my favorite photog-
raphers that I began to understand the
alchemy at play. Through their eyes, an
inert show by the indie-rock darlings Jap-
anese Breakfast looked holy — the kind
of three-dimensional, glittering pageant
we had been denied the pleasure of for
so long. All hell, meanwhile, seemed to
be breaking loose at a carefully managedconcert by the Baltimore punk band Turn-
stile, a seemingly worthy outlet for a year
and a half of repressed joy and rage.
Even Dr. Dog, who play the kind of
kitschy festival rock that makes me con-
sider heading home early, looked magical
on social media. I let a sentimental TikTok
trend, in which one of the band’s songs
plays as users’ baby pictures morph into
their current selves, lure me into buying a
ticket to what turned out to be an oppres-
sively branded show at the Rooftop at
Pier 17. But afterward, looking at images
the band was tagged in on Instagram, I
found smiling group photos of attendees‘‘This is going
to be an historic,
monumental
moment,’’ said
Mayor Bill DeBlasio,
about a splashy
Central Park
‘‘Homecoming’’
concert in August —
ultimately cut short
by weather.Fury/Getty Images; Kevin Mazur/Getty Images; Morten Falch Sortland/Getty Images; PeopleImages/Getty Images.