Do you ever have temper tantrums? I do. Not often, but sometimes. Always for ridiculous reasons. Almost always in the privacy of my home, thank god. Like when my old, overloaded MacBook gives me the spinning death wheel. Or when I can’t find any bobby pins. Sometimes I imagine what my neighbours would think of a 28-year-old grown adult screaming in exasperation and chucking a plastic wine glass (empty) across the room, and then my face gets hot and my armpits prickly and I vow to get more sleep, be less hungover and not sweat the small things. Serenity-now type stuff.
But what if you’re entertaining, exposing a very real part of yourself, uncovering your very personal artistry, and there are people in the audience being jackasses? Folk-rocker Father John Misty chucked his guitar and emotionally stormed offstage during the encore of a recent Toronto performance. The heckling at the FJM show wasn’t the worst ever but I felt for the guy.
In what other forum are you allowed, simply because you paid for a ticket, to behave like an asshole? Sports maybe. But those athletes are being paid bajillions of dollars and there are thousands of people present in a highly competitive atmosphere and fans are passionate about their teams.
Is it okay to yell out song requests? It’s not forbidden, but usually the artist will give you some kind of subtle cue like, oh, I don’t know, asking you to yell out song requests (as J. Cole did in his secretish show in July). Otherwise, it’s annoying.
At the Charles Bradley concert in May, two men would not stop yelling at Bradley between tunes. Two drunk dudes in their 20s constantly shouting song titles at a 65-year-old soul singer in a Will Ferrell “we’re going streaking!” pitch and volume was revolting. It astonished me because they were also genuine fans (they seemed to know all his songs). Charles Bradley isn’t going to halt his Menahan Street Band halfway through Confusion to play Golden Rule. He’ll play Golden Rule when he damn well feels like it. Charles Bradley probably has a set list.
The only reason people yell out song requests anyway is to show the artist and everyone else that they’re not just any fan, but that they’re an uber-fan, that they do, in fact, know all of this obscure material from the highly underrated album X that came out in year Y. Sometimes the idea is to convey a certain condescension or ownership, as in, “I paid for this ticket, I bought your album, so I can treat you like a circus act.”
Bradley is too much of a class act to respond, but I’m surprised that more fan-artist altercations don’t actually go down. In the past year or so, I’ve been in a number of scenarios when the performer has asked the audience to zip it. Chantal Kreviazuk at a swanky Paul Haggis TIFF fundraiser K’Naan at an ill-conceived Grey Cup concert Yasiin Bey at his own show.
Some part of me wishes the artist would just grin and bear it. In Kreviazuk’s case, patrons (not me) had paid somewhere in the region of $1,200 for a star-studded, Arcade Fire-headlined brunch. It was charity for kids in Haiti. No one was actually there to see Kreviazuk’s performance, specifically, and so I’m not sure anyone should be forced into dead silence at 11 am. Usually, though, I’m with the artist. Paying for a ticket entitles you to a concert. And if you don’t like it, you’re free to never buy a ticket again. Or leave.
Artists put themselves in the spotlight and therefore need to learn to handle booers and haters. But most touring musicians are not Biebering in the lap of luxury, surrounded by sycophants and throngs of palm-waving groupies to dust off their egos. Mostly they’re touring because they need to make a living.
Maybe it’s the Canadian non-confrontationalist in me, or maybe as a writer I relate to the insecure vulnerability that comes with exposure. But in the case of the hecklers vs. Father John Misty, as someone who understands the rage in the moment and subsequent regret of a temper tantrum, I’m inclined to side with Misty.
