Throwback to Adolescent Angst

I realize how unfair, disastrously unkarmic (or completely meaningless for some) it is for me to brag about the Arcade Fire concert I went to last week at Radio City Music Hall, but I can't help but find meaning in it and thus will subject everyone who will listen to my musing on the topic.

Beyond the reality of how hard to the tickets are to track down (the New Yorker reports that people offered thousands of dollars and/or sex in exchange for tickets to a recent show in a small church), there is a greater set of adolescent mores that their music makes me revisit, namely the first of which is recalcitrance.

Despite the fact that most of those in attendance paid an exceptional premium to be there and were really only there to talk to people, there was a moment where they became irrelevant to the equation.

NOTE: Before I go any further, I will say clarify that I was nearly 100% sober for this endeavor, only one $6 beer in the red and I am not writing about the trite (and thematically recurrent) notion of being altered while in an altered state of mind.

At one pointed instance, lead singer Win Baker invited the crowd to rush the aisles and come closer to the stage, half-sarcastically citing that there were only four security guards on the whole lower level. One near-brigade went forward, myself and friend included, and excitedly pushed down the aisle, stunted only slightly by a very large security guard who wanted us to move back, but could not enforce this.

He told us to go back, but no one was going to move and he gave up ground until we were halfway to the stage. We weren't violent, no one pushed back when he grabbed the advancing crowd, we were more just in that place to be there and not to prove much of anything, although there was a spirit about it and our decision.

This triggered a feeling, some liberating adrenaline flush, reminding me of that rebellious spirit evoked by grunge and rock concerts in middle school; that nonpareil freedom of three-chorded distortion and fronted apathy. I felt the same way rushing from the stands at a Stone Temple Pilots concert in 7th grade, mildly fearful of the consequences, but generally excited and embarrassingly pleased. Although we didn't hoist each other up to ride on top of the crowd as it was done so nervously in 7th grade, there was an inimitable connection that I had renewed with the 13-year-old version of me. I was excessively cheerful and hyperactive for the next 48 hours.

Music can do that, but that's not the point. The point is that I am, at nearly 26, foundationally who I was at half my age (and I am sure plenty of former girlfriends will vouch for that even if they didn't know me then); and no matter how much is displaced or made darker by time, unless someone is hermitically sealed by choice or religion from the contours of their youth, the sentiments, keepsakes, or small moral victories, there will always be triggers into those presumedly bygone recesses. And then you're happy to be yourself.