To an outsider- from parents to those
who’d rather listen to regurgitated, remixed Top 40 hits, Vans Warped Tour, the
genres of music it holds, and the entire subculture it surrounds and draws is a
completely different world, and a frightening one. They listen to the songs
that come from it and hear nothing but screams, growls, and words that disturb
them. They wonder how anyone can stand to listen to it, let alone consider it
music, and look at the subset of teenagers that do listen to it as troubled,
and as trouble-makers. These people are accosted with outcries of “you just
don’t understand!” from the people like us. The people who find comfort and
healing in the music and the environment. And it’s true – it’s not
understandable. That’s something I’ve learned to accept. There’s a quote that
touched me profoundly when I heard it, and it goes “Art should disturb the
comforted and comfort the disturbed.” Never in my life have I heard something
more applicable or more true. When an artist screams in a song, it’s not
Satanic or the devil’s doing, the singer isn’t possessed by some otherworldly
spirit and trying to infiltrate the young impressionable minds of the youth.
No, unlike what you’ll hear on the radio today, the singer is so overwhelmed by
emotion that screaming is the only thing that makes sense.
Are the masses at Warped Tour more
troubled than the rest? To this I’d give a resounding “Hell, yes.” But it is
not the music nor the concert that made them that way- it’s the other way
around entirely. Because of their lives, more troubled than average, they found
a connection with this music and this lifestyle, a deeper, more profound
meaning. Personally, I have struggled with self-harm in the past and, because
of physical medical problems, my skin doesn’t heal normally, so my scars are
very visible. While most of my life I spend trying to find creative ways to
hide the scars I have, scars I can’t get rid of, from everyone in the world,
when I go to Warped Tour, for that one day a year, that’s all forgotten. I
don’t have to layer bracelets halfway up my arms or slather them in expensive
cover-up that doesn’t work- I can put my arms in the air while seeing my
favorite band without fear of being judged, and look around and see other
scarred arms in the air along with mine. And indeed there are, and many times
as I pass people and see scars on them that are obviously self-inflicted, I
think to myself that there’s nothing more simultaneously beautiful and heartbreaking
as that moment.
Moshing. Circle pits. Walls of death.
The terms for what happens in crowds at rock concerts is enough to send terror
down the spines of parents everywhere. And looking at it objectively, you can
try to see a glimpse at what they see. What an awful subculture this must be,
if in the middle of a concert teenagers are encouraged to shove each other
around violently, if people come out with blood on their hands, knees and
faces. But then, I slip back into my own body, my own skin, and know how they
feel. You can see it in the most passionate, aggressive of the moshers. They
violently flail their bodies and arms around because this music makes them
FEEL. They FEEL so much, this overwhelming amount, that it physically takes
control of them and moves their bodies as the emotion rolls off of them in
spasms. And, contrary to popular belief, mosh pits are not vicious and they are
not angry. They are not mean or unforgiving. As soon as a person falls, they
are immediately covered by others who create literally a human shield from the
crowd until the fallen is back up. Sometimes this may be the person’s friends,
but oftentimes they are complete strangers, obeying the unspoken laws of this
genre, lifestyle- we look out for each
other.
There was a Youtube comment that I saw
the other day on a Suicide Silence video that talked about how he, as a parent,
attempted to expose his daughters to a wide variety of music and as such took
them to all the concerts that came to their area, from Suicide Silence to the
Hollywood Undead to Justin Bieber. He said, without question, the Bieber crowd
was the most vicious, the most unforgiving. This may strike an outsider as odd
but it makes perfect sense to me. At Warped Tour, there is no competition or
cruel intentions. Every single one of those thousands of people is your best
friend. You find people who, instead of looking at your shirt and saying “What
does that even mean?” you get showers of compliments, new friendships, you find
out someone else connected to the lyrics on your shirt in the same way you did.
This year at Warped Tour I witnessed a young man in a wheelchair crowdsurf,
chair and all, across a crowd of teenagers and young adults watching a band
called Crown the Empire. As I watched the pure, unadulterated joy on his face,
I felt my heart in my throat and I’m unashamed to say tears prickled my eyes
and ran down my sweaty, sunburnt face, and I’d never felt more proud than I did
at that moment to be part of the group of people I’m part of.
So are parents ever going to
understand? Will your best friend ever stop trying to convince you to stop
listening to that ‘noise’ and start going to One Direction concerts with her?
No. The answer is usually almost always no. And that’s something that’s really
honestly hard to accept. But if Warped Tour teaches anything, it is to be your
own person. Speeches come from nearly every artist about it at some point and
it’s true, if overdone and cliché and everything else, it is true. Be yourself,
courageously and fearlessly, don’t take anything from anyone, and believe in
the power of music. It can move mountains.
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