Everyone already knows how the big Eraserheads Reunion Concert ended last night, so no point rehashing the gory details.
I had a lot of issues with how the concert at the Fort was organized and run. The venue layout was pretty terrible, and the idea of having two hierarchical layers of Important People (VIP and SVIP, in front of the people who actually paid to get in) is, in my mind, totally at odds with what Eraserheads music stood for. When Rage Against the Machine reunited 2 years ago, the people who were in front were fans, not celebrities. People who waited for hours in the heat to see their favorite band onstage again, not people who arrived in chauffeured vehicles at the last minute and were served refreshments while they waited. Granted, I’m sure there are quite a few celebrities out there that really are Eraserheads fans, but the idea of segregating them because they’re better than us bugs the living crap out of me.
And if that sounds like overstating the issue, it really isn’t. What other reason would there be to have an SVIP section? Like the mysterious Radiohead Media company that threw this concert together at the last minute, that term seems to have sprung into existence out of nowhere. There were some hardcore fans who won VIP tickets via radio contests or whatever, but you had to be _invited_ to get into the SVIP section. And what the fuck kind of acronym is SVIP anyway. But I digress.
I guess it’s a testament to how much I love this band that even with all the crap these organizers pulled and the really spotty production values, it was still a wonderful listening experience. There was something magical about being squeezed in with all these sweaty, smelly people I didn’t know, and yet knew every single line of lyric of my favorite songs. These were _our_ songs after all. It was the soundtrack of our young adult lives. The stuff we’d make mixtapes out of, or tap our feet to in jeepneys. The stuff we’d sneak into class with and listen to when the teacher got boring. The stuff we’d play when life served us up some things we couldn’t quite handle yet. The stuff we’d celebrate with, or grieve with. Ultimately what matters is that for seventy-five minutes on August 30, 2008, ten thousand people were collectively transported back in time to remember exactly what that was like.