Oh look, the nepo baby singer who has nothing consequential to say also has empty fans who haven’t had a thought in their lifetimes. Sky’s blue, water wets, empty vessels make noise.
It is simple gig etiquette, you don’t control the choice of opener, and you can just come late if you really don’t want to see them. Even if you’re on the barricade and she can see you, you think an opener doesn’t understand that the people at the show aren’t always familiar with their work? They come with the mindset that they want to warm up the crowd, and if possible create new fans by exposing them to their music.
If you don’t like it, that’s also fine! Goodness me, I had more chats with Pulp fans about what they thought of the opener (people thought they were Weird and cringey) than I talked to them about Pulp. But did anyone do this? No! You let the openers do their thing! You can listen and either appreciate it or know that you have the choice to never listen to it again once you leave the venue.
It’s so self-centred to try and get the opener removed just because you don’t know them. What a stupid thing to say. Also ‘we don’t know her music’ but also ‘her music is so slow’? Make up your mind, do you know her or do you not?
People wonder why it’s hard for new musicians to draw huge crowds? It’s because over the last decade, we’ve all been conditioned so hard to know everything in advance.
Reruns, remakes, 20th anniversary remaster tops the charts, 30th anniversary reunion tour is the only show you’ve been to all year (it’s expensive so now you won’t spend $15 at a local show), as an audience, not only has our maturity been forgotten, but producers (and particularly financiers) of media have been so obsessed with coddling audiences for familiarity, we’ve been such huge losers for it.
The same radio stations that once boasted they playing the ‘hottest new names in music’ and magazines that proudly printed ‘We were the first to discover and ‘break’ them into the mainstream’ have spent the last year fishing for Oasis reunion stories. The name sells, familiarity is a business strategy and idiots will go into a frenzy doubling down on misinformation because they don’t like new and unfamiliar information (be it on bigotry, false biology or fantasy about ‘immigrants’).
And I guess sometimes it manifests itself like this: in people who are going to see an artist who has released 2 albums, and who herself was discovered by many fans in opening for Olivia Rodrigo and Taylor Swift, and those fans are complaining about a new artist they don’t yet know who has potentially got the biggest career boosting opportunity of her life, because they’re not ‘familiarized with her work’.
Ignoring the fact that anyone else who replaces her at short notice will also not be familiar, what the hell? Skill issue. Dora Jar has ONE album out. How fucking hard is it to listen to ONE album. A friend of mine is challenging herself to do one new album a day this month. How fucking hard is it.
(I should say, screenshots from Stereogum)
