What's the Point of a Concert?

Why the worst concert I've ever seen might be the best

Welcome back to Can’t Get Much Higher, the internet’s top destination for using numbers to understand music and the music industry. That said, this week’s newsletter contains no numbers. It’s about me trying to figure out if a concert that I went to earlier this month was the best or worst concert that I’ve ever seen. Strap in.

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What's the Point of a Concert?

By Chris Dalla Riva

I was at Madd Hatter. And I hate going to Madd Hatter. But sometimes you have to go to put your feelings aside, especially if it’s for a musical event you know you’ll never experience again.

Let me give you some context, especially if you aren’t from anywhere near Hoboken, New Jersey. Madd Hatter is a popular bar in the heart of Hoboken that tries to bridge the gap between a sports bar and a nightclub. I hate Madd Hatter because (a) I don’t really like nightclubs and (b) I don’t think it’s a very good bar or nightclub.

Madd Hatter in Hoboken, New Jersey

Maybe my opinion is wrong. The place is always packed. And it was especially packed earlier this month because Sean Kingston was performing there for five nights. Kingston is a rapper and a singer that shot to fame in 2007 when he released “Beautiful Girls,” an earworm built around a sample of Ben E. King’s 1961 hit “Stand by Me.”

Kingston got famous young. He was only 17 when “Beautiful Girls” came out. And between 2007 and 2010, he’d have four more top 40 hits. But Kingston’s career wasn’t to last. Around 2013, his musical output came to a near halt. His dearth of output was partially connected to health issues. In 2011, Kingston nearly died in a jet skiing accident. But he also had legal issues.

In 2006, Kingston’s mother “pleaded guilty in 2006 to charges of bank fraud and filing fraudulent loan applications and was sentenced to 16 months in prison.” That prison sentence ended two months before “Beautiful Girls” came out. Then in 2024, Kingston seemed to be wrapped up in similar issues with his mother. According to The New York Times, the duo was indicted “on federal charges related to a scheme in which they committed more than $1 million worth of fraud.” If convicted, they could spend decades in prison.

With this information in mind, we can head back to Madd Hatter. Again, Kingston was performing for five nights at the bar. I venture part of the reason this happened was because he has a court date next month. And it’s got to be expensive to fight fraud charges that could send you to prison for decades. He knows there are many people like my friends and I who are willing to shell out some money for a concert completely made up of songs that were popular when we were in middle school.

Calling this event a “concert” is being generous, though. Kingston showed up about three hours after the doors opened. He stood in the corner on a slightly elevated platform. And he sang along to recordings of five of his hits. To be clear, these were not karaoke tracks with the original vocal cut. These were the original recordings. If he stopped singing, you’d just hear the recorded vocal that made him famous. And he did stop singing quite often. The event mostly amounted to a star from yesteryear standing in the corner of a packed bar while a few of his songs blared through the PA system.

In short, this was probably the worst concert I’ve ever been to. But I sort of had fun. Most of my friends that live in the neighborhood were there. We had a few cold Bud Lights. And we got to hear some hits from yesteryear in the vicinity of man that made them famous. There are worse ways to spend a Saturday afternoon.

From the front lines of the world’s worst concert [Credit: Caileigh Nerney]

This experience had me thinking about an important question: What is the point of a concert? Historically, I thought that concerts were meant to create musical moments that existed only one time. It was musicians coming together to create sounds in the here and now. Though a century-plus of recording has convinced us that musical performances are etched in stone, unchanging, concerts are our reminder that music is an ever-evolving entity.

Sean Kingston’s horrible concert made me rethink things. Was my understanding about concerts too narrow? Was it really all about entertainment? Madonna’s last arena tour had no backing band. More contemporary artists like Travis Scott pack stadiums performing only with a microphone, DJ, and an inhuman amount of energy.

But even this might be too narrow. It discounts the scores of artists who seem to be at war with their audience, challenging them to expand their understanding of what a concert can be. Sean Kingston was certainly not at Madd Hatter to challenge the audience. He was there to collect a check. But I must admit that he did challenge my understanding of what constitutes a concert.

After hours of rumination, I think this is my conclusion. While you can have preferences about what makes a great concert, concerts are not one thing. We should be open to different live musical experiences.

If I thought every concert had to be as unpredictable as a Phish show, I’d miss out on great stadium performers, like Taylor Swift, who are putting on the same, highly choreographed show every night. If I thought every concert required a traditional band, I’d miss out on some great electronic shows by the likes of Emmit Fenn. If I thought every concert was purely about entertainment, I’d miss out on some punk shows that left me somewhere between shocked and scared.

If you get the opportunity over the next few months, I challenge you to go see a show unlike anything you’ve seen before, even if that means going to see a washed-up pop star half-singing to decade-old hits at a neighborhood bar.

A New One
"tastes like cherry" by country girl
2025 - Whispery Indie Rock

Sometimes it takes the entire runtime of a track for it to click with me. Sometimes it takes just a moment. “tastes like cherry” falls into the latter camp. The song opens with a rapid-fire guitar motif that is hypnotizing. Luckily, that magical motif is not wasted on an inferior track. The breathy vocal whispering and dreamy atmosphere are a perfect confection.

An Old One
"Homecoming" by The Teenagers
2007 - Indie Rock

When

Bonnie McKee

was toiling away on “Teenage Dream” with Katy Perry, Benny Blanco, another cowriter on the song, told them to make the lyrics more like “Homecoming” by The Teenagers. This is kind of a strange reference track. Though it tells of young, hormonal love, the lyrics are filthy. Nevertheless, the power of a great pop record, is that it is able to distill something like that, something that could never crossover into the mainstream, and make it palatable to broad swarths of the population.

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