Lorde, Brockhampton, and Two Life Affirming Moments

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Rules are meant to be broken, right? Specifically, I am talking about the rule that says you should stay where your assigned seat is during a concert. More specifically, I am talking about the moment in which I decided we (my friends and I) needed to try our hand at getting as close as possible to the stage for Lorde’s encore, which was going to happen any minute after the confetti-blowout of “Green Light”. A frantic jacket grab and fast paced walk throughout the pit later, and we found ourselves mere feet away from Ella and her beautifully fluffy pink outfit, groveling at the stage which became altar for the evening. With no more than herself and a drum machine, Lorde jumped right into “Loveless,” the counterpart of her “Melodrama” track “Hard Feelings,” which was performed earlier in the evening. Somewhere between the multiple spellings of the track's name that occurs throughout the song, I found myself surrendered to the music and dancing like an absolute fool, more so than usual. Suddenly I made eye contact with two girls, younger than myself to the point where they were definitely born in a different millennia, and with the exchange of a head-nod and smile we somehow communicated in a single moment that “Yes, we are both at very different points in our lives, and yes sometimes life throws us curveballs that are hard BUT we are here now and it is glorious and we are dancing like fools and life is well.” And that is what matters. ​

Have you ever gasped so hard for breathe that you suddenly remember that moment in which your doctor offered to prescribe an inhaler that one time you booked an appointment because you had some pressure in your chest? But you thought to yourself “It’s just a case of allergies, I’ll be fine.” That is where I found myself as the opening saxophone notes to “BOOGIE” blared out throughout the speakers in The Pageant on a frigid Tuesday night. The cold rain stuck to my clothes as if it was applied with adhesive glue suddenly transformed to sweat, as “America’s Favorite Boyband” skipped onto the stage and nearly incited a riot in the process. Never before have I experienced a crowd that synced up the thrashing of its bodies so perfectly, a formidable match against the foundation of the venue we inhabited. Luckily the floor of the Pageant held strong, and BROCKHAMPTON broke all of the pre-written rules about what it means to be a boy-band for the next hour and a half. Again I found myself making eye contact with strangers in the crowd, exchanging no words yet somehow both acknowledging that this moment was a special one, a notion that should always be recognized when it occurs. ​