Back in 2013, we took it upon ourselves to remind music fans that it’s our duty to remain at least somewhat civilized when we attend concerts. We weren’t asking people to stop drinking, dancing, and having fun. We just wanted them to stop acting in super obnoxious ways that annoyed everyone around them.
Sadly, the world didn’t listen. In fact, 2013 seems like a quaint and respectable age now that we’re all living in the twisted dystopian hellscape of 2025. Cellphones were hardly a novelty back then, but most people could at least remember a time back then when they weren’t surgically attached to our hands 24/7. Instagram was fairly new, TikTok was barely a glimmer of an idea in the collective mind of the Chinese Communist Party, and the pandemic hadn’t robbed us of basic social norms that we used to obey when we left our homes.
That’s why we’ve put together this new list of proper concert behaviors. Some of these are updated versions of the old rules, while others reflect the changes we’ve undergone over the past dozen years. And yes, some of you won’t agree with all of these. You’ll think we’re pathetic squares that need to learn how to have fun. You’re part of the problem. And when we revisit this again in 2037, everything will surely be worse.
Keep Your Chatter to the Bar. Yes, Even During the Opener You Don’t Know
When you look around the crowd at any given show, you’re likely to see a somewhat wide assortment of folks. The only thing we all have in common is we bought a ticket to this particular concert. That means we want to hear the music. We don’t want to hear you talking. If you don’t like the opener or you’re bored at any particular moment, head to the lobby or concourse, order a drink, and chat away. You and your buddy can do a live read of the My Dinner With Andre script for all we care. Just please don’t stay in your seats and yell to each other over the music. We can all hear you. It’s incredibly annoying. (And if you’ve enjoyed a few cocktails, you have no clue how loud you are. But you’re very, very loud.)
Help Crowd Surfers and Keep Your Hands Up
This isn’t an issue if you’re seeing, say, James Taylor at the Tanglewood Music Center or Engelbert Humperdinck at the Westgate Las Vegas Casino & Resort. But if you’re at a club packed with youths and some of them begin moshing, be a mensch and help out. Put your hands up, move towards them, and guide them towards safety. It’s not always easy, and it’s possible you’ll receive an inadvertent kick to the head, but the alternative is some poor kid smashing their head on the concrete. Nobody wants that. If you don’t want to deal with crowd surfers, move to the back of the room once things get rowdy.
Respect the Game and Don’t Push Your Way to the Front
Moments after the lights dim at any general admission event, there’s always one or two dickheads who push their way to the front of the crowd. They couldn’t give two shits that many of the people in front of them waited several hours to secure their spots. If you see this happen, and you’re feeling brave, position yourself so they have a hard time getting by. If you’re feeling extra brave, you can even tell them they’re breaking the sacred covenant of the pit. (You might want to phrase it somewhat differently.) And most importantly, don’t ever be the pushy asshole yourself. If you want a good spot, get there earlier. It’s as simple as that.
Stop Looking at Setlist.FM During the Show
For every act like Phish that switches around the songs from night to night, there are about 50 like Lady Gaga who basically stick to one set throughout the entire course of the tour. If you want to know what they’re going to play ahead of time, setlist.fm is here and ready for you. But once the show starts and you’re surrounded by people who may not have peeked, please stop looking at that damn website. I can’t tell you how much of an issue this has become in recent years where I can usually look around and see multiple people staring at setlist.fm. And it’s not even a quick glance. They study it like the Talmud with their screens at maximum brightness. I speak for many people when I say that I don’t want to know what’s coming next. And even if I looked weeks ago, I didn’t memorize it. Please give me a chance to be surprised.
Don’t Throw Shit Onto the Stage
We really need to say this? Don’t throw a beer bottle at the performers. Don’t throw coins. Don’t even throw your demo tape or a handwritten letter. Have you people lost your minds? (Back in 2004, someone threw a lollipop at David Bowie and hit him square in his good eye. He howled in agony and shock. Wherever that lollipop guy is now, I hope you’re proud of yourself.)
Be Mindful of When You Sit and Stand
We went over this last time, but it bears repeating. If you are at a concert with reserved seating, especially at a theater with sub-optimal sight-lines, it’s your obligation to make sure the folks behind you can see. You can’t be angry at the entire crowd. But if people are mostly seated, and you feel the need to be one person to get up and block people, don’t do it. We know your favorite song just started and you have the itch to dance, but it’s not worth it. A good rule is to stay down if you have a totally clear view of the stage. Your good time isn’t worth angering a ton of other people in worse seats. (Good people disagree on this one and feel they should get up whenever they like. They should think of older people who can’t stand long or just don’t want to bother the folks behind them.)
Turn Down Your Brightness and Turn Off Your Flash
In an ideal world, people wouldn’t feel the need to use their phones at shows. But if you’re going to surrender to the urge, please turn your brightness all the way down. In the pitch black, a phone is extremely bright and incredibly distracting. I don’t need to see your Instagram feed while I’m trying to watch a show. And if you’re filming, at the very least don’t have the flash on. That not only blinds everyone around you, but it often bothers the performer too.
Enough With the “Freebird” Joke
It wasn’t funny in 1978. It wasn’t funny in 1996. It wasn’t funny the first 9,000 times we heard it. And it’s not funny now. We have nothing against a little humor at concerts. But for the love of God, try a new bit. Screaming out “Freebird!” is more played out than a Shecky Greene nightclub routine.
Stop Filming and Taking Photos!
If you ignore everything else on this list, please read this one. We spend all damn day staring at screens. A concert is a chance to put them down and experience something that’s actually happening IRL. But for reasons that remain absolutely baffling, a giant percent of any given crowd would rather use their tiny cellphone screen to watch it when they could look up and see it with their own eyes in super HD 500K reality. People even do this in the very front row when the performer they paid to see is inches away from them. It’s craziness.
Yes, they’re taking photos and videos. But these are terrible photos and videos that they’ll likely never even look at more than once. Put your friggin’ phone in your pocket. Watch the show. For a precious hour or two, live in the moment. We used to do this all the time. We can do it again. (I know I’m an old man yelling at a cloud here. I don’t care. These stupid phones are melting our brains and somebody has to say it.)
For the Love of God, Don’t Shit Your Pants
We kinda can’t believe we have to say this, but it seems necessary now that both Noah Kahan and Olivia Rodrigo have reported that fans are literally soiling themselves at their shows rather than abandon their spots near the stage. People, what in God’s name are you thinking? Most concerts are about two hours long. You can hold it, especially if you go shortly before showtime. This is also true if you’re in a general admission area, even one packed tightly with people near the front of the stage. We know you waited all day for that spot, and can’t bear the thought of someone taking it. We get that you bought those tickets months ago, and have been counting down the seconds to this day. But that doesn’t mean you need to literally shit yourself. All you have to do is say to the people around you, “Hey, I’m going to the bathroom for a second. Can you guard my spot? Just stretch your shoulders and legs out a bit, and I’ll happily do the same for you once I get back.” It’s not hard. People are happy to comply, especially if you say, “The other options is I poop all over the floor sometime during ‘Drop Dead’ or ‘Willing and Able.’”
Courtesy of Martin Garrix
Louis Van Baar*
Liam Payne (left) and Harry Styles of One Direction onstage during the 2013 American Music Awards at Nokia Theatre L.A. Live on Nov. 24, 2013
Harry Styles Finds the Right Words on Liam Payne Tribute Song
For the past seven weeks, Harry Styles has reserved two minutes at each of his Madison Square Garden shows to reflect on the last time he gathered this many people in this room. Four years have passed since he performed 15 record-breaking nights at the venue during his Love on Tour. Now, every night at the new Together, Together shows, which span 30 nights at MSG, he acknowledges that “a lot of life happened to me and landed on me in ways that maybe it hadn’t before.”
Styles doesn’t usually go into much more detail; he typically just describes those in-between years as “a great reminder for me of just how wonderful and beautiful, difficult and inspiring, and also how fragile a life can be.” He encourages the audience to look around at each other and celebrate the community they’ve built together. Then he dives into “Sign of the Times.” It happens every Wednesday, Friday, and Saturday like clockwork. But when he delivered this speech on Friday, Oct. 16, there was a shift. It didn’t conclude in its usual way.
Instead, Styles turned his attention to the banner commemorating his 15 consecutive nights at the Garden in 2022. “It means a lot to be able to look up there at my name up there from the last tour,” he said. “There are so many people, friends and people that I’ve worked with, that I would’ve never been able to do this without.” Two years ago, he continued, he lost one of those pillars. Friday’s show fell on the same day as the second anniversary of the death of Liam Payne, a loss that time has not made it easier to acknowledge. “I’m sure a lot of you have been through something similar,” Styles said. “I hope you haven’t.”
A frequent assessment of Styles, both among his fans and those who’ve only encountered him at a distance, is that he often talks at length before getting to the point. He recognizes it himself on the Kiss All the Time. Disco, Occasionally song “Coming Up Roses,” where he sings about fumbling his words. But recently, comments about his long-winded way of speaking have started to feel like purposeful misreadings. There are clear and carefully considered thoughts present between his starts and stops. Anyone truly listening will pick up on those threads.
Styles cut himself off a few times during his speech on Friday. He tried to talk for a second about looking after each other, and repeated his point about the banner and the people who’ve supported him. He never mentions Payne by name, instead referring to him as a friend, which somehow became a point of criticism from some fans. The context is clear enough. Still, he seems to know it’s a gamble to expect understanding, especially when the conversation grows more complex and personal.
After about a minute and a half, Styles figured it best to show us what he means rather than tell us. “I’m gonna sing a song I wrote two years ago for my friend,” he said before premiering “Wise Enough.” The sullen tribute to Payne settled the room into a cool near-silence, punctured by quiet gasps and muffled crying. It was beautiful, devastating, and deeply exposing to watch Styles share his grief with 20,000 people in the best, and maybe only, way he knows how.
Earlier this year, Styles told Zane Lowe about the acute dread surrounding the expected performance of his mourning. “Full transparency, even the idea of talking about it, I struggle with that a little bit. There was a period when he passed away where I really struggled with acknowledging how strange it is to have people own part of your grief, in a way,” he said. “I have such strong feelings around my friend passing away. And then suddenly being aware there’s maybe a desire from other people of you to convey that in some way, or it means you’re not feeling what you’re feeling.”
Artists often describe the act of sharing new music as a change in ownership, something that is no longer their own once it has been handed over to an audience. “Wise Enough” feels protected from this. It would be confounding to see Styles ever record and release it in any official capacity. The song is openhearted in a way that exposes deep scars, anxious in a way that worries and fidgets about time and how it passes, and inconsolable in a way that doesn’t make the futile attempt to fight through anger, regret, or sadness.
“I can tell you what it’s like to bury friends on Wednesday nights/Gather in a garden around the fire,” Styles sings in a particularly cutting verse on the song, which concludes with an honest admission: “I’m not wise enough to call for a conversation/And then back it up, right?/Like you’re in the sky.”
Celebrity doesn’t obscure grief. It doesn’t come with a script for what to say when someone is sorry for your loss, or when they recollect their own version of the person you knew. No one really has the right words for these moments. Over the weekend, fans debated whether “Wise Enough” is actually titled “What Is Enough?” Styles introduced the record so briskly it was hard to decipher. The question of adequacy feels similarly impossible to answer.
Grief is so plain in how universal it is, but so complex in how and when it chooses to present itself. It can be policed only as much as it can be predicted, which is to say barely at all. That Styles let us into his now yearslong search for some semblance of understanding — knowing how his words have been picked apart before for far lesser things — shouldn’t be taken for granted.
Styles never acknowledges that banner at MSG. It’s not for lack of gratitude — he cried when it was unveiled. But the point he has reiterated every Wednesday, Friday, and Saturday since the end of August is that the achievement is something that must be shared because he couldn’t have done it alone. He talks about being on stage as if what happens in that room exists far beyond and outside of himself, something that endures even in his absence.
It’s true in a way. There’s muscle memory tied to the music. It’s in the spinning, dizzying way fans dance to “Satellite,” or the way they wildly kick their feet and make the building shake during “Kiwi,” a song he brought back to the set just for New York. It’s just like before, but still so different.
Friday night continued as usual after “Wise Enough.” Styles belted out “Sign of the Times” in the sobering way he always does, then “Aperture” let in a cathartic flood of strobing lights and pulsating beats. The emotional whiplash took physical form as fans consoled one another, holding out their hands to help up friends and strangers who crumbled to the floor at the conclusion of the tribute. Some were crushed by their memories of loving One Direction, and the care they hold in their hearts for Styles. Some were just as wrecked by their own personal losses.
A lot of life and loss can happen in four years, as Styles says each night. For some people who were at MSG on Friday, there are friends present in their memories from the last tour who are missing from the new ones they’re making. The lyric “You dance until you’re tired/No, you don’t, and now you never will/Will you?” surfaces their own devastation completely separate from what inspired Styles to sprawl those words on a page. How do you dance to “Aperture” — the beating heart of this show in its declaration that “we belong together” — after hearing something like that?
You take the hand of the friend or the stranger who pulled you from the ground and use it to lead each other back to the dance floor. When Styles talks about community and stresses the importance of caring for one another each night, he reminds everyone of the fragility of a moment, and urges them to cherish every second they get. To dance wildly and sing loudly and wrap their arms around each other. To hold tight to what’s here right now.
It’s all any of us have, so it has to be enough.