5 Popular Music Concerts I Loved in NYC
Reflections on going to concerts, and some of my favorites in New York City.
Every month in compiling my Blankman List, I look for concerts to feature. In my mind (and I recognize that there are different schools of thought here) there are two types of concerts:
Popular music, where audience members may socialize, sing, and dance along to the live music being played.
Art music, where audience members are expected to be quiet and respectful during the performance.
It’s not strictly black and white of course, but in this article I focus on popular music concerts I’ve been to in New York City.
Popular Music Concerts
What sparked this post was stumbling upon a list I made in 2011, the year that I moved to NYC, of every artist or band that I’d seen live up to that point. As imperfect and potentially embarrassing as it may be, here is the full list arranged alphabetically:
+44, 50 Cent, 51 Peg, The Academy Is, Adam Duritz (of the Counting Crows), Alkaline Trio, Animal Collective, Avec, Béla Fleck and the Flecktones, Billy Idol, Black Dice, Blink 182, Bon Jovi, Brandi Carlile, The Bravery, Breaking Benjamin, Buckcherry, Children of Bodom, Cobra Starship, Coldplay, CSS, Depeche Mode, The Dreaming, Evanescence, Eve 6, Fall Out Boy, Foo Fighters, Garbage, Gipsy Kings, Girl Talk, Godhead, Hinder, The Hold Steady, Holy Fuck, Howie Day, Imbue, India.Arie, Interpol, Jane’s Addiction, The Jenny Boyle Band, Jet, John Legend, Keane, The Killers, Lady Gaga, Leon Russell, Louis XIV, Marilyn Manson, MC Chris, Meat Puppets, Megadeth, Muse, My Chemical Romance, Nine Inch Nails, Papa Roach, Passion Pit, Paul Wall, Poe, Public Enemy, Reggie and the Full Effect, Regina Spektor, Rilo Kiley, Rufus Wainwright, Seether, Silversun Pickups, Slayer, Smashing Pumpkins, Street Sweeper Social Club, St. Vincent, They Might Be Giants, Three Days Grace, Tokyo Police Club, Tori Amos, Tortoise, Uncle Lucius, Vampire Weekend, Velvet Revolver, Wean, Weezer, Wu Tang Clan
It’s funny. On the one hand, I don’t really remember much if anything about many of these concerts. Yet even just spot-checking, I can tell I missed a few. I remember seeing jazz pianist Ahmad Jamal in DC, for example. It’s also incomplete in the sense that it leaves out classical music entirely. This might be due to the difficulty of documenting it, but it’s certainly not due to a preference in concert. When I go to a popular music concert, I often become a wallflower, hesitant to dance and just wanting to sit and listen. I do it for the music, man.
A glass or two of wine usually helps, but it seems I’ve accepted this fate as I’ve gotten older. I’ve seen far fewer concerts in the 13-ish years I’ve been in NYC, compared with the 13 years prior, where I saw concerts mostly in the Baltimore and DC areas. I also find myself comparing the two music scenes. NYC has a somewhat unusual identity. You can find performances of practically anything. With that kind of universality comes an almost genre-less city. It is the birthplace of hip-hop, and it is also the birthplace of punk rock, and it is also the birthplace of salsa, and so on!
Because I like list-making—I do write the Blankman List, after all—what follows are five of my favorite concerts that I’ve seen so far in New York City. Like the list I made in 2011, I leave out classical music.
1. World War IX
When I first moved to NYC, I lived in a Bushwick apartment complex. I had a neighbor who played in the punk rock band World War IX. I told him that I had never seen punk music blasted a dive bar before, so he invited me to an upcoming concert. I was arguably treated to the practical opposite of classical music: gritty power chords being spit out of an amp, with audience members spilling beer and thrashing about. The music was fast, loose, and begging me to turn off the part of my brain that tries to tease apart melodic contours and harmonic rhythm. It was still musical though; cohesive, well crafted. The memory that lingers most was when my friend called me out from the stage: “Everyone, welcome Richard, who is at his first punk concert!” It was a moment in a dive bar forgotten by everyone as soon as it happened. Everyone except me, that is, who for a moment felt included in a room full of punks.
2. Lady Gaga
My wish to move from Baltimore to NYC did not come out of thin air. I had visited the city many times, falling in love equally with its chaos and its culture. I remember one trip in 2010, just before moving here. I took a bus to the city in order to meet up with a friend and see Lady Gaga. I didn’t know many of her songs at the time, but this concert both kicked me in gear to listen to them and also showed me the intensity of seeing a show at Madison Square Garden, followed by exiting en masse into the streets of Midtown Manhattan. Somehow that made me want to move here more. These days I generally avoid that part of the city, but after having experienced this literally, I do not avoid it like the plague.
3. David Byrne
As Broadway started to reopen towards the tail end of the pandemic, I feverishly entered lotteries to different shows. I actually won the lottery for David Byrne’s American Utopia twice, first when my friend M. was in town and then again later with my husband. I went in not only blind, but the first time panicking when I started to realize this wasn’t traditional musical theater, but more like a live concert that’s scripted and choreographed. Ultimately, it made me realize the line between theater and concert can be blurry; after all, the Lady Gaga concert I went to was largely scripted and choreographed, too. I gained an appreciation for David Byrne’s music, which I had barely heard before. I went on to hear his music on stage again several years later in Here Lies Love.
4. Johnny Winter
There are a few formative artists for me—people I listened to as a teenager, when music was religion. I identified with the blues quickly, both as a source of teenage angst and as a burgeoning guitar player. The whole experience of getting to see Johnny Winter perform live is a reminder of the importance of living in the moment. His Woodstock thrashing days were long gone. He was seated and practically motionless the whole concert, strumming the guitar from his lap while the band behind him was responsible for the liveliness. Yet the music spoke for itself, and the blues remained just as relevant. Winter died around two years after this concert, and around six years later, the venue—B.B. Blues Club and Grill—closed.
5. Keith Jarrett
In my personal music listening life, jazz felt like the final frontier. Before starting college, I had listened to many, many hours of popular and art music, and it seemed like the whole Western canon until one day I heard Miles Davis’ Kind of Blue. It kinda fit into both buckets. In the years that followed, I listened to many jazz artists, gaining a deep appreciation for the torchbearers. It always feels magical to see living legends perform live, a sensation I felt before when I saw Ahmad Jamal (how did I leave him off that first list?!), and something I felt at Carnegie Hall when I saw Keith Jarrett in 2012. A detail I remember about this concert is he did something like six encores, which at some point started to feel like psychological warfare. “You thought you were going home, did you? SIT DOWN!”
Thinking Back
For the fun of it, I also tried to pick my five favorite concerts among the 2011 list I unearthed and shared earlier. After narrowing them down to ones I even still remember, here are my top five in no particular order:
Lady Gaga – This was the the only popular music concert I’d seen in NYC before moving here, which I wrote about earlier in the post.
Tortoise – This post-rock concert from early in my concert-going life (likely in 2001) ended up affecting me more than I expected. It launched a phase in my life where I explored a ton of both indie and electronica music.
Slayer – I haven’t attended that many metal concerts in my life. This was a welcome and invigorating break from musical routine for me, and the first of a handful of metal concerts to follow.
John Legend – I remember sitting in the lawn with my friend W. It was a rare instance where I was the one dancing, egging him on to join.
Béla Fleck and the Flecktones – This concert stuck with me. This group expanded my perceptions of jazz, rock, and especially banjo playing.
There is one detail that I remember for many of these concerts that is at times the only detail I remember. Who was with me. If I go to a concert with a friend or family member, I’m in truth indifferent to who’s performing. I’ll sit (or stand if I must) and listen to pretty much anything. It’s the friend I want to see.
how was FOB live??