Editor's Note

The Throne performed at Greensboro Coliseum last Sunday, and I wasn’t there to see them.

Missing concerts is nothing new for me; since I arrived at Duke and developed a taste in music beyond the Garden State soundtrack, I’ve made and broken countless arrangements to see live music at Cat’s Cradle, King’s Barcade, Duke Coffeehouse, wherever. Sometimes, I’ve gotten all the way to the venue door only to fall short of actually hearing the show—like the time I got kicked out of Ghostface Killa at Cat’s Cradle for using a fake I.D.—more frequently, work (and procrastination) have thwarted my best-laid plans to take in a little culture.

But missing this one hurts worse than most. Kanye West is my favorite working artist, bar none, and right now he’s touring behind not just the buddy-buddy billionaire swag of Watch the Throne, but also his own magnum opus My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy. As anyone who saw his Glow in the Dark tour circa 2008, his commitment to spectacular live performances is unequaled by most living musicians. I know to a certainty that I would have enjoyed Sunday’s show.

That’s true of a number of concerts I’ve missed out on. EMA, whose noisy, folky, deeply felt debut Past Life Martyred Saints came out earlier this year, has garnered a reputation for seriously involved, batshit-crazy live shows; when she performed this summer, all of four blocks from my apartment, I was too altered to stay through the miserable opening act. Likewise Kristian Mattson’s (a.k.a Tallest Man on Earth) concert at the Cradle in January 2011. The point being: I’ve knowingly failed to attend some high-quality performances before. But never before has doing so induced such acute feelings of futility and longing.

Successful performers fall into two categories: they play good shows, or they play big shows. EMA and Kristian Mattson rightfully fall into the former; arena-rockers like Coldplay or the Kings of Leon fall into the latter. By “big shows,” I mean the kinds that posit themselves as a capital-E event as much as a music rehearsal, where the anticipation beforehand is half the fun of attending. This criteria has more to do with an artist’s popularity than their skill as a live performer; there’s perhaps no better example than the massive outdoor festivals that have become so prevalent in the summer months. There’s some tension between the concepts of “good” performances and just-plain-“big” ones. Johan Duncanson of the Swedish indie-pop group the Radio Dept. once described to me his aversion to playing mega-fests like Coachella; he felt like his audience was more intent on crossing off longed-after life experiences than actually listening to music.

But there’s nothing inherently mutually exclusive about “good” and “big,” and the best experiences I’ve had listening to live music offered some confluence of the two. This is rare, and among active performers, I find myself at a bit of a loss for examples. Arcade Fire are without question a very good band, and popular enough that their concerts qualify as “big,” but something in their live dynamic keeps their rafter-seeking anthems from actually hitting their target. LCD Soundsystem’s last show at Madison Square Garden was certainly a big deal to a lot of people, but James Murphy’s everyman ethos doesn’t quite fit with the notion of concert-as-event.

I didn’t go, but if I had to guess, a Kanye West/Jay-Z stadium tour probably fits the bill. I hope whatever else I was doing Sunday night was worth it.