Is there any sentiment more startling at this current gloomy moment than optimism? Or, at a time when half the country seems to be warring simultaneously with the other half and itself, unity? Perhaps even more disconcerting, that long dormant sensation, hope?
Most live events, whether a sports game or a concert, tend to generate a sense of communion. But last weekend at two performances with ostensibly little in common — Jerry Seinfeld’s 100th appearance at the Beacon Theater on Saturday night and Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band at the UBS Arena on Long Island on Sunday — the collective emotional response felt almost preternaturally heightened, and unexpectedly similar.
It wasn’t just that the very concept of synchronicity itself is so markedly out of sync with our divisive era. Nor did the feeling of togetherness seem to stem from the shared audience demographics — overwhelmingly white, skewed male and on the whole … not young. Something more than mere nostalgia for their earlier selves seemed to be at play. It was as if the two performances reconnected audiences with an earlier culture, one our current fragmented cacophony of infinite entertainment can no longer deliver.
Bruce Springsteen is 73 and Jerry Seinfeld 68. Both reached the heights of their popularity in a pre-internet, pre-iPhone, pre-streaming era. Back then, a performance was something you witnessed as it happened rather than on demand. As Chuck Klosterman noted in his 2022 book, “The Nineties,” TV at that time was built on the idea that you could watch only at a particular moment in time. “Seinfeld” offered an especially present-tense experience, filmed in front of a studio audience: “For much of a decade, ‘Seinfeld’ was the most popular, most transformative, live-action show on television,” Klosterman writes.
Entertainment was almost necessarily a shared, rather than purely personal, experience, more universal and, in some ways, more accessible. You could buy a concert ticket without a total Ticketmaster-induced meltdown. Springsteen, who with his E Street Band, was once voted by Rolling Stone readers the best live act of all time, owes much of his popularity to touring and live albums. And up until this 2023 tour, Springsteen notably made an effort to keep tickets at a reasonable price.
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