What I found off-putting about the concert was...

Quote

What I found off-putting about the concert was that the emotion from the crowd completely dwarfed whatever emotion came from the stage, which is part of the reason why Dashboard Confessional’s Unplugged special came to mind so readily. In that footage, the singing crowd practically is the performance; the performer himself becomes secondary. There are moments when those watery-eyed teenagers seem not to be responding to Chris Carrabba, but to the experience of seeing Chris Carrabba. I got a similar vibe from Mangum’s audience, a sense that they were responding to the circumstances around the performance more than the performance itself.

Having seen Mangum twice last year at All Tomorrow’s Parties (Asbury Park), I think Evan Rytlewski is very close to being correct in his AV Club “Why Don’t You Like This?” debate with Josh Modell, but also very wrong. He’s correct in that there’s good deal of reverence in the room at a Mangum show (although, like Modell, I’m not exactly sure why that’s a bad thing, except that it’s alienating to outsiders). However, I’d suggest that the reverence, from my experience, was as much about the material as the man, perhaps even more so. You wouldn’t have seen nearly the same reaction, for example, had Mangum dropped a ton of covers or new songs; it was the thrill of hearing those iconic Aeroplane songs that everyone fell in love with in college, sung and performed straight from the source.

In that context, Mangum’s requests for the audience to sing (which he did many, many times at ATP) actually diminished the cultism in the room, as I saw it. Rather than letting the crowd sit there in hushed awe, Mangum pestered us to sing, his tone suggesting that the songs were as much ours as his now, and that us being part of the show was far preferred to a “genius on stage” sort of experience.

McNutt Against the Music (EP)