Are Artist Indebted To Their Fans For Their Rest Of Their Lives?
This past weekend Lauryn Hill harsh criticism for her concert performance at London’s O2 Academy theater.
Hill has been criticized openly for her constant ‘tardiness’, and she received just the same from her UK fans after she arrived 90 minutes late for her Saturday night show [Sept 21st] Hill delivered a live performance of hwr classical hit songs from her 1998 ‘MisEducation of Lauryn Hill’ album but some fans were simply not enthused with the change of Hill’s music production.
Hill was also SLAMMED by the media outlets, some calling Hill ‘washed up’ and ‘out of touch’. The Huffington Post describes Hill’s performance as ‘unintelligible’ and the independent U.K shared the same sentiments saying:
“Everything Is Everything” is noisy, full of chewy guitar, but woefully lacking groove. Her rapping on “Lost Ones” is finickity and fragmented – in deconstructing her hits, she seems to mislaid their melodies. Even “Ex-Factor”, greeted with a heart-sore, nostalgic roar, is curiously up-tempo, with busy percussion and screeching guitar solos, losing its mournful soul. “It ain’t working,” Hill sings – and it seems the audience agrees.
Now there were many fans that came to Hill’s defense calling Hill ‘a musical ‘genius’ for her overall performance.
” Thank You for giving your actual concert experience. I traveled from Austin to Martha’s Vineyard this year to be in her presence and experience Lauryn in person.
All the songs are remixed and if you open your minds to her genius you will experience a hell of a jam session. Lauryn Hill and band jam their asses off. ”
Another wrote:
” Well I went to the show in Brixton tonight and it was pretty damn phenomenal! ”
” Bad reviews? Smh. People don’t recognize good music anymore. She sounds great and the band is dope! What did they expect? Its not 1998 anymore. “
So the question begs, Are artist indebted to their fans for a lifetime. I plead the fifth here. As a concert goer [myself] I can can sympathize with my fellow music peers that sadly we feel as though we have a certain entitlement from artists to give a good show, [considering that we’re the purchasing attendees] but the problem with that is that we are one of thousands of fans with that same opinion yet each of us may uphold different expectations of what we’d like to see from our artists and its simply NOT our right.
Many artists switched up their musical arrangement, including Beyonce and Jay-Z which showed on the recent ‘On The Run’ HBO special this past weekend.
Beyonce and Jay-Z switched up alot of their production to fit selected songs that they could perform easily for both their solo and collaborative songs, and from a personal stance, I preferred the original song arrangements and beats but they gave a STELLAR performance nonetheless and not once did Beyonce flop on her vocals and choreography [despite the newly mother’s raunchy attire which is was quite distasteful to watch] ….in my opinion.
The point here is that we simply don’t know what we’re going to expect from artists when we show up to a concert, and BASHING them further serves no purpose because you won’t get your money back. Instead, we should make this a teachable moment for artists like one fella wrote in a open letter to Lauryn saying:
” Let me use this opportunity to declare that this is not a typical rant article anchored with one of the worst possible action photos of the artist to suggest or portray them in a negative light. This is a letter written in love to an artist who has removed transparency which once was. This rare openness, this rare humanisation, this rare honestly, this rare vulnerability of someone deemed as a celebrity, is what drew many to Ms Hill who (from what I can see) has unfortunately and uncannily become the one who is UNPLUGGED from all of this.] “
If there are legal obligations not allowing to you perform your original material to the same instrumentals or at the same tempo, then on behalf of all of your supporters we can accept and understand if this is the case but because we are left in the dark about this we enter your show with a great level of expectancy to which is not met. This leaves a negative impression on us which then leads to negative reviews which then in turn results in bad publicity on a mass scale which is detrimental to the strong legacy you have built over years.
I will use some of your lyrics in regards to your timing. “You CAN get the MONEY, you CAN get the POWER” but you shouldn’t let your audience have to keep their “eye on the FINAL HOUR” of the day Ms Hill. If the majority of your audience are queuing up from 5pm for a show is set to start at 7PM and you make an appearance after 10pm… how is this acceptable Ms Hill?
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