The crowd sounds different when you go to a pop concert for an artist with a younger fan base. As you climb the stairs to the auditorium, the high frequency excitement that greets you is like the throttling of jet engines preparing for take off. It’s a very different pitch compared to the low, subterranean rumble that emanates from the rock and progressive gigs that I normally go to.
But I don’t want you think I am being dismissive: quite the opposite, in fact. If you’re over forty and feeling somewhat ground down by the relentless gloom of current events, I strongly recommend you go to a Dodie (not to be confused with Dido) concert. Spend a couple of hours in the company of a few hundred young people who don’t see why ‘that’s the way it’s always been’ has to be the final word. It may not change your world but you leave the building with fresh optimism that the world can be changed.
Maybe it’s because I have two daughters who inspire me with their beliefs about subjects like climate change, feminism and gender equality, convictions which seem so different to the jaded tropes you hear spouted by a lot of people my age. For sure, youthful optimism has always flourished, then faded, as the kids settle down and settle in. But the idealism of today’s teenagers and young adults is informed to an astonishingly high degree and in a way that their parents and grandparents could never have matched. My eldest daughter would have crushed her father in debate at the same age. I truly believe that young adults today are savvier, more intelligent and more perceptive than they have ever been because they are the first truly networked generation. For all of its problems with bubbles, echo chambers and fake news, the internet gives these emerging hearts and minds unlimited potential to compare their values against all the alternatives that may exist. And while a few of the crowd tonight will no doubt become venture capitalists or bond traders, my feeling (hope) is that for most of them, their progressive outlook is hard wired. And that frightens the bejesus out of the powers that currently be.
Before you think I’m overstating the case for youth to save the world (although let’s face it, they’re the ones who will have to) it’s not all rosy in the garden. Dodie sings songs about loss to an audience that is desperate to be found. When I was young, my favourite band of that era, Pulp, were describing how their faithful were the ‘misfits’ but today it feels as if everybody under the age of twenty five is a misfit, looking around in bewilderment and trying to figure out what the fuck is going on.
Because the decisions on the issues that really matter are most definitely not being made in their name and are certainly not the things they would choose. In the past, this mattered less. To some extent, the world would keep on turning. Now, with climate change, at least, that is no longer the case. Society as we know it might have disintegrated fifty years from now. And even if we pull back from the edge of climate catastrophe, political decisions like Brexit or the overturn of Roe v Wade will dramatically and incontrovertibly limit opportunities for young people for at least a generation.
But when you are at a Dodie concert, it seems possible to rise above the greyness and soar for a while in bright sunshine. Where it seems perfectly reasonable to ask the kind of bullshit free questions that are obvious when you’re seventeen. Like, do you have to be so hateful to someone with a different sexual preference or gender identity or skin tone to you? Can we not, for once, regard the planet as a life support system instead of a balance sheet? Could we not just for once try to be nice to each other? And not because it’s a religious belief that will give us riches in the afterlife, but because it will simply make things better for everyone in this one. Ferris was wrong when he said that “a person should not believe in an ‘ism’, he should just believe in himself.” What the amazing younger generation is proving is that it is perfectly possible to be individual, networked and the altruism that runs through them is like a pheromone. It saturates the air and makes you giddy. It makes you believe that perhaps the future is not going to be the skip fire it’s so often described as.
I know what you’re thinking. Altruism and idealism are a heady cocktail but the morning after, the hangover is often epic. But you can see by the way the industrial right wing movement tears strips off anything it deems “woke” or “progressive” that they are absolutely terrified. Because one day, the meek and the misfits really will inherit the earth. And I hope I live long enough to see it happen. But until then, and trust me, you don’t need to “imagine” as John Lennon famously sang, just go and see Dodie. She’s fabulous and so are her followers.
Supersonic jets are being scrambled for take off. And above them, there’s only sky.