Musical Fast Food From Sweden
Image by Wiki Commons
Crossposted From Haaretz
Image by Wiki Commons
Wow, so many people. It’s been years since there were so many, streaming into the Tel Aviv Fairgrounds. The parking lot was packed; the line for the bathrooms was endless. The Roxette concert last Saturday night was moved from the pavilion, with a capacity of 5,000, to the adjacent lawn, which can hold many more, and thus the whole event felt like a stadium concert in every sense. By comparison, the shows featuring Suede, Mark Ronson, Interpol and Jane’s Addiction at the fairgrounds this past summer suddenly seemed like intimate performances at the Tzavta club.
This was probably the most impressive commercial success of the season, but also, at least for me, the weakest concert. It is impossible to argue with 10,000 people, and it’s doubtful whether there is even anything to argue over. Presumably only a small portion of the crowd at the Roxette concert consider its songs to be the be-all and end-all. They are songs that have kitsch written all over them. Formulaic ballads, rhythmic songs that sound like rock ‘n’ roll made out of plastic. Musical fast food, made in Sweden.
The Forward is free to read, but it isn’t free to produce
I hope you appreciated this article. Before you go, I’d like to ask you to please support the Forward.
At a time when other newsrooms are closing or cutting back, the Forward has removed its paywall and invested additional resources to report on the ground from Israel and around the U.S. on the impact of the war, rising antisemitism and polarized discourse.
Readers like you make it all possible. We’ve started our Passover Fundraising Drive, and we need 1,800 readers like you to step up to support the Forward by April 21. Members of the Forward board are even matching the first 1,000 gifts, up to $70,000.
This is a great time to support independent Jewish journalism, because every dollar goes twice as far.
— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO
