I had nothing to complain about. The concert was short, the performance sloppy, and towards the end she told us quite frankly that we shouldn’t kid ourselves and skip the encore, or even the request for an encore. Mitski in Zürich was everything I ever desired. This was a woman who got properly pissed off by disappointing ticket sales, reluctantly agreed to move the concert from a mid sized club to a small bar, maybe even left her band home, and was now standing in front us displaying such an intense lack of motivation that even the one dancing fan in front of the stage in the end stopped moving.

The best concert ever!

No, I’m not cynical. Remember I wrote about concert experiences and the lack of autenticity? If anything, I hate standard, contractually agreed concerts that last exactly 1,5 hours. Concerts where the performing is back on stage for the encore even before the audience started requesting it, and doing no more than two extra songs before the lights go on again.

Mitski in Zürich was the perfect example of someone woh wanted to be anywhere but there, and did all she could to be off stage as quickly as possible again. She wasn’t drunk or high, so she probably fully experienced every single long minute of it. And so did we. I don’t know where she had to play the next day, but maybe she just had to catch the bus.

Life as an artist, it’s probably no fun. Let’s not judge, and let’s not do it from the comfortable perspective of a spectator. Let’s just count our blessings and be happy when someone displays genuine emotions. At least some things cannot be contracted.