Anyone who has ever had a dream in which their teeth suddenly start falling out probably knows that it’s a common motif that can symbolize everything from fear and anxiety to impending loss and death. I don’t know how many dreams about losing her teeth LeAnn Rimes has had in her 42 years of life, but when her teeth recently did fall out mid-concert, her composure was astonishing.
To be clear, Rimes’ teeth didn’t suddenly crumble like cookies. During her June 21 performance at Washington’s Skagit Casino Resort, the singer recounted feeling something “pop” in her mouth and realized it was her front bridge, the result of several dental surgeries years earlier. Recounting the incident on Instagram the following day, Rimes explained that once the bridge dislodged, there was no quick fix for securing it, leaving her with two options: leave the stage and disappoint her audience, or repeatedly push her teeth back in as she sang. Rimes opted for the latter, and ended her Instagram video by warning anyone in the front row of the next night’s show to be on the lookout for flying teeth.
A week later, Beyoncé’s “Cowboy Carter” tour kicked off the first of two shows in her native Houston. As she sang “16 Carriages” from atop a red Cadillac convertible suspended above the hometown crowd, the car began tilting sharply. Bey remained remarkably unpanicked while repeating “Stop, stop, stop” to an unseen operator, and the car was lowered without incident; after a short break to regroup, the singer addressed the crowd, saying, “I want to thank y’all for loving me. If ever I fall, I know y’all will catch me.” Like the pro she is, Beyoncé took to the sky again the following night — this time on a giant horseshoe but no red caddy — and we’ll probably never know how the previous night’s malfunction happened or the name of the tiny island on which whoever was responsible is living out the rest of their cursed days.
Just one day after that, Katy Perry had her own midair crisis during a show in Australia when a stage prop meant to lift her into the air malfunctioned, tipping to one side and forcing Perry to grasp its frame to keep from slipping off.
Performers like Beyoncé, Rimes, and Perry take on inherent risk in the course of doing their jobs, most of which audiences don’t see. And how they react in unexpected moments can tell us a lot about them. The humor with which Rimes recapped the teeth debacle probably endeared her to audience members who know a thing or two about losing a partial bridge during a night at the casino; Beyoncé emphasized her connection to Houston, re-establishing the pride she takes in repping the city. But the relationship between performers and fans hasn’t always been as gracious as this pair of incidents might suggest, and music’s contemporary history of artist snafus and audience reactions is one that encompasses biases and double standards, harsh media spotlights, and expectations that can be as impossibly high, and just as unpredictable, as that dangling Caddy.
For music journalists in the late 1990s, there were two artists whose shows you didn’t want to miss. The first was Fugees superstar Lauryn Hill, whose 1998 debut, “The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill,” racked up Grammys, became the first album by a woman rapper to achieve diamond certification, and remains her one and only studio album. The second was the magnetic indie oddity Chan Marshall, who performed spare, soporific, blues-inflected folk under the name Cat Power. Big, cheesy stage shows were out; raw, electrifying authenticity was in. Hill and Marshall were hot tickets in large part because there was almost no way to predict what might happen when they were—or weren’t—onstage. Hill was notorious for arriving hours late to her own shows and refusing to apologize for it. Marshall barely whispered her songs into the mic and often just trailed off in the middle of them; she also suffered from stage fright so severe that she sometimes performed entire shows with her back to the audience.
This kind of unpredictability was exciting—whatever happened, there was going to be a story — but as women musicians in a business still dominated by men, neither Hill nor Marshall got much leeway from audiences and critics. After all, what right did they have to treat paying audiences with such blithe disregard? Shouldn’t these ladies be grateful that people came out to see them at all? Being late, weird, messy and inconsistent performers was slightly more acceptable for the boozy guys of cult favorites like Guided By Voices and The Replacements, but you had to at least be charming about it. No one was rushing to defend the prima-donna tour shenanigans of, say, Axl Rose or the guy from Creed.
Start your day with essential news from Salon.Sign up for our free morning newsletter, Crash Course.
As talented musicians and songwriters who failed to love performing, Hill and Marshall were seen to be breaking a longstanding social contract between musicians and fans that stretched from the most bloated of arena-rock spectacles to the dankest of sticky-floored dives. There were tacit expectations. For the audience: No heckling or raising a Bic lighter in mock worship; absolutely no shouting “Free Bird!” during a lull between songs like you were the first person ever to think of it. On the performing side, Metallica and only Metallica could get away with staging theatrically gory “accidents” night after night. Almost everyone else did their best to show up on time, keep patter to a minimum, and give the crowd their money’s worth. By the end of the decade, both Hill and Marshall were worn down and taking a break from live performance.
When big names with big shows re-emerged in the 2000s, the social contract was both stricter and less balanced. Being a celebrity and being a fan came to look like parallel pathologies, especially once a new crop of tabloid magazines began feverishly documenting every move made by pop princesses like Britney Spears, Christina Aguilera, Jessica Simpson and countless others. These glossies told us everything they knew and implied that we were entitled to know even more. They monitored weight gains and breakups, off days and nip slips, holding these stars to impossible standards ostensibly in the name of their young fans. Barely postadolescent women who’d never consented to be role models were suddenly the prime targets of paparazzi hoping to catch them doing something — anything — that could be judged against their public profiles.
The scope of the tabloids went well beyond the young, white and poppy; their scorn for famous women was expressed as warnings. The message was that any woman who made her living from performing was fair game. They had success and money; they didn’t deserve privacy as well, and the audiences who lifted them to fame had earned front-row seats to watch when they fell. It was a profit motive based on attracting curious readers who could be quickly soured into dedicated haters. The money was in the ugliness, and the ugliness peaked in 2004, at the Super Bowl, when a suggestive bit of choreo between halftime performers Janet Jackson and Justin Timberlake went wrong. The weight of unreasonable expectations, along with the full force of America’s racism, sexism and hypocrisy, came down on Jackson, and her career never recovered.
Then there were the gossip blogs that transformed the internet into one big burn book whose pages were reserved exclusively for women. Black-Eyed Peas singer Fergie experienced an onstage bladder fail that continues to thrive in search terms like “Fergie peed pants.” Madonna had the nerve to get older yet not disappear from view. Sure, Jessica Simpson’s edgier pop-star sibling Ashlee probably could have handled things better when a technical mishap on “Saturday Night Live” revealed that she was lip-syncing. Anyone trying to guess her offense based solely on the public reaction to it, though, probably would have landed on something like “clubbed a baby seal to death and wore it as a hat.”
In the years that followed, pop culture stayed mean, but also became increasingly diffuse — with more things to watch and listen to and more platforms on which to do it, the heat spread a bit more evenly. It’s possible that pop culture has spent the last couple of decades overcorrecting for the unfettered viciousness of that time, the pendulum swinging so far in the opposite direction that it exploded into thousands of fandoms each determined to prove that theirs is the One True Fave. The intensity of stan culture and the incendiary combo of social media and smartphones means that contract between performers and fans is still changing.
And maybe it should be. The amount of art now being made, as well as the increasing transparency about who can make it, has had an effect on the relationship between fans and faves, one that puts labor at center stage. We see far more of the superstar sausage as it’s made, for better and worse, the industry economics that require tours to be longer and the stage shows that have to thrill audiences even more than the last one. Does seeing the moving parts ruin the magic? Maybe. But audiences who show up with more respect than entitlement, who are awed to see their faves on top but will stay when their teeth fall out — that’s magic too.
Read more
about live music
