Chanting, Live Music and Human Connection

When I was a kid, I used to hate chanting. There were a few reasons for this; for one, the words we were chanting weren’t in English, diminishing my interest in the material by about 75%. But second, and more importantly in my mind, I was self conscious of how I sounded compared to the adults around me. Every week I felt embarrassed adding my little child’s squeak to the deep, resonant vocal pitches around me.  

Couldn’t everyone hear how dumb I sounded? How I stumbled over that one word? 

As time went on and I moved from sitting in the pews next to my parents to sitting next to my dharma school classmates, my anxiety lessened when I finally realized nobody cared what I sounded like. But that epiphany left me with an entirely new problem during chanting: boredom. I didn’t understand the purpose of repeating words I didn’t understand every Sunday, but I was a classic rule-follower, so I went through the motions of it anyway. 

To me it was just another part of the day I checked off of my list, another thing I did because my parents told me I should. Eat your vegetables. Do your homework. Chant during service. It wasn’t something I necessarily looked forward to, but it wasn’t something I dreaded either. At least until I left for college, and my world suddenly got a whole lot bigger. 

I was raised in a suburb in Southern California, so going from that to NYU and being immersed in city living was quite the culture shock. There is a peculiar type of loneliness you can feel when you’re in a city overflowing with people. You walk past tourists and commuters and performers on the street and you exist but you’re also invisible. The person sitting next to you on the subway doesn’t care which stop you get off at, let alone if you make it home. It makes it easy to get lost in the shuffle.

For months I became so busy with school and living on my own for the first time that I didn’t think about chanting or Buddhism at all until late into the second semester of my freshman year, but even then the reminder came in a way I could have never expected. 

It was April of 2012, and by some miracle my roommate had managed to drag me out of our dorm long enough to go to a concert with her. I had never heard of the band, the line to the bathroom was already wrapping around the room, and the floors were perpetually sticky. But the ticket was free, so who was I to complain? 

We filed into the dimly lit space, bodies pressed together like sardines all the way up to the stage, overpriced drinks sloshing over our wrists in the bump and shuffle of settling into the space. I can’t say what, but something happened between the time the house lights went down and the band made its way onto the stage. There was something in air, an excitement that was palpable in the way people couldn’t stand still around me; a pile of kindling just waiting for a spark. 

A quick note: the venue this concert in was Webster Hall, which is not that important except to say it was built in 1886, and had not gone under any significant structural renovations since then. And maybe it was the fact that we were in this historic building that had hosted the likes of Tina Turner, Prince, and Guns N’ Roses, or maybe it was the simple fact that we were on the second floor of an extremely old (and most likely not up to code) building, but what happened next is a moment that will stay with me for the rest of my life. 

The spark that the crowd was waiting for ended up coming from the crowd itself. I have no idea who, but someone started to jump. That in turn made their friends start to jump, and we were all packed so tightly together that what started as two or three people hopping quickly rippled out, hundreds of people feeding off of the energy around them until the old building’s sticky floors felt more like a trampoline under my feet than the hardwood I knew it was. By the final chorus, there wasn’t one person in that room who wasn’t on their feet, jumping and singing and rocking the literal building down to its foundation. 

It was in that moment, smushed between sweaty strangers, scream-singing words I didn’t really know, that I found myself thinking about chanting on the Sundays of my childhood.  Because the magic of this concert was not solely in the band playing the music, but in the people who made up the crowd. I may have not known the names of the people next to me, but in that moment it didn’t matter because together we became one amorphous jumping human blob, dedicated to nothing else but being present in that moment. Which was what chanting every Sunday had given me my entire life, even if it had taken me eighteen years to realize it. 

Live music is a way for people to see their favorite musical artists, but more importantly it is also a portal of connection. And not solely between the artist and their fans, but between the fans themselves. You can see it plain as day in clips from Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour, fans trading friendship bracelets and dressing up as their favorite song lyrics. 

I see it in my current obsession, (your favorite artist’s favorite artist) Chappell Roan, a lesbian drag queen performance artist whose career has skyrocketed in the past few months with the release of her single “Good Luck Babe”.

Her campy costumes and unapologetically queer lyricism have created a space for queer people to come together and celebrate being themselves. As a result, music festivals around the country have been rescheduling her original concert slots to their main stages to accommodate the impossibly large crowds that have been coming out to see her perform. 

I think it’s no surprise Chappell’s rise to stardom has coincided with the cancellation of many US state’s pride events this year. Now more than ever queer people are seeking safe community spaces, and Chappell’s meteoric rise to fame is proof of that. Sure, the people are there to see Chappell; but more importantly, they are there to be queer. To be present and true to themselves without fear of persecution. 

I remember walking home after that concert in 2012 feeling a little less alone. Nothing in my life had changed, I was still alone on the opposite side of the country from my family, but I felt a little more whole. In the same way I eventually realized no one cared what my voice sounded like when I was chanting, I was finally realizing that I did not need to know the names of everyone I walked past in order to feel connected to them. It’s easy to close yourself off to others, to mark our differences before our similarities. But at the end of the day we are all human, all looking for connection; we just need to open ourselves to the possibility of receiving it. 

Author’s note: thanks to the power of the internet I was actually able to find a video of the concert I went to! Note the shakiness is due to the actual floor moving rather than by the videographer.