As the band hit full throttle: live event, mediatization and collective identification in popular music concert films

Since the end of the 1960s, the experience of the live concert has in many respects been at the
core of the construction of value judgements in the public discourse about popular music. The
celebration of the live show as a moment of collective identity construction is based on the premise
that this moment is universally accessible, involves a community of peers that interacts peacefully
despite their differences, and follows a set of common – often unspoken – rules. This chapter seek
to demonstrate how that the audiovisual representation of the popular music concert retains such
values at its very core, which presents the live show as a moment of democratic self-recognition for
the community of its participants, illustrating my argument by a series of examples drawn from a
variety of genres and decades (from the Chemical Brothers to Frank Zappa, from the Taking
Heads to Sigur Rós). A set of recurring tropes are then discussed through the perspective of
"performative democracy", highlighting the fact that the first step in building a community such as
the one envisioned by the film concert is the shared participation in a specific idea of belonging
embedded in the media representation.