By Matthew Becerra, April 22, 2025
What happens when fans care more about going viral than enjoying a show?
Mike, an underground rapper from New Jersey who’s known for his themes of exploring grief, family and identity, performed a concert in Italy in March, and right in front of the mosh pit where people are supposed to have the highest energy and interact the most with the artist — someone pulled out a chessboard. The attendee deliberately ignored Mike and treated him like background noise. It’s not funny. It’s disrespectful.
Playing a game of chess during a performance crosses a line. When someone’s onstage performing music, the least an audience can do is pay attention.
Behavior like this is unacceptable, and it seems to be growing in spaces like underground and experimental hip-hop venues, with a large percentage of hip hop fans being predominantly white, suburban or from online spaces finding a way to interact as the music, often rooted in grief, trauma and identity, is now being treated like a joke due to audiences that can’t relate to the messages in the music want the spotlight.
These concertgoers seem to have an “I-paid-for-this-ticket-so-I-can-do-what-I-want” mindset while completely ignoring concert etiquette. These actions, like recording shows with gaming consoles and impractical devices — like a PlayStation Portable or a Chromebook — to now intentionally ignoring the event and trying to create a moment for themselves, undermines the artists’ performances. It’s attention-seeking behavior disguised as humor and irony.
Another example of this rudeness and attention seeking behavior was when Vince Staples performed a set on Tyler The Creator’s Call Me If You Get Lost tour in 2022 and a group of white kids in the mosh pit decided to sit down and play duck duck goose ignoring his set.
Music industry studies student Giovanni Raimondo agreed with this sentiment.
“A lot of these kids just want their moment of fame,” Raimondo said. “They’ve seen it online, and they want to top it. It’s about them, not the show. It’s not about being part of something real, it’s about saying, ‘Look at me.’”
This is bad for all artists and performers, especially performers from minority groups, and it ultimately shows one of the constant negatives of not only the commercialization of art, but more so the commercialization and appropriation of hip-hop.
When a white kid pulls this stunt, it echoes a pattern of art being consumed, repackaged and disrespected by audiences that want access to the genre but not the depth of art. To some of these people, the music holding the artist’s expression of their emotions, perspective and identity is nothing more than a beat and an aesthetic.
Audiences juxtaposing their idea of an artist’s pain or lived experiences to their more privileged life through jokes made at the artist’s expense is extremely wrong, but some audiences feel it’s OK just because they paid to be at a particular place.
Paying to see an artist gives you nothing but the right to do anything except that — see and listen to the artist. There is still etiquette at concerts that should be upheld by the crowd, like being respectful toward one another and not just the artist. It’s an unwritten rule among concertgoers that if you’re going to stand quietly at a concert, watch it from the back.
There’s also a layer of perception here that can’t be ignored: Chess is seen as a hobby for “smart people”. The game has been linked to intelligence in a Michigan State University study.
Mike is viewed as an artist known for being introspective, but he’s ultimately still a rapper, an occupation that holds an untrue stigma to older white audiences as not being on the same level of sophistication as other forms of music.
When artists perform on stage and give a piece of themselves to you, don’t treat it like background noise for your next social media stunt. Not everything needs to be content. Some things are meant to be felt. Why even show up if you’re not there to feel it?
Graphic by Connor Lālea Hampton
