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the young guy playing an acoustic guitar. Shooting backlit

George Strait Breaks Concert Record

We still flock to what's good and real
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“People have a hunger for live music made by real people — and it’s more than Taylor Swift,” tweeted music and culture critic Ted Gioia in response to the 110,000 souls who showed up for country music George Strait’s Saturday concert in College Station, Texas. Strait’s concert officially broke the record for total attendees at a U.S. concert, which is stunning, considering the phenomenon of Swift’s “Eras Tour” that has captured audiences around the globe and even perked up the U.S. economy.

Gioia points out that, even (and perhaps especially) in our society in which listening to music seems to have become an individual, digitalized experience, filled with its fair share of computer-generated beats and bops, it’s obvious that people still want the up-close encounter with something real.

I’m reminded of the COVID-19 lockdowns when we wondered whether the movie theaters would forever close and hand the baton off to digital streaming services like Netflix and Max. While overall, fewer people are occupying film premieres and cashing in on the latest flicks, this seems to have less to do with streaming services and more of a decline of quality in Hollywood’s output. Consider Oppenheimer and Barbie, which came out jointly in the summer of 2023 and overwhelmed box office stats. People clearly will go to see a good (or controversial) movie when they get one. What’s more, we’ll pack out a football stadium to hear from a real human being plucking at his guitar strings.

Concerts like these are remarkable reminders that whatever technological changes arrive and threaten certain cultural goods, like music, literature, and art, human beings have an enduring and exceptional longing for something the bots can’t compose: transcendence.


Peter Biles

Writer and Editor, Center for Science & Culture
Peter Biles is a novelist, short story writer, poet, and essayist from Oklahoma. He is the author of three books, most recently the novel Through the Eye of Old Man Kyle. His essays, stories, blogs, and op-eds have been published in places like The American Spectator, Plough, and RealClearEducation, among many others. He is a writer and editor for Mind Matters and is an Assistant Professor of Composition at East Central University and Seminole State College.

George Strait Breaks Concert Record