By Phoenix Rising (Phoenix Legg)
Over the past year I’ve been lucky enough to stand in the photo pit and the crowd at some big shows — Skillet in St. Petersburg, Metallica’s two nights in Tampa with Limp Bizkit and Pantera, the Summer of ’99 festival outside Chicago, and Avenged Sevenfold with Good Charlotte back in the Chicago suburbs. Different nights, different styles, different decades of rock. But one pattern kept showing up that I didn’t fully expect.
A lot of the younger faces in those crowds weren’t just there for the newer material. They were singing every word to songs that came out before many of them were born.
I watched teenagers belt out Metallica riffs that first hit the radio in the 1980s and 1990s. I saw people my age and younger go all-in on Creed, Limp Bizkit, Bush, and the rest of that late-’90s wave at the Summer of ’99 festival. At the Avenged Sevenfold and Good Charlotte show, the mix of older fans and newer ones felt natural, not forced. Even at Skillet, the energy crossed age lines without anyone having to explain it.
It’s easy to talk about generations like we’re locked in separate rooms. The truth is messier and better than that. Music has always been one of the places where the walls get thinner. My generation didn’t grow up with cassette tapes or the first wave of these bands, but streaming, social media, and live shows have made the older catalogs feel available instead of distant. What used to be “your parents’ music” is now just music that still hits.
That doesn’t mean we all agree on everything. Some of us prefer the heavier side, some lean toward the anthems, some just like the energy of a big outdoor night. That’s fine. Civil disagreement works in the pit the same way it works in the rest of life — you can have different favorites and still share the same volume for a couple of hours.
Covering these shows with a press pass gave me a closer look at something I already sensed while traveling the country as a kid reporter: people are more connected than the headlines sometimes suggest. When the lights go down and the first riff hits, a lot of the labels fall away. You’re just another person in the crowd reacting to the same song.
I’m grateful for the chance to be there, notebook in hand, watching my generation claim some of these older catalogs as their own. It doesn’t erase the differences between us. It just proves those differences don’t have to be the whole story.
— Phoenix Rising