Joy of live music will win out. Rayner
Why Ariana Grande?
Had I access to a medium, there are a few things I’d like to ask the piece of human garbage who saw fit to detonate a bomb at Manchester Arena on Monday night, chief among them what delusion he was labouring under to think that blowing himself up at a concert thronged by young girls would somehow advance whatever cause he hoped to advance with his actions. But also I’d like to ask him why he singled out an Ariana Grande show as his target.
Was it pure opportunism? Did he finally get the bomb right and the local stop on Grande’s Dangerous Woman tour was simply the first and easiest opportunity to propagate carnage that presented itself? Or did he spend weeks, even months, dreaming of the exact, horrifying scenario that played out in Manchester on May 22, eagerly awaiting Grande’s arrival in the U.K. so that he might finally put his senseless plans in motion? Did Grande and her fans symbolize to him all that was wicked and hateful about Western culture or was the arena just an easy, vulnerable target, the most convenient place upon which to inflict violence in the heat of the moment?
Unfortunately, we’ll never know. Dead men tell no tales. Maybe alleged bomber Salman Abedi really did want to kill all those little girls. Maybe he really did hope he’d take out an 8-year-old or two. Regardless, Grande seems a fairly innocuous symbol of American decadence for anyone crusading in the name of Daesh or whatever the hell else was going on in Abedi’s diseased mind. She’s not Toby Keith, strolling about Saudi Arabia arm-inarm with Donald Trump, after all; she’s just a former child TV star with a few middle-of-the-road pop hits no one will remember in 20 years. Now Grande will be remembered for this. Now the 23-year-old singer has to carry on with her career knowing that 22 people died in England this week for no reason other than they were fans of her music and happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time, much as the members of Eagles of Death Metal have had to soldier forth knowing that most of the 130 victims of the Bataclan nightclub massacre in Paris in 2015 perished because they happened to like Eagles of Death Metal.
No wonder poor Grande feels, as she put it on Twitter, “broken.” No one deserves to be a part of this madness. No one.
The fallout from Monday’s bombing will be predictable and pointless. There will be calls for better security at concerts, which at venues like the Air Canada Centre, the Rogers Centre and the Budweiser Stage (formerly the Molson Amphitheatre) already borders on airport-level intrusive, and we as a society will further submit to the whims of the surveillance state.
Parents will think twice about letting their children attend pop concerts, and patrons at those pop concerts will occasionally shoot a furtive glance over their shoulders wondering if this is the night some nutjob with a machete or a machine-gun or an “improvised explosive device” comes barrelling through the gates.
This is the point of terrorism: to instill fear in the masses of senseless violence. That’s why terrorist violence is senseless. If it made sense, it would somehow be less terrifying.
All we can do is keep going out, keep going to those shows. That’s the only way to win in this situation.
I will not let the actions of some hateful human being with a bomb deter me from taking my daughter to experience live music
“I’ve learned, if we keep love in our hearts, no darkness can ever prevail against the light,” Eagles of Death Metal frontman Jesse Hughes told Fox News in the wake of Monday’s tragedy, and he’s got a point. But we also can’t be so cowed by fear of unlikely eventualities that we become prisoners in our own homes, denying ourselves the simple pleasures that make life worth living. Music is a healing force. Music is a source of community.
I have a five-month-old daughter. I have been looking forward to taking her to the family-friendly Field Trip festival on June 3 and 4 almost since the moment she was born because I want her to experience the joy that live music has given me for my entire life, and I will not let the actions of some hateful human being with a bomb on the other side of the Atlantic deter me from taking my Polly to see Feist two Sundays from now.
And if she wants to go see Ariana Grande a few years from now when she’s developed her own tastes in pop music, I’ll take my Polly to see Ariana Grande. I want my little girl to know that music, not terror, wins. Because music does win.