“Oasis Liam and Noel” by Will Fresch is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0.
Pranav Trewn finds peace in his vinyl record collection.
Reunion tours are becoming exhausting. Just ask Jane’s Addiction.
If you were among those excited to hear earlier this year that the original lineup was back on the road for the first time in 14 years, then you were probably also devastated to see that they made it about four months before blowing up on stage and canceling the rest of their tour.
The unrealized expectations of a beloved band announcing their grand return, only to fall apart before the finish line, is hardly an unfamiliar story. In fact it’s practically the norm at this point, as the industry increasingly banks on resurrecting existing IP rather than invest in growing new artists to accrue cultural capital of their own. We’ve seen a majority of the groups that once seemed definitively dead suddenly reemerge as though nothing changed in their time away. Now, we basically expect the inevitable revival of any notable inactive band with at least half of their members still alive. Remember how much Slash and Axl Rose hated each other? Well they certainly don’t seem to anymore.
Ever since the Pixies staged their unexpected comeback in Coachella ‘04, promoters with the means to keep adding commas to show offers have been among the biggest instigators of modern reunions. Frank Black and Kim Deal may not have been on speaking terms prior to their live return, but money still talks even if the band members won’t. The 2004 Pixies run wound up grossing $14 million in ticket sales.
The thing is, no matter how much cash is at play in bringing the band back together, the same interpersonal conflicts and intrapersonal demons more often than not lead the renewed outfit – older but not necessarily wiser – towards the same outcomes they gravitated towards in their initial run. Just look at the still unfinished business from the recent comebacks of the Fugees or Rage Against the Machine. Or go even further back before the 21st century to the doomed revivals of Cream, Buffalo Springfield, or the Velvet Underground.
Given everything we’ve seen for how poorly these blockbuster reunions typically go, do fans really hope to see more of their favorite groups get back together?
Take the Smiths. Morrissey and Johnny Marr are once again duking it out in the press, this time in part over the latter turning down a lucrative offer from the titanic promoter AEG. Per usual, I gotta side with Marr’s judgment on this one. Given all the justifiable reasons for the two most prominent members of the beloved English rock band to never be in the same room again, would a Smiths reunion not do more harm than good to their cultural legacy – as well as our own memories of the band (more than what Morissey already does as a solo act)?
I look at the Oasis reunion, the biggest news in live music of the last few weeks, with the requisite media cycle of Ticketmaster fiascos and festival speculation, and feel only apathy. Not just because Oasis was never a good enough band to justify this level of hyperbole for their return, but also because the business machinery that supports an event of this scale hardly makes that fan demand feel worth the effort. It’s the classic art versus commerce conundrum – there’s no compelling musical reason for Oasis to be making new music and performing in 2024 besides a large enough payday finally getting Liam to stop calling his brother a potato.
Even those buying tickets for the gigs next summer joke about taking out insurance policies – a year is a long time away for a notoriously cantankerous siblingship to hold a truce. The question feels less “if” the reunion will stick, but whether or not the next breakup will happen dramatically onstage or behind the scenes. It was lovely to see the members of the Talking Head speak to each other again for the re-release of Stop Making Sense last year, but basic civility doesn’t mean they are ready to share the road together for months at a time or get back into a studio the way fans hoped. Sometimes when the moment passes, we should respect that it’s truly past.
A moment that should have remained in the past is Linkin Park’s, the turn of the century rap-rock giants that announced their return earlier this month with Dead Sara singer Emily Armstrong. Almost immediately, they were hit with criticism across the board for 1) hiring a vocalist with a highly questionable background in Scientology and history defending rapists, and 2) returning under the same moniker following lead singer Chester Bennington’s tragic death in 2017, which many felt was an irreplaceable loss. As much rapture as I’m sure early concertgoers have felt hearing “Bleed It Out” and “Faint” again live, the personnel swap confirms Linkin Park to be more brand than band: forget the show, the business must go on – so why can’t Bennington’s vacancy be filled like any other open role at a company? Even without Bennington’s mother and son’s heartbreaking disappointment about how the comeback was handled, the whole thing is unquestionably bleak.
To be fair to the artists engaging in these loveless reunions, I can see the appeal of taking this deal from the industry’s proverbial devil. Post breakup endeavors like the High Flying Birds and Beady Eye were never going to hold the trademark strength necessary to make either Gallagher brother feel purely satisfied commercially. Plus the will it takes to turn down £100 million offers more than once is frankly unimaginable. I love Hamilton Leithauser and Paul Maroon’s solo work, but barring some freak TikTok hit situation, they will certainly always be able to play bigger rooms together as the Walkmen than they could apart. Linkin Park, controversy and all, scored with their new single their highest charting hit in 15 years.
Sometimes the reunions do result in the ideal we all hope for – a legendary band returning better than ever, to even greater relevance than their past peaks. Slowdive proved better than almost anyone that it was possible, and the Pavement and Bikini Kill runs have brought the rock royalty renewed attention from a younger generation and for older fans some of their best performances to date.
But it’s too easy for most bands to simply rest on their laurels and hawk nostalgia bait to people whose tastes have been ground down by streaming. With more festival promoters pivoting to staging historical reenactments like Just Like Heaven and Lovers & Friends, bands like the Rapture or Miike Snow can come out of the shadows almost solely to play those gigs in the safety and guaranteed success of the fan bubble it draws. They then just as quickly retreat to inactivity since they have little left to offer a more discerning public than retreads of what they’ve already done.
I enjoy those bands, but do I think that seeing performances of “House of Jealous Lovers” or “Animal” are going to feel as revelatory in 2024 as they did in 2003 or 2009? It’s a shame to be chasing those thrills when you can engage with existing moments of culture with contemporary resonance percolating in real time. Your mileage may vary per phenomenon, but I would take hearing Fcuckers Dimes Square dance revival jams in sweaty clubs or doing the “Hot To Go” dance alongside the massive festival crowds coronating Chappel Roan’s ascendance over doing karaoke to decades old radio hits in the nose bleeds with $50 parking and an $18 beer.
What appears to drive the hot ticket prices for these revivals is the same spirit of reversion that is fueling the frankly insane amount of anniversary tours currently running. We can access any song we want at any moment in time, which has flooded us with options for every consumption choice we make. Absent thoughtful curators to filter the deluge, algorithms plug us back into the bankable favorites of yesteryears. The industry sees dollar signs in the data of what we yearn to reconnect with, and when the market is saturated with newly printed merch runs and vinyl reissues, well then the faces behind those hits are going to have to suit up in their old skin and move some concert tickets.
A reunion tour does not need to solely be a perfunctory exercise, but much of what I’ve seen doesn’t suggest that there is much creative fire underpinning these bands’ decisions to bury the hatchet and get back to the lab. Rather, we mostly see the Frankensteined results of custodial battles over a band’s identity, a la the Sex Pistols, or promotional tie-in opportunities as a reunion’s raison d’etre, such as N’Sync coming back only to contribute a half-assed effort to the Trolls franchise. The boy band reunion is an especially dire sign for what we as a culture seem eager to manifest, pressuring 40 year old-plus men to preen onstage like they’re still adolescent heartthrobs.
My reunion distaste doesn’t extend to bands that never really broke up. It’s great to see TV on the Radio gearing back up after so much time away, and if Daft Punk – the most active defunct band in recent memory – decide to finally give fans what they want, it will be a welcome development rather than a true surprise. I refuse to get into the pointless nomenclature debates over whether LCD Soundsystem’s four-year return after a false-start farewell constitutes an actual breakup, the same way it’s meaningless to ever take a rapper’s “retirement” at face value.
I’m thinking instead of the properly finished outfits that had their swan song and are coming back to markedly replay past glories rather than do something new. While Sublime was an important band with hits worth celebrating in concert, I need to see Bradley Nowell’s son pantomime his father’s mannerisms on stage about as much as anybody wanted to see Jaden Smith recreate The Fresh Prince.
Given how hollow the backdrop is behind most reunions, it’s actually refreshing when a group just cuts the artifice and acknowledges the blatant cash grab for what it is. Outkast’s 2014 festival run oversaturated the market, and drew criticisms from Andre 3000 clearly half-assing verses (not that y’all even wanted to hear him, you just wanted to dance). He did this while decked out in custom jumpsuits expressing his real feelings about shows he later admitted to regretting: “I didn’t wanna do the tour. We hadn’t performed in 10 years. It was old songs. I’m like, ‘How am I gonna present these songs? I don’t have nothing new to say.’”
In retrospect, they at least walked away with a big enough payday for each of them to do what they most cared for artistically over the last decade, whether it was embedding themselves within L.A’s experimental jazz world or making albums with Phantogram. For fans, they got to cross off a bucket list band they thought they may have missed the window for. It’s fine to engage in the performative spectacle, but let’s not have any illusions of what it’s all really about.
Perhaps the best reunion I saw in recent times was the No Doubt one-off from this year’s Coachella. The key difference I can chalk up for my appreciation, especially notable for a band I wasn’t old enough to appreciate in their heyday, is the ephemerality of it taking place at all. It was a true one off gig that arrived unexpectedly without much teaser from the group or prior fervor from fans. In that way, the celebration felt almost inspired in its pure spontaneity.
Gwen and co. got handsomely paid of course, but no reunion LP or tour followed to irrigate a new revenue stream for a wider set of suits. The spirit suddenly moved them, and then the spirit settled back to its natural resting place. Reunions, like all good art, are enjoyed best in the thrall of serendipity, listeners fortunate to have found themselves in the right place at the right time for a moment that wasn’t guaranteed, and might never happen again.
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