Went to see TWICE at Giants (Metlife) Stadium. While I’ve been to several concerts in arenas, and several concerts outdoors, this is my first time at a large outdoor stadium.
For reference, Madison Square Garden for ice hockey seats 18k. UBS arena where we saw both TWICE and MAMAMOO is similar. Citi Field where the Mets play seats about 40k. Metlife stadium seats 80k, but for a concert, a lot of seats are obviously closed off. Of course that is made up for with the floor seating.
So yeah, everything I already don’t like about big arena concerts held true. Unless you pay the hideously expensive prices, almost every attendee is too far away to really see the performers. You end up just experiencing the concert by watching the large video screen. You could just watch a video of the concert later.
Another thing that is not great, the food situation. You can bring in outside food in a clear plastic bag. But that means either cold food that’s not in a cooler, or hot food that’s gone cold. I guess car people can try to tailgate, but this isn’t a football game. You could stuff yourself silly at home, and hope it lasts you the rest of the night.
Or you can do the most convenient thing and just buy overpriced concessions. The problem is, this isn’t a football game. There’s no half-time. Every attendee is trying to get food before the concert starts, and once it starts, nobody leaves their seats. The lines at every concession stand were horrendous. The food service employees were working very slowly and lazily. And who can blame them? What incentive do they have to try hard and make the line move fast? None!
Also, wow the food choices at Metlife are not just overpriced, but they are really bad. I guess that’s the difference when you have a bigger stadium. The economy of scale means you can’t really be offering lots of different food options that may be complex to prepare. No special pastrami sandwich shop on the third base line. Very few sad choices, and the same choices everywhere.
Anyway, so this concert despite having all the failings of a big stadium concert, did actually have a lot of positive aspects. First, they performed a LOT of songs. The set list is on Wikipedia. 29 performances, plus their spinny wheel random encore thing to tack on a few more.
The group has 9 members, and for the first time on tour they each got a solo stage. That’s basically a requirement for me at this point for a live show of any size in any genre. Give some sort of performance that is exclusive to your concert. And other than Nayeon who performed her solo song POP!, we got 8 performances not seen elsewhere.
After the first set of solo stages, they brought out a live band. Drum, guitar, bass, and keys. That band stayed the entire rest of the show! That means all the performances after that point were special live band versions. This was an A+ move. Not only did it mean you got to hear these modified live renditions of the songs, but the live band gave a lot more energy.
Because they performed so many songs, the talking parts were actually significantly, and thankfully, reduced! So many KPop shows kill time chatting with fans. They minimized that to about as much as you could. Just enough talking to let them catch their breath so they could dance again.
The production value for the big concert was way high. Special sets, check. Lasers, check. Different types of confetti, check. Pyrotechnics, including straight up fireworks, check. None of it overused, and all used appropriately for excitement.
One big thing, which I did not expect, was just the energy. The concert started before 8PM and sunset was 8:30PM. It ended around 10:30. They started performing with the sun out, and it was OK. But once it got dark, wow, the energy totally changed. Even though indoor concerts are also dark, outside dark just hits different. And when all the fans have the light sticks that are centrally controlled. The mood got pretty hype. The live band part started around the sunset time, and I wonder if that was intentional.
Lastly, it was just kind of weird. I’m not a huge fan of TWICE, but I do like the members and quite a few of their songs. But I was there watching them at the beginning. They were formed by a reality show named SIXTEEN, and I watched the episodes as they came out. To see them 8-9 years later, as a girl group from Korea, almost fill a stadium in NJ, it was kind of surreal. The power of Internet!