Miranda Lambert has a point

What’s going on with the live entertainment industry? Lately, there’s been increased attention on bad fan behavior, particularly throwing projectiles at musicians while they’re in the middle of performing. While these behaviors aren’t necessarily new, there is a sense that it’s become worse in the Internet age when more fans are hungry for viral moments and eager to turn concerts into content. This makes it more likely that fans will be uncouth and artists will be on the defensive. But is it possible that Miranda Lambert was too defensive during a recent show at her Las Vegas residency?

“I’m gonna stop right here for a sec,” Lambert said in the middle of a performance of her ballad “Tin Man,” captured on video and shared in a viral TikTok. “These girls are worried about a selfie and not listening to the song, and it’s pissing me off a little bit. Sorry. I don’t like it. At all. We’re here to hear some country music tonight. I’m singing some country damn music.”

Fans at the show cheered Lambert on after the scolding, but the Internet was more sympathetic to the scold-ees. Some TikTok commenters called her a “diva,” while one wrote, “She could have finished her song and just said some blanket statement like, ‘Let’s try to be in the moment and stay off our phones’ if she felt like she needed to.” A Twitter user agreed, “They’re right because why is she making such a big deal over a selfie.” Over on Instagram, someone wrote, “Honestly what she did was SO incredibly rude. You paid money to be there & if you want a picture that’s none of her business unless she wants to state no cameras allowed! I’m sorry she treated y’all this way, definitely lost some respect for her.”

As for the actual women taking the selfie, influencer Adela Calin said her friends intended to quickly take a picture and then sit back down. They had tried to get one before the show started, but there wasn’t good lighting, she told NBC News, and they wanted to capture that they had “the best seats in the house.”

“It felt like I was back at school with the teacher scolding me for doing something wrong and telling me to sit down back in my place,” she told the outlet. “… I feel like she was determined to make us look like we were young, immature and vain. But we were just grown women in our 30s to 60s trying to take a picture.”

On the face, it does seem unreasonable that fans should be shamed for taking a selfie at a show, and completely reasonable that a group of women would want to document how close they were to a popular artist they enjoy. (In the selfie, which Calin posted to Instagram, Lambert can be seen performing just over the ladies’ shoulders.) But the time and place in which the incident occurred complicate the story. This wasn’t a typical large, crowded concert, but a (relatively) smaller Vegas venue where much of the crowd was seated. (This can be seen in Calin’s own posts from the night.) Particularly during “Tin Man,” a ballad, the audience is apt to be less active, so a large group selfie is bound to be more disruptive than it would be if you were, say, on the floor at a Taylor Swift show.

With that in mind, was Lambert right to publicly shame this group of fans, two of whom walked out after being subjected to her scolding? Ultimately, it’s her show, and she can conduct it however she’d like. A performer’s job is to create a certain atmosphere for the entire audience, and it is also reasonable that she would want to protect and preserve that atmosphere. Calling out those fans directly might not have been the kindest way to deal with the situation, but figuring out how to address disruptions in the moment, from the stage, isn’t easy, or cut and dry. Hayley Williams of Paramore recently grappled with a similar issue after ejecting two rowdy fans from a show, apologizing to those she’d called out but expressing ambivalence about how to wield the responsibility of keeping her concerts safe.

The presence of phones at shows, meanwhile, is a genie that can’t be stuffed back into the bottle. And right or wrong, when artists try to push back on the issue, it tends to be a losing battle. Indie artist Mitski shared a note with fans on Twitter in 2022 in which she admitted, “Sometimes when I see people filming entire songs or whole sets, it makes me feel as though we are not here together.” She shared that “it makes me feel as though those of us on stage are being taken from and consumed as content.” The backlash was swift and intense, to the extent that the tweet was deleted from Mitski’s page.

Her own fans were the ones asserting their entitlement to filming her concerts: they paid for the privilege to be there, so they should be able to do what they want. There’s truth to that, but there’s also truth to the fact that performers are people, not zoo animals. They’re entitled to their feelings about the behavior of fans. Audience members stripping performers of personhood is part of the reason we’re seeing phones flung on stage as if those performers aren’t human beings who can be hurt (physically or otherwise) by those actions. In the case of Miranda Lambert vs. the selfie squad, there isn’t a clear right or wrong. But it is clear that the relationship between audience and performers needs a reset.