Attending a live show today means phones, photos, videos. It seems that getting a couple of low-quality shots that don’t even begin to reflect what the experience was actually like is a necessity. I’m guilty of posting some of my own, complete with lyrics from the song being performed at the time, in a spiritual successor to the cryptic lyric-laced Myspace posts from back in the day. Hitting a show isn’t just going into a gathering of people drawn to the same music, but it’s entering a recorded space, one made up of all the photos and videos of that place. And while it can be discouraging to look up at the stage and see hundreds of glowing rectangles reflecting it down in miniature, that just comes with the privilege of having smartphones. We trade some of the immediacy of live music for evidence that we were there. Except when we can’t.

Last month, deep house artist Lane 8 made his stop in Chicago for his Childish Tour. He played a spectacular set in the Aon Ballroom, a huge glass-enclosed rotunda at the edge of Navy Pier, pulling the crowd (who was warmed up by Ashibah’s spectacular opening set) through the uplifting ethereal glitter of his work.

A major distinction that night, though, was that phones were banned. We had to put them into magnetically-sealed Yondr pouches, which are small enough to carry around in your pocket, but can’t be opened in the ballroom itself. The idea is that the crowd, free from that pocket-sized distraction, and from the need to document their night, can more fully enjoy the show—they can live in the moment and embrace its temporary nature. Better to thrive in a fleeting moment, than to sacrifice the intensity of that feeling in order to document it.

This drive for spontaneity and immediacy lies at the core of Childish, an album that Lane 8 made for the joy of creating it, instead of to appeal to the audience. The result is playful, sometimes unusual… but it’s compelling, easy listening. While buoyed by songs like the whimsical “Higher” and the devotional “You” (with Kasablanca), songs like the quiet emotional gutting of “The Deep” (with Art School Girlfriend) broaden its range of feeling. Lane 8 was inspired by watching his children create, and so everything that makes up Childish—from its spirit, the theme of its visual aesthetics, its artwork drawn by his daughter, and the album’s name—evokes a state of being in the moment, unconcerned with what exists outside of it. Which is, perhaps, what we miss about our own childhoods: complete immediacy, an utter lack of long-term perspective.

Depriving the couple hundred attendees of their phones for a few hours was done in that spirit, locking us in a room where nothing else existed but the music, the visuals, the lightshow, and all the other grown-up children dancing around you.

Because that’s what we are, really: grown-up children. At least, that’s what it feels like as I write this in April 2025, watching the orange madman driving the global economy into the ground with the tacit assistance of anybody in government who could actually stop it. TikTok is exploding with Millennials reacting to the oncoming recession—yet another one in our lifetimes—with a shrug that asks, “First time?” and suggestions on how to party through it: house-parties instead of clubs, road trips instead of overseas flights, and a general disregard for your own wellbeing while still watching out for your people. And drink. Dear god, are you gonna need a drink to get through this shit. Might be a little harder to do this time, though, without the pre-ban Four Lokos.

But at least recession pop’s coming back.

All of this advice, the jokes, the callbacks to 2008, underlies the fact that us Millennials never really had a chance. Instead we just keep getting hit and hit and hit—we watched the towers fall as children, then as teenagers the economy tanked and nearly took our futures with it. We spent a brief couple of years in our twenties thinking that the stability of the Obama era was going to last, and now we’re going into our thirties and forties as veterans of the pandemic with another four years of the unprecedented (at least in this country), knowing now that it was never going to get better, or even stay just, like, okay. Those too-quick years—I want to say 2009 through 2015, for myself—are the Lane 8 show. It’s a few hours spent in a room. That room is at the end of a pier, hugged by the great empty darkness of Lake Michigan on three sides… but facing the lights of Chicago’s remarkable cityscape on the other. Maybe those lights standing against the dark are a promise. In the room, neon beams fan and arc through it like that light has come alive, is vibrant and uncompromising with the promise of itself. The music is childish, and so is everybody in the room—from the man who made it, to the people who came all the way out to the end, here, this knife of light in the dark, to experience it.

I’d say we chose to be here, but that’s really for those of us who could afford it—an option that a lot of us are probably about to lose. Going to shows helped me come back from 2020 and 2021, and even though it’s threatened now, it’s not gone: I can trade the huge productions for the local, the DIY. The music’s just as good, and the beer’s cheaper.

Because that’s what you do, when everything is so expensive that money’s a joke, and you have no prospects of a better life—prospects that will last your entire life, I mean, and not a brief stretch of good or good enough that just winds up showing you how it should be and might not be again for a long time. You go small, you go cheap. Eventually you gotta walk out of the room into the cold and dark outside on your way back into the city but, hey: that city’s lit up, and summer’s coming. Summer will always come back.

Yet that sentiment can kinda feel like bullshit, right? Sucks now, but it’ll get better. We tell that to ourselves when we’re in the worst of it, and sometimes we believe it, sometimes we don’t. As someone hoping for optimism but forced into cynicism because of *gestures broadly* I find more comfort in emo than in house. Emo confronts the hellscape from a different angle, embracing the dark and the awful so that we can get it out of our system and, hopefully, leave space in us for something good to come in. It’s more honest for that, but it’s equally important to have music like house, which reminds us that there’s also good in the world and in our lives to look at, to acknowledge, and embrace. And maybe even dance to.

House music has always given me images of light: vibrating, synthetic and scintillating. And it makes me happy, not in the cathartic draining of the darkness that is emo and metal and goth, but in its celebration of light, of good, an emotional counterbalance that tells you it’s okay to be happy about something right now.

Which we experienced at Lane 8’s show, phoneless and at first fumbling. It seemed like people approached each other more, joking about the Yondr pouches as an icebreaker, hoping that they weren’t getting an emergency phone call or that they hadn’t accidentally told Siri to call their ex. We don’t realize how much we’ve come to experience the world through our phones until we can’t use them to hide from it. Deprived of anything outside of this moment in this room, we had only the moment. We got drunk, as in, immature, as in, childish, and it didn’t fix our lives. Neither did it save the world, dancing and music and love and the light, and in fact it’s kinda selfish to party while everything around you roils through a slow collapse. But being a child involves, in a fundamental way, being selfish, because how else can you create art without caring what other people think about it? How else—and I mean this in all seriousness—can you keep going through the hell of it all if you can’t find something for your pleasure, and no other reason? What’s the point of any of it if we can’t be happy today, now, especially when the sacrifices we were told to make yesterday were for a tomorrow that might never come?

We got through it last time because we were selfish. We acted childish, we ignored the orders of the society that fails us. You endure it by finding some kind of happiness among the awfulness. The world isn’t ending, but it continues and continues and continues to hurt itself. The best we can hope for during it, is that the music stays good… and that there are still people in the room dancing with us.

Photo Credit: lane8music.com