Iggy concert draws younger audience

Despite the fact that Hopkins students were begging others to take their Iggy Azalea tickets off of their hands at amazingly discounted prices on the “Free and For Sale” page, you probably wouldn’t have noticed the decreased attendance while dancing in the crowd at Pier Six last Thursday.

Yes, it was a weekday and midterms were just around the corner for many students, but people of all ages — some surprisingly young and some probably a little too old — flooded the concert venue.

Many attendees were wearing silly Coachella-esque concert attire which seemed wholly inappropriate given the chillier weather and general time of year. Give me boots and leather jackets, not paper-thin crop tops and sandals, people! But I digress.

Before Iggy Azalea came onstage, people were screaming at any and every hint that the show might begin, from opening DJs leaving the stage one after the next to tech people coming and going. Several times the crowd began chanting “IG-GY!” over and over again.

Honestly, unless the late start or the short set length bothered you (Iggy’s performance was only about an hour), I’d say most of us had a pretty great time, besides maybe the parents who were dragged along to the concert.

To be fair, if you’re going to let your kids go to a concert, they might as well go to one in the Inner Harbor because of the solid curfew that forces concerts to end around 11 p.m. I’m pretty sure, however, that parents weren’t expecting the Iggy Azalea concert to be quite so graphic.

Dancers twerked, gyrated and otherwise rocked out to all of Iggy’s radio-tested hits, including “Problem,” “Black Widow” and “Fancy.” The crowd went wild, and I too screamed along to the lyrics. Some of my personal favorites, “F*** Love” and “Work,” were also performed.

In my opinion, the most striking issue surrounding the concert was the age of the audience members. It would be surprising if the parents of the middle school-aged (and younger!) kids a few rows in front of me expected “P****,” one of Iggy’s first viral hits on YouTube, to contain such sexually explicit lyrics.

Don’t get me wrong. I don’t believe the show was inappropriate for its intended audience, but even I — and my friends will tell you I’m not conservative in what kids can or cannot listen to — wanted to cover the eyes and ears of all of the little kids in the audience several times!

I understand that Iggy wants to be an artist that can make people question and redefine old ideals. I think it’s great that she wants her listeners to understand women’s sexual pleasure is a topic which can be explored and expressed.

Her standpoint is similar to that of Ryan Gosling, who became a feminist meme after stating: “There’s something very distorted around this reality, that they’ve created which is that it’s okay to torture women on screen... but give a woman pleasure, no way. Not a chance. That’s ‘pornography.”

I do not think, however, that singing the word “p****” over and over again in a concert filled with young kids is necessarily the best way to convey female sexuality.

Opening up a conversation about sexuality and women being empowered by their sexuality is positive, but I would imagine that for parents, it’s a bit like that saying about religion: “Religion is like a penis. It’s fine to have one and it’s fine to be proud of it, but please don’t whip it out in public and start waving it around... and PLEASE don’t try to shove it down my child’s throat.”