MONDOmagazine

Ask not for whom the beach-ball tolls…

By the ever-annoyed, Jenny Bundock

Ok, now some of you are not going to like what I have to say, but you need to listen very carefully, because if you don’t, you are exactly the jackass that I am trying to get through to.

I like going to concerts; I always have. But time and time again, especially at festivals, I am forced to have my enjoyment marginalized by some other person who feels like they need to “up the level of fun” with a little bit of “I saw this on the Woodstock ‘69 DVD” excitement.

What do they do? They bring a beach ball.

Illustration by Dara Gold

If I had ever attended a concert on a beach, I would maybe — somewhere inside — be less annoyed when I’m watching a band and that rainbow ball starts bouncing around, but since I haven’t. As far as I am concerned, there has never been a time in my life where I have found the inclusion of a beach ball appropriate, necessary, fun, or even understandable. It just sucks, always.

I initially equated the beach ball with my teenage years and the angst that I had towards crowd surfers. Like a beach ball, the crowd surfers would always add an element of annoying distraction, because you needed to scan your periphery constantly to see if there were incoming threats that might hit you in the head or face or glasses. I was wrong to assume that this later breed my hatred for the concert beach ball. The difference between beach balls and crowd surfers are vast, and the beach ball comes out as way more annoying, selfishly motivated, and good-time-fascist.

The ball is a toy, it is brought with the sole purpose of being lost into a crowd, and, thus, becomes garbage. Lame. A crowd surfer came for the show, was hoisted by friends or strangers to the top of a pit and lands, and assumes a position where they too prop up another surfer. It’s give and take. It’s like recycling, what once was on top is now below. Fair.

As well, the only person having any fun with a beach ball in a crowd is the person who brought it. You know I’m right. When have you ever seen that ball coming for you while you were watching one of your favourite bands and enjoying yourself and thought, “Great! An opportunity to play with a big inflated plastic ball! I was hoping to be able to think about something other than this band that I paid to see.”

(The Flaming Lips are excluded from this conversation due to their awesomeness and their creative take on the ball-in-crowd scenario.)

Crowd surfers have fun being up top, security gets to be rude to someone and vent their frustration with life in general when they pull someone down — often on the ground you can score a shoe or wallet out of the deal, which is fun — and many people get to surf.

Surfing is also spontaneous, which adds value in my opinion because it comes from an element of “I’m having so much fun, I’m so amped right now, I’m going to surf this crowd and risk losing all of my friends for the rest of the day.”

The beach ball is a thought you have when you are packing the car the day before. It’s a deflated plastic ball you tape to your leg to get through security, and then inflate for several minutes and release. It hurts me how lame that is. 

The most important point, however, is that you can escape the crowd surfers. They are usually at the front, near the pit, being moved towards the stage. If you don’t want to get kicked in the head, you move back. Easy.

If you are near the front, someone (hopefully) yells “heads up” when someone is coming for your face with his or her shoe, and you duck. There is a system in place to allow people to opt out or defend themselves.

You cannot escape the beach ball. In fact, if you try to, by ignoring it and just watching the show blissfully from anywhere in the room, you either get to be “that girl at the front who got hit in the face/head with the beach ball” or you get to be “the bitch who let it land in front of her and didn’t playfully serve it back to the opposite side of the room.” Frankly, I don’t like someone bringing that kind of negative attention my way over some $1 bag of air and plastic they won’t even try to get back later.

Prime example, I was at Hillside this year now — for those of you who don’t know what Hillside is picture as many tanned neo-hippy free-lovers as you can and then imagine booths where people make natural soap and hemp bags and then imagine families with kids and vegan organic food vendors; all of it is on an island in a conservation area; yeah, it’s pretty chill. Anyways I was at Hillside, and I was standing by myself watching Born Ruffians, (who are amazing) and require and deserve my full attention because I love them —and then came the beach-ball. Like a big inflated buzz kill, it rose over the crowd and came bouncing around the tent. And even hippies — I swear to you fucking vegan, laid-back HIPPIES — were annoyed.

The beach ball has no shame either. It hit the band while they were playing, it hit the sound guy, the by-standers offstage, the children. And I know when Luke hit it back into the crowd, it validated the ego of the person who brought it and they went to their friends later and said, “Luke from the Born Ruffians hit my beach ball back and it was awesome. Everyone had so much fun. I’m going to bring it next year too!”

The problem is there is no way to tell pissed-off defence from gleeful, willing participation. So I say we get democratic about this. If you hate the beach ball at shows, from now on, exercise your very same right to take the ball out of play.

If someone felt they had a right to toss it into the crowd, then you and I have the right to snatch it from the air, and roll it away from you. If someone else picks it up and throws it, that is democracy, and that’s fine — but I will never hit another beach ball again.

We, as a group of ticket-holding concert patrons, don’t have to take this any longer. We don’t need to silently suffer to prop up the self-esteem of one shit-bag ball-owner, who wants to get on the Coachella DVD, or have Luke from Born Ruffians play pseudo, by proxy, volleyball with them.

Because everyone does hate that damn ball. And it is about time we did something about it.