In advance of Lollapalooza this weekend, Steven Hyden and Kyle Ryan of the AV Club have a great back-and-forth on the virtues of summer music festivals. Hyden comes down solidly on the Rosenberg/Matthews side of "concerts should not be physically uncomfortable". Ryan defends festivals, and ended up conceding most of Hyden's criticisms. Here's him on why you just need to wear the right clothes to enjoy them:
My festival uniform: T-shirt, cargo shorts (to carry sun block, notebook, etc.), hat, sunglasses, and old running shoes. Shoes are the most critical; it baffles me when people wear flip-flops to festivals. They give you no support on a day when you’re on your feet for hours, and expose your feet to getting stepped on, sunburned, and dripped on by any number of liquids. Terrible idea. Also critical: shorts, and I don’t care if you think you’re too cool for them. You won’t care how cool you look when black jeans make your legs feel like gyro meat roasting on a spit. Plus, it’s all going to get disgustingly dirty; don’t wear anything unless you can live without it come Monday morning. You can’t do anything about the weather, but you really have no one to blame but yourself if you’re uncomfortable.
This is true, perhaps, but not much of a defense. Ryan's essentially conceding that to enjoy a concert you have to fine getting filthy and being ridiculously hot, which amounts to a fairly convincing case against them for those of us who aren't fond of filthiness or ridiculous heat.
What's more, I'd go further than Hyden and say that this is not a problem just with festivals, but with club concerts too. Monday's Robyn/Kelis concert, as Alyssa said at The Atlantic, was overcrowded, hot, dirty, and overall physically uncomfortable, as indeed most sold-out club shows are. And that show was perhaps the best case for rock clubs versus places with seating, since one presumably one wants to dance to "Milkshake" (or, in this case, a "Holiday"/"Milkshake"/"Pon de Floor" medley). But one had about two inches of personal space, at best, so dancing wasn't really in the cards.
Obviously, there are disadvantages to sit-down shows. Putting in seating costs more, for one, and it can make it harder to stay engaged. I love Grizzly Bear, but even then I nodded off during the middle of their set at Orpheum, a seated venue. And some shows really, truly wouldn't work seated. The whole point of seeing Major Lazer live is to see Skerrit Bwoy being a safety hazard; at the show I went to, he didn't just stage dive, he jumped onto ceiling pipes in the club and proceeded to climb them like monkey bars before jumping directly on top of me and start dancing again. But seated shows don't rule out the possibility of crowd interaction; usually, some people will crowd just under the stage to dance, and if the seats are at enough of an incline, everyone can still watch the show. The times when I feel like that experience offsets feeling like my legs are going to break in half are few and far between, and I wouldn't mind throwing an extra $20 at a band so I can relax while watching them play.