A couple of months ago, a fan named Sydnee Tallant pointed her phone camera at a Jumbotron showing Suga, the BTS rapper now on a solo tour, as he performed at the Kia Forum, outside Los Angeles. But in the concert footage she posted on TikTok, you can barely make out what he’s singing, because Tallant was wailing at the top of her lungs the whole time. “I sound like a beast,” the 19-year-old told me later. In another recent video, a young woman at a Taylor Swift tour stop in Arizona swivels the camera away from the stage, capturing her own face as she screams the bridge to “Cruel Summer.” The clip has been viewed 2.6 million times.
As many artists embark on their first tours since before the coronavirus pandemic, a lot of the concert clips flooding TikTok capture not the live music itself, but a behavior that some fans self-deprecatingly describe as “demon screaming”—raspy noises emitted at ungodly pitches, as if the screamer were possessed. Some people accuse Gen Z and its preferred social-media platform of ruining concerts. A Refinery29 headline asks, “Is TikTok to Blame for the Demise of Concert Etiquette?” “Loud Singing at Concerts Is Dividing the Internet,” declares Thrillist. I sympathize with the Swift fan who complained—in a viral TikTok video, naturally—about spending $3,000 for a front-row seat and having to listen to someone else scream the whole time. And yet, when I saw Swift in Philadelphia in May, I yelled many of the lyrics until I felt winded, and I wasn’t doing it for TikTok.
Are fans simply having fun, or is their behavior too extreme? Versions of that question have been debated for decades. In 1966, the Beatles stopped touring, partly because they couldn’t hear themselves over their fans’ cheers. At a 2016 concert, Justin Bieber asked audience members to tone down their screaming, calling their behavior “obnoxious.” The recent complaints, in other words, are nothing new. But if the screams today are indeed louder and more intrusive than those of the past, the rise of TikTok does make a likely suspect; demon screaming is easy to dismiss as yet another social-media fad—one more way in which the appetite for viral fame has changed daily life.
Still, another possible explanation comes to mind. The young music fans now entering prime concertgoing age spent a large chunk of high school or college away from friends, and missed out on a lot of joy. “Please scream inside your heart,” a sign at one Japanese amusement park infamously asked guests during the first pandemic summer. Now, as more big-name musicians are reclaiming the stage, music fans are finally able to let loose—and set their screams free. In other words, if Swift fans’ demon screaming sounds like an exorcism, it’s because that’s what it is.
Tallant, who lives in Fullerton, California, said that experiencing her favorite artists up close feels like a “once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.” She and I had exchanged Instagram handles in late 2021 after sitting next to each other at a BTS show. When I called her recently to ask about her TikTok concert videos, she mentioned that she had picked up extra shifts at her two jobs and sold old clothes and books so that she could afford sound-check VIP tickets for Tomorrow X Together, a South Korean group known for their energetic emo-pop tracks. Her efforts paid off in May, when she saw the five members live for the first time. “It was surreal,” she told me. “I screamed screams I didn’t think I was capable of.”
“Screams, no matter what context they are given in, elicit interest and attention,” Harold Gouzoules, a psychology professor at Emory University who studies screaming, told me. Screaming has a unique acoustic trait that researchers call “roughness,” which can make the sound especially grating to certain ears; screams change volume at much higher rates than regular speech, activating the brain’s fear center, the amygdala. (That some screams express joy, not distress, doesn’t make them any easier for other people to listen to. Gouzoules said that study participants often have difficulty differentiating between screams of fear and those of excitement.)
Gouzoules also explained that many animal species scream to ward off attacks from predators and to call for help. At concert venues, the purpose of screaming is more opaque—it’s not for survival purposes, for sure. But when emotions are running high, screaming can become contagious. Gouzoules said that such contagion has been observed in a lot of animals, including flocks of birds who start screaming when one member is under attack. Gouzoules suspects that the screaming initiates mostly from fans seeking attention from the artists they idolize. “You’ve got these highly attractive individuals. They’re all on the stage; all the attention is directly at them,” he told me. “The screaming, in essence, says, ‘Look at me, look at me!’”
Some commentators suspect that an intensifying competition among fans, for scarce tickets as well as for musicians’ attention, is eroding concert etiquette—or that the youngest fans never learned it in the first place. At a show featuring the British pop star Louis Tomlinson—a former One Direction member—a Gen Z fan named Devon Hunt saw behaviors that struck him as dangerous rather than simply irritating: pushing and shoving on the floor, blocking others’ views with large signs, throwing objects at the performer. In a TikTok video on the subject, Hunt, who is 22 and lives in Fresno, California, wondered if the pandemic has stunted young people’s social skills.
That hasn’t stopped Hunt from going to concerts, even ones hours away in the Bay Area or Los Angeles. “Yes, there’s bad concert etiquette that I’ve experienced,” he told me, “but I wouldn’t change anything.” He thinks most concertgoers understand that screaming “comes with the territory,” especially for people who choose to buy floor tickets. Demon screaming may not end up as a permanent fixture at concerts. If it’s merely a social-media trend, it’ll pass. Gouzoules raised the possibility that, if the behavior is caused by the pandemic, it might recede to a pre-pandemic baseline, if one ever existed.
In the meantime, concerts don’t have to be unpleasant experiences for the scream-averse. Earplugs and a sense of humor can go a long way. When I saw Tomorrow X Together in Washington, D.C., one girl in another section of the arena was screaming “Soobin”—the name of the group’s leader—so loudly from the nosebleeds that he probably did hear her. But I resisted the impulse to judge her. After the Swift show, a friend showed me videos of myself yelling along, embarrassingly off-key, to “My Tears Ricochet” and “Tolerate It.” But these were songs that had kept me company during the most isolating days of the pandemic, songs that I could only dream of seeing live one day, and they were being played right before my eyes. It was hard not to scream for that.
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