Mid-March, Webster Hall, Manhattan, New York. The general-admission crowd was closely packed, the heat of human bodies making me sweat, yet I felt none of the anxiety that normally seems reasonable in a dense thicket of strangers. I did, however, feel a bit underdressed without fairy wings or a full-length gown. I often find myself going to concerts without putting much forethought into my outfit or appearance. Then, when I’m at the venue, I start regretting it, wishing I’d made myself look better for the occasion. I start to feel plagued with the ingrained worry that I must maintain a certain appearance to lend full value to my experiences.
Well, guess what? This time, the performer had a song for that.
A few weeks ago, I saw Paris Paloma live on the Cacophony North American tour. If you aren’t familiar with her work, then I fear you aren’t properly familiar with me. Her debut album Cacophony was one of my favorite albums of 2024. I could talk about her music alone for ages — of course I am listening to it as I write this. But seeing her live was really on another level.
I’d been waiting a long time to see Paris Paloma live — if you didn’t guess from the spelling of her best-known song, “labour,” she has the audacity to be British and is more often touring in Europe. (Not that I can blame anyone for preferring to be in Europe nowadays.) While my friend and I were in line to enter the venue, someone right behind us was chosen to give a social media soundbite about why it was important that Paris had come to the U.S. I was a little hurt that they didn’t choose me, because I would’ve had a lot to say (probably far too much to include in whatever video they were compiling this footage for). In an era when women’s rights are under legislative attack, politicians and corporate billionaires are so openly hateful, and conservatism is seeping into pop culture in insidious ways that reinforce internalized misogyny, it’s so important for an artist with such a powerful feminist message to spread such joy. Let me explain what sort of joy I’m talking about.
First of all: the book swap. As soon as we got into the venue, we made for the merch line, and along the way we passed a wooden box filled with books. I’d brought along a book that I’d just finished reading on the train into the city, prepared for this. I slid my book into the pile and selected another to take for myself. Before the concert started, I read the first pages of the book while standing in the crowd — fulfilling a beautiful Y/N fantasy, really. I was actually the girl reading at a concert. No one declared that they had fallen in love with me because I was so smart and mysterious and not like other girls, but surely everyone was thinking it. In all seriousness, though, it’s one of my favorite things I’ve seen an artist include at a concert.
The opener, Sarah Julia, was a duo of Dutch sisters whose music I’d tragically forgotten to check out before the show. For a moment, I regretted what I felt must have been a grave oversight. But my mood soon changed. In the modern world, we think of recorded music as the “real thing” to which live performances must compare (I was reading about this in my music anthropology course recently). I had forgotten that there is a certain magic to hearing live music before you’ve heard the recorded versions. And wow, it was heartbreakingly beautiful. I couldn’t have been prepared either way — my favorite song that Sarah Julia played, “Daughters,” hadn’t been released yet anyway. (But it is out on Spotify as of this week!) They were such a lovely opening act and gave me a new small artist to appreciate.
Then Paris Paloma was on stage, really not so far away; I was about seven people back from the barricade. Being so close, in a small venue, made this artist I adored feel so surprisingly human. I’ve rarely had such physical proximity to the performers at a concert. She opened the set with “my mind (now),” the first track of Cacophony, a song expressing cathartic frustration with emotionally dysregulated men — a common theme in many of her songs. Then she played “drywall,” one of my personal favorites. The repeated, intensifying line of “never making good on silent threats so that he knows that I have nothing” is perhaps her greatest encapsulation of what it feels like to be a woman in this world.
For “knitting song,” which makes me cry without fail — it’s about love between women passed down through time, between grandmothers and granddaughters and best friends — she brought Sarah Julia back onstage to perform with her. They took a few moments longer than expected to appear, and I later saw on their takeover of the Paris Paloma HQ Instagram story that they’d been in the middle of filming a fit check backstage and completely missed their initial cue to come back out. They joked about it afterwards, and I found it all the more endearing. At some concerts, I find myself idolizing the performers to the point that they scarcely seem human, but I knew these were very real people, creating something beautiful.
One of the highlights of the show was “good boy,” an as-yet unreleased song that Paris has only introduced at recent shows. Before that song, she stopped and talked a bit about her thought process behind writing it. The song was about the hypocrisy of how misogynistic men are so obsessed with dominance, yet so quick to worship other men they view as their superiors. In her little pre-song speech, she dropped one of my favorite lines ever: “There is nothing more submissive than a man who subscribes to patriarchy.” It was wonderful. And so painfully correct. I need the song released ASAP. Even if one lyric does assert incorrectly that dogs know not to drink saltwater — as a coastal New Englander who takes my dog down to the beach for walks, I contest this claim, at least in his case. Still, all of the lyrics about people ring very true.
The set list included most songs from the Cacophony album — the one tragic omission was “boys, bugs, and men,” which is another of my favorites. To my surprise, though, she played “The Rider” from the new Lord of the Rings soundtrack. I honestly hadn’t listened to that one very much, but the live performance was spectacular. I was also deeply moved by “bones on the beach,” a song that speaks to me in particular as an anthropology major — the song quite literally mentions an “overzealous anthropology professor,” and grapples with the moral implications of excavating someone after they were laid to rest. I could barely breathe when she sat down with her guitar and played “triassic love song,” simple and acoustic, a call-and-response with the crowd for the line “that’s all that I want, darling.” And of course, I screamed along to “labour” at the very end — it’s a true icon of female rage music, not just the story of a woman angry at an individual man, but a wide-reaching expression of fury and exhaustion with the endless grind of patriarchal expectations. It’s nearly enough to forgive the British spelling.
But back to the song I mentioned at the beginning of this article. I don’t recall the precise order of the set list, but I quite clearly remember Paris Paloma’s performance of “as good a reason.” It’s an upbeat, invigoratingly angry song about how capitalism preys on manufactured female insecurities: “Every time you are succeeding / There’s an old man somewhere seething / And spite’s as good a reason to take his power / When you hate the body you are in / Oh, love, you’re acting just for him / As he counts his gold and green in his ivory tower.” The song is almost theatrical in some ways, and I found I enjoyed it substantially more seeing it live as opposed to listening to the recorded version. The lyrics carry such a profound expression of freedom: rebel against the societal messaging that constantly keeps you down, shames you for your natural existence, pushes you to buy a million products you don’t need. Express yourself how you want, how you really want, pushing the inner voyeur out of your head. It’s a reminder I need often in this endlessly commodified world.
After the show ended, I got to experience the truly iconic part of every Paris Paloma concert: the fairy dancing. “Soldier, Poet, King” by the Oh Hellos played over the speaker, and much of the crowd coalesced into a big dance circle, everyone twirling around in their dresses and skirts in a very Ren Faire-esque sort of festivities. I spun around in my mushroom-print dress, feeling a profound sense of community with this crowd. Then “Free” by Florence + the Machine came on, and no other song could have captured the moment so perfectly. It is a rare kind of liberation to be surrounded by so many people, overwhelmingly women, who share such a commitment to making life wonderful and magical in spite of the frustrating and oppressive society we inhabit. For a moment, there is no thought of the long train ride back, or the terrifyingly dark parking garage in downtown New Haven, or every horrible thing in the news. Of course you are aware of it, but it does not burden you when surrounded with so much love. For a moment, when you’re dancing, you are free.
What is this feeling? I don’t want to oversimplify things by calling this sort of magic inherent to womanhood or femininity, because that is a kind of gender essentialism in its own right. “I’m just a girl,” “feminine intuition,” Dwight from The Office wishing he could menstruate to be in touch with the moon and the tides — get out of here already. It’s all a social construct. I often think of an Ursula K. Le Guin quote: “But I didn’t and still don’t like making a cult of women’s knowledge, preening ourselves on knowing things men don’t know, women’s deep irrational wisdom, women’s instinctive knowledge of Nature, and so on. All that all too often merely reinforces the masculinist idea of women as primitive and inferior — women’s knowledge as elementary, primitive, always down below at the dark roots, while men get to cultivate and own the flowers and crops that come up into the light. But why should women keep talking baby talk while men get to grow up? Why should women feel blindly while men get to think?” If they looked only on a surface level, an observer of the crowd of dancing fairies might ask this question. This is all good and fun, but what’s the use of everyone being fairies for a night? The dark parking lots will still be out there waiting.
But here’s the thing: Paris Paloma doesn’t reduce womanhood to a cottagecore aesthetic or a primal emotion that others can’t understand. She frames gender inequality as the societal problem it really is. She subverts the framing of women as the “emotional” gender in “drywall” in her description of a man’s uncontrolled rage: “I used to think of him a caring thing, knuckles on his drywall / I’ve tried all of the parenting, descent into hysterically / Rippin’ into ribbons the things he knows he isn’t.” In “labour,” she sings about weaponized incompetence as “dominance under a guise.” Even in “last woman on earth,” a song instructing a lover what to do with her body in the title’s terrifying predicament, as she echoes Althea Davis’s “let death be kinder than man” — even in this song, the implication still lies underneath: men are monsters specifically when they choose to be. The violence men inflict upon women is not the natural order, the entropy that comes for us all, dust to dust, “leave me to the beasts and bears.” This is done to us on purpose and we have the full right to be angry.
And yet we keep dancing. We keep teaching each other how to knit in the firelight. We create magnificent art and fantasy worlds to inhabit. We love one another even when we’re doomed. We keep reading books — not to be the one who makes everything political, but when you go deep enough, even the book swap at the concert is subversive in today’s political climate. Books aren’t so different from witches, in terms of the sorts of people that like to ban and burn them. We must educate ourselves and build community and keep telling stories and making music. We can build a better, kinder, more equal human existence.
So yes, I’d certainly say this concert was worth the trip.