Good for Gwen Stefani, but the Sphere must shape up
By now, we’ve all heard of The Sphere. Whether we saw those blinking emojis towering over Las Vegas like an alien invasion, or heard news of the star-studded residencies enjoying the mind-bending wraparound displays of the 18,600-seat auditorium, it’s a venue officially subsumed into our cultural lexicon.
Most recently, it has been announced that the Gwen Stefani-fronted American rock band No Doubt will reunite for a six-day residency at the auditorium, reportedly slated for May and June next year. One could only guess what an incredible dose of vibrant, peppery aesthetics might do to their fierce sound, made all the more riotous considering they’ve only played together twice in the last decade.
But along with the exciting news comes a dreadful fact: their residency will make Stefani the first woman to headline the arena since it opened two years ago. So far, the innovative venue slap-bang in the middle of the desert has enjoyed residencies from a range of huge rock bands. Things kicked off with U2, who played an incredible 40 shows. Since then, Phish have played four shows, Dead and Company have played 48, the Eagles are also on their way to completing 48 shows, and even the Backstreet Boys are aiming for an impressive 35.
Can someone remind me what year we are in? In the late 1990s, No Doubt’s addictive pop-punk sound and feminist lyricism became the perfect arrows to sling at an industry and a culture operating within the confines of the patriarchy. Hits like ‘Just a Girl’ quickly became a riot girl anthem used to expose the limitations of female freedom, autonomy, and power in an age when female representation was at a shocking low. Is there any better indication of the rampant, insidious inequality of our society than these songs being the first of their kind that The Sphere will hear live?
The usefulness of The Sphere is already a contested matter outside of the gender politics of it all. At a time when grassroots venues are in crisis, it’s a shame that $2.3billion has been pummelled into the societal equivalent of an adult version of those prams for children that hold an iPad front and centre, forgetting that the point of the journey is the beauty and unpredictability of exploration. The sheer humanness of everything.
Do we need more screens, more immersion, at a time when the digital is taking over everything? Inclusivity and allyship don’t lie in the spectacle. They lie on the ground, in the emotions we share or in the biases we must unpick. A panoramic film can’t help us now.
I get it, I do. If I truly envision how magical the experience would be, the sheer euphoria such high-end production, paired with your favourite music, would bring, the possibilities soon appear endless. Or are they? There’s a dreadful level of irony in the fact that the venue presents culture with a new way to visualise, imagine, create, and world-build through art–and yet the world, staring back at us, is still sickened to the core by sexism.
Give a man all the tools he will need, and he will still build the nightmare he is most familiar with. How about we hand the tools over to the women, for once?
“Man is born free, but everywhere is in chains,” Jean-Jacques Rousseau once wrote. The most innovative, futuristic venue in the world is still operating via the chains of the past. There are no excuses here. The Sphere must shape up, or face the consequences.
