Boygenius’ Big, Emotional, Gay-as-Hell Night Out at Madison Square Garden

Before the concert, engaging in hushed discussion among fellow attendees about which boy is best, it was striking how Dacus seemed to be the fan favorite. “We’re in Love,” her solo ballad on the record that is rumored to be about Baker, was a high point of the night, leading the crowd into a quiet, and perhaps slightly teary, reverie. “I’ll be the boy with the pink carnation,” Dacus sang as she paced, and fans threw the flowers onstage. Likewise, when the band premiered their forthcoming EP, the rest, from a smaller B-stage, the Dacus-led “Afraid of Heights” was the highlight of the bunch, with a strummed melody that sounded like clapping out the bones to some old song and novelistic details about trying to date a daredevil. “I never rode a motorcycle/I never smoked a cigarette,” she sang. “I wanna live a vibrant life/But I wanna die a boring death.”

Bridgers is the most famous of the boys, and a lot of the time onstage it seemed like she was either hanging back and supporting the others, or having fun blowing out her rage. There were a few micro-solo moments, though, and Bridgers’ always felt the most charged, like the fans could swallow her whole. At one point she walked to the edge of the stage extension and asked for the crowd to put down their phones because the song she was about to sing—“Letters to an Old Poet”—was intense, and she wanted to see their faces. As Bridgers performed, I couldn’t see one single phone screen alight amid the sold-out crowd. I cannot think of the last time that happened at a show of this size. If Boygenius’ 2023 takeover can sometimes feel intimidating and exhausting when experienced online, in person it felt affirming, horny, fun, angry, soothing, and yes, at times, completely emotionally devastating.

When they turned the cameras around on the crowd last night, for several minutes on the big screen it was just a sea of feminine faces (sprinkled with a few masc ones). I got to thinking more about that Tori/PJ/Björk meme, and how that cover story was horribly sexist (“hips, lips, tits, power” was the tagline), aimed entirely at a male gaze and misogynistic way of thinking that lumped women into their own diminished genre. The artists were pissed about it at the time, and rightfully so—but this was also an environment where, as Amos noted in the interview, men would shout out horrible things like “get off the stage, you fucking whore!” during performances. Boygenius, on the other hand, is self-directed and aimed at the queer gaze, fiercely pro-woman but not in a performative, pussy hat kind of way. It’s tits out, messy polycule vibes, where group therapy and birth charts are topics of the day almost every day. Like I said, it’s definitely not for everyone. But this kind of all-woman, gay-as-hell arena rock experience seemed, at least to this seasoned cynic, special.