One Direction Concerts Are Only for the Tween 1%

If you love pop music, have almost a grand burning a hole in your pocket, and haven’t yet developed a gaydar, do I ever have the summer fun outing planned for you! A One Direction concert!

According to CNN, carting your tween to see Britain’s most sought-after slashfic fodder since Olympian diver Tom Daley (Google “Tom Daley showering.” Shhh. Just do it.), will cost an average of $674.23 per ticket. If we assume that many of the most ardent, hyperventilating fans of the boy band are of an age that require parental supervision, that’s a $1348.46 outing where both mother and daughter feel uncomfortable about the fact that the other one would readily bone the guys bopping around onstage (“Does my daughter know how to give blow jobs? Does my mother know how to give blow jobs?” etc).

Gratuitous mom/kid sex joking aside, $675 tickets put One Direction shows firmly into the #richpeopleshit hashtag. I mean, I’m an adult with a job living in an apartment in one of the world’s most insanely expensive cities, and the cost of 2 1D tickets is — no joke — almost as much as I pay per month in rent. Does this mean that “One Direction” refers to the irreversible nature of the increasing class divide in industrialized Western countries? (No. But it’s fun to imagine that it does.)

While it’s easy to make fun of people who think 90 minutes of Harry Styles and his befuddling hair is worth $COLLEGE, life can suck a little if you’re a kid whose parents can’t pay for concerts and whose job as a locker room monitor at the community pool barely pays for a halfway decent school clothes. Ticket prices are nothing to sneeze at, and as someone who grew up mostly poor-ish in a small town full of other poor-ish people, I know how it feels to want to go to a cost-prohibitive show. But since seeing Alanis Morisette or Hanson or Foo Fighters at the Target Center in Minneapolis was out of the question, I figured out other things to do that were more within my budget. You know, like sitting on my bedroom floor looking at college admissions brochures or attending my friends’ free punk shows in VFW halls or driving to the only 24 hour restaurant in a 30 mile radius to split a $6 CHOCOLATE VOLCANO dessert with my brother or going to a party on the nearby Indian reservation and getting pulled over on the drive home. See? Those things are totally fun and I definitely didn’t grow up to resent it at all.

So, priced out teenyboppers, I feel your pain. My advice is do your best to not dwell on the fact that Taylor Hanson met his wife when she was in one of the front rows of a Hanson show. Try reeeeal hard.

[CNN]