2023 may be known as the year concert etiquette went off the rails. Every other week, it seems, there’s been a new tale of some artist being startled or even maimed by an audience member throwing something at them while on stage. Then there are other disruptions, some of them stranger and even more upsetting, some of them comically ridiculous, some of them just plain baffling. Just ask Pink, who recently had a guy thrown out for staging a protest about circumcision.
During a quiet moment of her set, this audience member caught Pink’s eye with enlarged text on his phone screen. “Oh, you’re making a whole point right now, aren’t you? Do you feel good about yourself? Are you gonna be all right?” Pink said derisively in a video of the altercation posted to social media. “He wants all of you to read it. He came here tonight to talk about circumcision.”
The singer marveled that the man “spent all this money to come here and do that,” saying she felt bad that he wasted his own time. That didn’t stop her from having him removed from the audience, going so far as to instruct her security to “get that cancer out.” She joked, “I’m gonna have to buy a Birkin bag with that ticket money.”
Specifics of the protest aside (suffice to say, there’s a dedicated group of adults out there staging demonstrations to raise awareness for their cause), Pink may take the prize for having the most bizarre concert interruptions of the year. Though unlike Bebe Rexha she has thus far escaped without injury, she did have to deal with someone throwing their mom’s ashes on stage. “I don’t know how I feel about this!” she announced nervously, and quite reasonably, at the time. PSA, for about the hundredth time: please stop throwing things at artists, and while you’re at it, please only attend a concert if your end goal is actually to enjoy the concert. Your fellow audience members thank you!