Although I’ve been to significantly more sporting events than I have concerts, a handful of shows I’ve seen over the years have created some lifelong memories.
While sports and video games have comprised just about the longest-lasting interests in my lifetime, it would be at least a little dismissive to look back on my childhood years and view those as my only true passions of the time.
Thanks to a mix of having a sister seven years older than me and former DJs for a father and uncle, I was exposed to a large amount of music in my early childhood years, right around the time that much of the music I love to this day was released.
I truly began to develop my own taste in music in the fall of 2005, when I began to take full advantage of the XM Radio that came along with DirecTV at the time – particularly gravitating towards the 20 on 20 hits station, which would play recurring countdowns of the top hits of the time.
There have been many worse years for pop than 2005, and in hindsight it was wild to soak so much music that I’d listen to for a lifetime at just nine years old. While artists like Fall Out Boy, Eminem and Kanye West certainly grabbed my attention, nothing could surpass my fascination and interest in Green Day at the time, coming around one year after the release of American Idiot while the band was still touring and heavily promoting the album.
The affinity for American Idiot led me down the rabbit hole of Green Day’s earlier pop-punk material from the ’90s, which in turn led me to explore much more music from the era itself.
My music taste would rapidly change and grow in the following years, with my discovery of Third Eye Blind and Nirvana in 2007 further cementing me as a dedicated fan of ’90s alt-rock – something that hasn’t changed a single bit nearly 20 years later.
Despite my lifelong love for music, it wouldn’t be until August 2012 that I attended a conventional concert, seeing Coldplay during their Mylo Xyloto tour at the United Center. Although I can’t say I’ve hung on to my Coldplay fandom all that much, it set the stage for wanting to seek out more live music as I continued to get older.
I’ve been to probably a dozen or so concerts in my life, not including the several shows I saw while working in a beer tent at Lollapalooza, something I did each year from 2016 to 2019. While this allowed me to see artists such as the Red Hot Chili Peppers, J. Cole, Chance the Rapper and the late Mac Miller, festival shows have a significantly different energy and ambiance to them, and none of them are included on this coming list.
There have been four shows I’ve attended, all as an adult, that not only were incredible experiences for someone with a music taste similar to mine, but also transcended what one can expect out of a typical performance.
Here’s a look at the shows I’ll remember for the rest of my life:
1. Paul McCartney – July 26, 2017 (Hollywood Casino Amphitheatre, Tinley Park, Illinois)
When talking about music and concerts with my college roommates, it always stuck out to me how much their tone changed when they began to talk about their experience seeing Paul McCartney live.
It may tough to fully delve into during an era that is seemingly devoid of a monoculture, but it’s hard to state just how much of a shared experience listening to The Beatles was for essentially anybody in the West – and how that experience has been passed down to younger generations since.
As is the case for most 30-something year-olds, the music of The Beatles was inescapable while I was growing up, with their 1 compilation album released in 2000 giving me a great crash course as a kid on their most enduring hits.
Yet to actually have the chance to see these songs played live was an opportunity I knew I couldn’t squander – especially after hearing how special of an experience it was to my two closest friends. Despite having nobody to go with, I bought a lawn ticket to see Paul McCartney at what was then the Hollywood Casino Amphitheatre – an outdoor venue located in the Chicago suburb of Tinley Park.
Performing without an opener, McCartney played an unbelievable 39-song set on this warm July evening, with songs spanning from the earliest Beatles days to his rather bizarre 2015 collaboration with Rihanna and Kanye West in FourFiveSeconds.
There were several unforgettable moments about this show – the pyrotechnics during Live and Let Die, the jolt of energy that came alongside opening with A Hard Day’s Night – but nothing could hold a candle to McCartney’s acoustic solo performance of Blackbird, which he opened up by talking about the song’s connection to the American civil rights movement.
As people living in the digital age, it’s very hard to not reach for our phones when we sense a big moment is on the horizon – it’s a way to make sure we have evidence of that memory going forward, something tangible that we can look back on.
But there’s also something to be said for the experience of just living in the moment, fully absorbing your surroundings and letting that serve as your memory to look back on. Before he played Blackbird, I knew I would have been a damn fool if I sent even a split-second fumbling with my phone. I just stood, watched and listened, and it created what was perhaps the most special, memorable moment I will ever experience at a concert.
The music of The Beatles will last as long as humanity does, and getting a chance to hear many of those songs performed by the man that wrote so many of them himself was a truly cherished experience.
2. Rage Against the Machine – July 12, 2022 (United Center, Chicago, Illinois)
Lots of concerts are highly anticipated, but the wait for this show really felt like overkill.
Initially scheduled to take place in 2020, the tour was pushed back two years due to the COVID-19 pandemic – with Rage Against the Machine and opening act Run the Jewels finally embarking on the tour in July 2022.
My wife and I secured tickets for the third night of the tour, which was the second of two nights at Chicago. What we weren’t aware of before the show was that lead singer/rapper Zack de la Rocha had suffered a relatively serious leg injury during the previous show, necessitating de la Rocha to be seated for the entire performance while being assisted on-and-off stage.
Just one night removed from a major injury, de la Rocha and Rage Against the Machine put on a show for a lifetime, bringing the United Center crowd back into a time machine with them for what was a streamlined 17-song set of the band’s most potent numbers from the ’90s.
I’ve long been a fan of Rage Against the Machine, first introduced to them via Guitar Hero II‘s inclusion of Killing in the Name, while later going on to love the band’s entire discography – particularly as their left-wing messaging always aligned with my personal political beliefs.
While Rage’s music is almost exclusively political, the show itself didn’t contain all that much banter on modern-day issues, with brief political messages being displayed on the screen in between songs – some of which alluded to the erosion of abortion rights that occurred just a month prior with the Supreme Court decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization.
Despite this iteration of Rage Against the Machine being four guys in their 50s, every song felt as forceful and emphatic as it did on recording upon its initial release, with Rage’s debut album still maintaining a lofty legacy well over three decades after its release on Election Day in 1992.
This show also stood out to my wife and I due to what happened in the aftermath of it. de la Rocha’s injury ultimately impacted much of the tour, with the band halting concert dates after a five-show residency at Madison Square Garden in August 2022.
Rage Against the Machine ultimately canceled the entire European leg of the tour and the second North American leg due to de la Rocha’s injury, with drummer Brad Wilk announcing in January 2024 that the band would not play live again.
It feels wrong in hindsight that the show we attended even went ahead in the first place, but it ultimately went down as an unreal experience, getting to take in some of the most important music to me in a live atmosphere. Truly irreplaceable.
3. Kendrick Lamar – August 19, 2022 (United Center, Chicago, Illinois)
By the time of this show, I had already frustratingly missed out on seeing Kendrick Lamar on two separate occasions during the 2010’s.
After being unable to get out of work during his Chicago stop in 2017 for the DAMN. tour and having the same scenario present itself the following year when he performed with SZA and Jay Rock in Tinley Park, my wife and I were determined to get tickets for The Big Steppers tour, which he embarked on in support of his May 2022 album Mr. Morale & the Big Steppers.
While many would agree that Kendrick Lamar is one of, if not, the greatest rapper of all-time, it is his music that speaks much louder than anything else. Lamar has always been a famously private individual dating back to his mainstream breakthrough in 2012 with the release of his sophomore album, good kid, m.A.A.d. city.
Even in the wake of his highly publicized and successful feud with Drake, there is not much to know about Kendrick Lamar’s personal life. He’s been conspicuously intentional in concealing much of his own personal interests and hobbies, and maintains a famously minimal presence on social media.
I say all of this to emphasize that I truly didn’t know what to expect during a show of his – wondering whether he would interact with the crowd at all and how much of a role the live production would play into the show.
What we were actually in for is something I never could have imagined.
As the rest of the country was later filled on during his Super Bowl LIX halftime show performance, Lamar is a bona fide PERFORMER. In addition to a rapidly changing set design that was meant to fully complement the setlist and storytelling of the album, Lamar felt much more like the lead in an emotional 28-song musical than he did a rapper on tour.
While the setlist largely focused on his most recent album, Lamar tastefully implemented many of his most recognizable songs from earlier in his discography throughout the evening, playing snippets of songs in some instances that gracefully transitioned into the next number of the performance.
Lamar’s interaction with the crowd was fairly minimal, something that honestly added to the show. Watching this concert felt akin to watching LeBron James play live during the 2018 playoffs – it’s someone at the absolute top of their game, meticulously executing their craft to a degree simply nobody else can.
No matter how much you love and listen to Kendrick Lamar’s music, nothing can prepare you for what this man is capable of as a perfomer.
4. Oasis – July 11, 2025 (Heaton Park, Manchester, England, UK)
A show that was merely just dreamed about by fans across the globe for over a decade-and-a-half came to fruition in July 2025, as Oasis returned to their home city of Manchester for their first concerts in 16 years.
I was first exposed to the big Oasis hits back in 2007 as I was initiating myself with ’90s alternative rock, but it wouldn’t be until the start of the COVID-19 pandemic that I started digging into the band’s discography more.
Up until that point, my knowledge of the band was pretty straightforward – they were huge in the UK, had a couple big hits in the states and had two brothers that absolutely fucking hated each other as the faces of the group, making their eventual demise in 2009 feel overdue, if anything, to many.
As my wife and I began collecting records and CDs in late 2020, I started to develop an interest in Britpop as a whole, and sought out Definitely Maybe and (What’s the Story) Morning Glory to get a better grip on the kind of music that swept across the planet at around the time I was born.
It wasn’t much longer unti both my wife and I were enamored with their discography, with their three earliest albums in particular striking a delicate balance between aggressively confident and emotionally relatable.
For the first few years of our dedicated Oasis fandom, we were under the impression that the closest we were ever going to come to seeing them live was seeing Noel Gallagher’s High Flying Birds in June 2023, with the Don’t Look Back in Anger closer expected to fill the Oasis void us and hundreds of thousands of other fans were feeling.
What seemed to be only a pipe dream came true in August 2024, when Oasis made the unprecedented announcement that they would in fact be reuniting for a global tour – making it a high priority among my wife and I, along with a college roommate of mine who also loves Britpop, to get tickets.
While my wife and I were both content to try to see them play at either their Chicago or Los Angeles dates, my college roommate, more acquainted with online wait rooms for tickets, pledged to try to get us all tickets for one of the shows in the UK.
Despite highly publicized issues with Ticketmaster and price gouging, he somehow came away with tickets – not only to one of their UK shows – but to the first of their five shows in Manchester, their emphatic return to their home city after a 16-year hiatus.
Upon arrival in Manchester, the only thing that I could compare the atmosphere to would be to what it was like in Wrigleyville during the 2016 World Series. Oasis signs were found on just about every business throughout Manchester’s Northern Quarter, as locals and tourists alike were decked out across the city for a homecoming for the ages.
While I’ve previously written at length about this show and the experience, getting to take in such a unique concert with unthinkable circumstances surrounding it was the epitome of a once-in-a-lifetime experience.
After the opening performances of Cast and Richard Ashcroft, there was a seismic explosion among the crowd when Noel and Liam Gallagher took the stage together, a noise more deafening than anything I’ve ever heard at a sporting event as 80,000 people screamed their lungs out.
What followed was a 23-song communal singalong, with the incredibly funny and inebriated British crowd serenading each other with the songs that have come to define an entire generation in the country’s culture – which made this show particularly special, as that kind of connection to the band simply never existed in the U.S.
A particuarly emotional moment came during the playing of Don’t Look Back in Anger, a song that took on an entirely new meaning in the aftermath of the 2017 Manchester bombings – with the city adopting the song as an anthem of Mancunians’ perserverance through unspeakable and unforeseen tragedy. While I was thousands of miles away when that happened, this was a universally shared experience among the Manchester crowd – and getting to physically see what that song meant to them in an incredibly difficult time is something that will stick with me for the rest of my life.
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