“More” (Phish & the Vibe)
Excerpt and Link to an Essay of Mine about the Vibe and the Band Phish
Overview: For those who don’t know, Phish is a famous jam band that has been around for over thirty years. Similar to the Grateful Dead, they have amassed a dedicated fan base and their concerts are like carnivals and festivals where inner selves are invited to shine, dance, love, laugh, and go wild. Talk about “the vibe” is a cornerstone of Phish culture. Some “Phish heads” also happened to be academics. In 2019, people organized the first ever academic Phish Studies conference at Oregon State University. Some of those presentations were then published in the academic journal, Public Philosophy Journal. Below is an excerpt from my essay. The excerpt focuses on the relationship between the vibe and communal ecstatic states know as the “it” of the Phish experience. Below the quote is a link to the article and then a YouTube video of Phish playing the song “More” (courtesy of LazyLightning55a). Note: This article coincides with an interview I did about the vibe and Phish, which is also posted here under that title.
Excerpt:
I want to conclude this essay with a brief return to the “it” experience and read it through the lens of the vibe. In many ways, this is why fans keep coming back to the shows—to experience the grand Phish vibe. This vibe is commonly experienced during moments of egolessness, when the band takes fans on a magic carpet ride with ups and downs, peaks and valleys, riffs, teasers, and, of course, plenty of jams. You suddenly realize that your little peephole of a mind is really just a self-defense mechanism. Yes, the ego serves its function as a protective shield, and it even brings with it its own set of pleasure principles (see Freud). But the intoxication of vibing twenty-thousand-strong helps “crazy Phish phans” realize that there are protective gears that precede and exceed the ego; that the vibe engenders its own laws of magnetic attraction and repulsion; that one’s vibrational hum-and-mesh guides us with or without our egos’ self-defense mechanisms. And that’s when I, personally, close my eyes, flail my arms, shake my ass, and think, “OH MY GOD THIS IS FUCKING AWESOME!”
For Phish fans, this kind of experience helps us remember, in some faint Platonic sense, that we are not reducible to our thoughts, mind, ego, or even these specific moments in time. Yes, we are constituted, in part, by these and other experiences; the facticity of our lives matters. But we are always more, and our living, breathing bodies are contributing to and participating in a universal human process without definitive beginning or end. This felt recognition often produces joyous, celebratory, even liberatory reactions. This helps explain the carnivalesque costumes and dancefloor shenanigans: glitter, glow sticks, unicorns, blinking balloons, beach balls, and plenty of jumping, jiving, yelling, screaming, and squirming. Bodies are moving without looking and communicating without talking. It’s the way of the samurai, sensei, witch, and wizard. Yes, there are always some sloppy bumps and “excuse mes,” but that’s part of the vibrational dance. Everyone’s feeling it in their own unique way. It’s a decentralized spontaneous dance; a simultaneous oneness and differentiation. As the band sings:
In a world gone mad a world gone mad
There must be something more than this
We're vibrating with love and light
Pulsating with love and light
In a world gone mad a world gone mad
There must be something more