Rina Sawayama | Brooklyn, NY | Live

Seeing a favorite pop singer play a live show has always been a joyful experience, but two years into living through a global pandemic, the experience can feel downright euphoric. For music fans and icon stans, long-awaited tour dates that were previously scheduled, rescheduled, and sometimes rescheduled again, are the rewards for patience and continued dedication through a tumultuous start to the decade. 

That feeling of euphoria was alive and well throughout Rina Sawayama’s three-day “residency,” as Sawayama called it on stage, in New York this past week. Sawayama’s shows in New York have served as the ending to a fifteen-city run of sold-out shows across the U.S. this spring. With two nights at Brooklyn Steel and an additional show at Terminal 5, Sawayama has the city under a trance.

This run of shows was rescheduled from a set of dates in October 2021, which were canceled amid a flare of COVID cases as the Delta variant surged across the country. A little more than six months later, thousands of Brooklynites were able to congregate to worship at Rina’s altar.

The audience at Sawayama’s show on Sunday was undeniably queer and happy to be there. As one TikToker put it, the stream of people leaving the venue after the set’s conclusion was a “river of twinks.” In between sets, the crowd shout-sang along to such bangers as “You Oughtta Know” and “Toxic.” Sawayama is captivating on stage, but it was hard not to look back at the people standing on the barricade who looked so delightfully warm in the glow of the stage lights.

Spaces like this are imperative to queer joy, culture, and well-being. A concert can be so much more than a performance for queer people; it can be a meeting place, a space in which our true selves can be revealed publicly, a home amongst friends and strangers. For a young person, still far away from aging into the bar scene, an all-ages venue may be one a first foray into the joy of queer community.