We can also get how annoying people can be with cellphones. They're noisy, blinding, attention-stealing boxes, and they're slowly depriving us of true connection.
Even so, it's still a little strange to see country music singer and hometown hero Miranda Lambert stopping her show to call out someone for daring to take a selfie during her performance.
Yet this is what happened during one of Lambert's recent shows in Las Vegas, where she's doing her Velvet Rodeo residency show at the Bakkt Theater in the Planet Hollywood Hotel & Casino. Lambert was in the middle of performing the tear-inducing ballad "Tin Man" when she spotted some girls near the front of the stage on their phones. She stopped the song and called them out in front of the massive crowds.
"These girls are worried about their selfies and not listening to the song," Lambert said. "It's pissing me off a little bit."
The irony, of course, is that someone else with a phone captured the incident on video and posted it to TikTok. Sure, Lambert can't police the entire concert hall, but that doesn't make the irony any less delicious.@justingregg8 Amazing show. 10/10 recommend. This had ☠️ lmaooooo #countrymusic #MirandaLambert ♬ original sound - Justin Gregg
"We're here to hear some country music tonight," Lambert said to the cheering crowd. "I'm singing some country damn music."
She then motioned for the fans to put away their cellphones and asked the crowd, "Shall we start again?" before picking up a second time at the beginning of her "Tin Man" performance.
The video of Lambert's schoolroom scolding has been shared over every social media platform you can think of with varying degrees of "You go girl"s and "You stop girl"s. Some applaud Lambert for telling people to put their damn phones away when they're at a show. Others say their behavior didn't need to be pointed out to a crowd of people since they were harmlessly capturing a photo of themselves next to one of their favorite singers in seats that had to cost at least $300 each, according to Ticketmaster.
Adela Calin, a Las Vegas influencer who was in the group taking the photo that pissed off Lambert, told NBC News that they tried to take photos before the show started but the lighting was bad. So when the lights came up during Lambert's performance, she says her group asked someone behind her to take a group photo of them with Lambert in the background.
"It felt like I was back at school with the teacher scolding me for doing something wrong and telling me to sit down back in my place," Calin said. "I feel like she was determined to make us look like we were young, immature and vain. But we were just grown women in our 30s to 60s trying to take a picture."
Other fans were also "pissed off a little bit" — but at Lambert. In one video, a concertgoer could be heard saying "Let's go; you don't do that to fans," presumably before walking out.
There is a spate of recent incidents of so-called "fans" throwing things on stage during concert performances and reaching a point annoying enough for the singer to ask them to stop. It happened to the rapper Latto during a German music festival, singer Harry Styles, who got hit in the eye by a flying object, and Drake, during the opening show of his new tour in Chicago.
In comparison, a selfie doesn't seem so bad — especially when front-row tickets are so expensive.
In 2019, a similar event happened to Lambert during a show at the Great Allentown Fair in Allentown, Pennsylvania, when she confiscated a beach ball that made its way to the stage and stabbed it with a pocket knife to deflate it. Those girls in Vegas are lucky Miranda didn't ask them for their phone. She might have loaded it into a skeet shooter and blasted it out of the air with a shotgun like the world's most expensive clay pigeon.
