Berlin in November, Veronicas Included

The Veronicas were on the lineup and that alone was enough for me. Not cool, not critically respectable—just two Australian sisters making pop songs that sounded like being sixteen and furious and in love simultaneously, which is a useful emotional frequency regardless of what you’re actually experiencing. I’d been quietly devoted to them for longer than I was comfortable admitting.

The MTV Europe Music Awards came to Berlin in November 2009—O2 World, the fifth, the full production. Shakira headlined because Shakira headlined everything that era; she seemed constitutionally incapable of not being the most compelling person in whatever room she entered. Little Boots was performing too, which felt genuinely exciting. She was one of those artists who seemed on the verge of doing something lasting, her precise and slightly cold electropop well-suited to a stage that size. And Tokio Hotel, for the Berlin crowd, which was a generous designation since they’re actually from Magdeburg.

Award shows at this scale are mostly spectacle dressed as celebration, and you attend knowing that. What you’re actually there for is the proximity to people you’ve been listening to through headphones—the specific weirdness of a song you know intimately being played live in an arena by the person who made it. That dissonance between private listening and public event is something I’ve never stopped finding strange, even when the show itself is mediocre.

There’s something about Berlin in November—the quality of the light, the weight of the air, the way spectacle lands in a city with a complicated historical relationship to it—that made the whole thing feel more loaded than the same event somewhere warmer and easier.

And then the Veronicas played. I never fully resolved that particular attachment. I’m not sure I want to.