Craig Hlavaty:

Willie Nelson, Arena Theatre, January: Willie Nelson's long shadow and the lineage he comes from should inspire hushed and excited reverence. There are less than a dozen living, breathing classic country icons ambling the Earth, and he is one of them. When you are in the same room as his voice, you are breathing in history with each note.

So imagine my surprise when the Arena crowd would not sit down, shut up or refrain from walking up to the stage to take pictures or realize that Nelson will not sign your 11X14 print of him while he was singing. This didn't cease for the two hours the man and his legendarily reliable band went through nearly 30 songs.

When the security for the venue would tell them to sit down, they would loudly protest that they had every right to walk where they pleased, even to the point where they would get nearly physical. One fight even broke out to the right of Aftermath's seats over a man spilling his beer on another's wife while he was trying to take a grainy and unfocused picture of the man who wrote "Night Life."

As has come to be an epidemic at most country shows here in Houston, it seems that most attendees are only in attendance to either network, talk about their deer lease antics or drink expensive beer and break in their $1,000 cowboy boots.

This all begs the question as to whether most people go to a concert or show to commune with the artist and their music, or are they there to have a shared experience with strangers with the musician becoming merely a moving warbling warming glow in the center of the room.

Shea Serrano: You know, all of the shows that I went to this year had crowds that were pretty okay. I will say this though: If you're a rapper, and you want people to go apeshit at your show, you should concentrate on getting young white kids there. Those guys go bonkers at rap shows. It is excellent.

William Michael Smith:

The Cult, House of Blues, October: Fights, disgusting levels of cleavage courtesy of Dow Corning, drunk-ass corporate doofuses with mussed hairdos attempting to be hipsters on their one music outing of the year, and, of course, the hideous level of chatting and racket. Fortunately, this was exactly the crowd this band and those songs deserved. All hail lame-ass stripper rock.