“Rolling Stone Presents: Amplified, The Immersive Rock Experience” is at Illuminarium daily. (Photos courtesy of Illuminarium)
Designed for broad appeal, Illuminarium’s Rolling Stone Presents: Amplified: The Immersive Rock Experience offers iconic photography and superb sound but could dig deeper.
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In my mind, Rolling Stone has a very particular odor. My most permanent memory of poring over those oversized music magazines in the early ’90s — expansive periodicals with coverage of seemingly everything cool about the culture — is the lingering smell of the cologne samples nestled in their pages. Three decades later, one still makes me think of the contentious Nirvana vs. Pearl Jam debates.
I had hoped Rolling Stone Presents: Amplified: The Immersive Rock Experience, playing now at the Illuminarium on the Beltline, would immerse me in those halcyon days (minus the olfactory experience), bringing me back to ravenously reading about bands in a pre-streaming world. I anticipated learning something new about the intersection of music and popular culture, but there was also fear of disappointment: The magazine has long since become a bit of a punching bag; it’s no longer the arbiter of cool, if it ever was.
Would experiencing the newest Illuminarium show make me feel like one of Dewey Finn’s students in “School of Rock,” huddling around Apple products to learn sanitized and commoditized music history? Or would it inspire and engage, leaving me with the artistic drive and need to create that can settle over me after a perception-shifting concert? The marketing copy for Amplified offered opaque details such as “relive iconic moments” and “see what made music great.” These generalities might be just convincing enough to separate music lovers from their dollars ($35 gets you a 50-minute experience that feels like, if I had to boil it down, an IMAX movie in the round) without making any promises.
After premiering at the Illuminarium in Las Vegas, where it’s still running, the show has been moving into other Illuminarium spaces across the country. There are also plans to contract the show out to other spaces, such as Artechouse NYC, and even locations outside the U.S. The exhibit recently opened in Toronto.
Once the show begins, a disembodied Kevin Bacon intones, through an array of speakers from Berlin-based Holoplot (of the Las Vegas Sphere fame) hidden in the walls: “Rock, in all its forms, was the first music that the city not just heard but felt.”
Then comes the promise that “Amplified is a guided tour through the story of the music and the changes it brought.” Cue The Who’s “Baba O’Riley.”
The show is the creation of Brad Siegel, founder of Brand New World Studios, and his team, who brought Rolling Stone on as a presenting sponsor. RS veteran Jodi Peckman curated the photos, with Joe Levy, another RS vet, in charge of the music. Many of the images in the experience ran in the magazine, and organizers worked directly with iconic photographers to license their work. In a nice hat-tip to the creators, during the credits, the photos are presented in miniature, as in a gallery, with all the pertinent details. There are no captions during the show, by design, so you’ll just have to recognize the musicians blown up to 23 feet tall and whirring around the Illuminarium’s walls.
The experience feels very much like paging through the magazine, letting Rolling Stone’s expansive definition of music wash over you in a blur of soundtracked pictures and video snippets. Yes, the show starts with rock but goes, happily, far afield. Outkast is presented along with hip-hop and R&B legends; bits of funk and pop and other sounds filter in and out of the musical pastiche. Siegel first imagined the piece as a show about rock ’n’ roll, but that definition became more inclusive once RS signed on as the presenter. After all, the magazine “never declared itself as a rock ’n’ roll magazine,” he said.
“We felt that rock impacted so many different genres, and so many other genres impacted rock,” he said.
That Catholic view is laudable, but many choices are obvious or downright clichéd. The audio and video immersion feels very superficial, and there doesn’t seem to be any desire to dig deeper. But that might well be on purpose, as organizers hope to attract a broad array of curious music fans to the exhibit. They’ve aimed for the show to be multigenerational and have something to appeal to all listeners.
“Families go to concerts these days,” Siegel said. Organizers are hoping to screen the show for 250 listeners during each performance, hopefully a good handful of families among them.
The sound system is impressive, and the photography is, of course, excellent. But even casual fans of popular music will likely leave the show disappointed, wondering why they didn’t spend the money on an actual concert. There are no huge insights about music and culture to be gained. I certainly didn’t come away with a fresh perspective on rock ’n’ roll or any new insight into how it changed the culture.
The show is at its best when putting the spotlight directly on the fans, showing the crowd during concerts and the different ways fandom has been reflected by audiences over the years.
It’s a useful introduction to the sights and sounds of the last 60 years; children and grandchildren who need a crash course in the RS view of the world will likely come away buzzing with excitement. But, for many, the literal larger-than-life projections of music royalty may serve to discourage musical exploration. The show lionizes musicians as untouchable geniuses at a time when making music has never been more democratized. Amplified presents art as something created for us, the fans, by musicians — not the shared experience music really is.
Where & When
Rolling Stone Presents: Amplified: The Immersive Rock Experience offers hourly shows from 3 p.m. to 8 p.m. daily. Individual day passes are $32.14 and include admission to Space: An Experience Beyond Earth. Illuminarium, 550 Somerset Terrace NE, Atlanta. illuminarium.com/atlanta.
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