How the pandemic ushered in a maximalist new era for Las Vegas residencies
When Usher performs on Sunday evening in Las Vegas' Allegiant Stadium during the city's very first Super Bowl, he'll also be graduating from two years as one of its busiest and most successful working residents. In the post-pandemic market for maximalist entertainment — an insatiable experience economy fueled by revenge travel and irrational spending — America's "capital of entertainment" has found itself at the center of a cultural revival. Usher's concert residencies at both Caesars Palace and the MGM Grand have been critical, commercial and Instagram blockbusters.
Alongside his triumphant tenure on the Strip, Adele is now in the third sold-out stretch of her revue at The Colosseum at Caesars Palace, and, as of last fall, U2 has landed in a monumental new concert hall made almost entirely of screens, The Sphere. Professional sports teams, Formula 1 races, futurist design hotels and entire new districts have joined the world's most technologically advanced concert venues to create a new kind of dazzle in Las Vegas, far removed from my own assumptions and once biased antipathy.
Las Vegas has had, Hunter S. Thompson's come to mind. As a child of the '90s in Virginia, the city was revealed to me as a cinematic and spiritual hellscape via cable TV — Scorsese's , Nicolas Cage in , the underrated shotgun wedding movie and on that note, Elizabeth Berkeley in . But vintage fictions have not kept pace with modern reality. When I moved to Los Angeles in 2022, I finally decided to drive across the Mojave to the maniacal mirage in the desert. For an economy premised on tourism, updating the cultural environment to attract a new generation of customers feels relentless. Entire resorts have been torn down, entire neighborhoods created at great pains to local residents. A high speed train to Los Angeles , inaugurated by President Biden, all in the service of serving and courting a new generation of younger, browner, and wealthier spenders. For better and certainly worse — chicken or egg — as capital flows, culture follows.
