So the summer season comes to an end and so does the Music Festivals (for the most part). For nine months, the great American Middle class hikes at to the middle of nowhere for the thrilling experience of not seeing the bands they went to see.
Or is that a little unkind?
Either
1. Seeing the bands on a giant jumbo screen or
2. Missing half the bands they came to see so they could hold their space near the stage
3. Or giving up, smoking a doob and letting the music drift to them in the back of the field.
And even if they choose "2", between press pits and security and interlopers pushing at you and a stage so high you have to break your neck to see the performers and a sense of overwhelming dislocation of time and place, maybe drug induced, maybe normal garden variety anxiety, it is a nasty little loss of interest.
At any give Festival you can write off from the opening bell for the next four hour. The bands may be good, they may even be great, but you have never heard of them, you don't want to see and you are stuck with them. This is what we call in the trade a humungous waste of time and money. You are showing up to see a band who are a rotational way from the 10pm slot at Pianos.
I am not putting down the band here, I am putting down the money, time and botheration for something you don't want.
Lets say the bands you want to see start at 3pm.
3 – 330p Band one
4p -430p Band two
5p 5530p – Band three
6p – 645p – Band four
730p – 815 – Band five
9 – 10p – Band six
1030p – CC – Band seven
Seven bands: 1 – 4 are 3rd tier, 5-6 are 2nd tier and one superstar.
Though really, superstar? The two I went to this year superstarred Beck and Nas (I lost interest hours before either showed up). Otherwise, you are getting into pushing matches with fat Goth chicks for a closer look at Devandra Bernhardt.
But even if you love the seven bands, happy with the Devandras of the world, what will save you from the $11 beers and the $15.00 chicken finger meals, the $5 diet Pepsi or the $6 Brownies (no, not those type of brownies). There is a hopeless tackiness about the entire enterprise. It is as if the same lame corporations who set up shop at the surreally lame nyc street fests follow the unassuming unwashed into the thickets and fields to con them once again.
The only Music fests that make the slightest sense is dance fests and those make sense because the punters aren't watching anything. they can drop some speed and follow it up with ecstasy and trip the (pretty) light fantastic into 24 Hour Party People Land. If you can use the music, MF's have a saving grace but if you want to consume it, they are a major, major rip off. This is the absolute truth: I recently went to "Rock The Bells" and after Slaughterhouse's set turned to my friend and said, "We really have to catch this band next time they're in town". I had zero sense of having seen the band live, they seemed OK but I was so far away, so distracted, the cheapo close circuit screens were faded from the daylight.
I admit it, unless I am being spoon fed, Music fests are not for me. Too much of the way they are managed go against what I enjoy in a music going experience. But even if it was for me, I wouldn't enjoy this experience as presented. Even if I liked camping out and was social or whatever, I wouldn't like being herded like cattle, fed lousy food and exorbitant prices, being a second class season in the pecking order of Festival Greatness… which goes.
1. The Drug Suppliers
2. The Bands
3. The Groupies
4. The labels, managers, handlers, etc
5. The family of the bands
6. The employees of the Fest
7. The VIP ticket holders
8. Me.
In the Festival Food Chain, please meet Mr.Rock Bottom, hastled by security, hustled by overpriced clip joints, back of the crowd, end of the rope, abused and disabused. $500 for a weekend of humiliation? Only if Mistress Ellen lets me to lick her boots…