FYF fest announced its line up a little while ago (Phoenix, the Strokes, Interpol, the Blood Brothers, Grimes, Death Grips, Slint, Built to Spill,…) and I bought a ticket, the Twilight concerts at the Santa Monica pier just announced its line-up (Cults, Omar Souleyman, Jagwar Ma, The Zombies, Charles Bradley,…) and I am planning to go to some of them (it’s 100% free!), Make Music Pasadena also announced its line-up (Surfer Blood, Yuna, Tennis, Saint Motel, Moses Sumney,…) and of course I’ll go, it’s also free! You get it, it’s summer festival time.
On Thursday, Made In America Festival announced its first line-up ever in Los Angeles, and I am not planning to go. John Mayer and Imagine Dragons are the headliners? Are you kidding me? I hate them both. I will skip this festival in a blink, because the line up is very disappointing to me, add to these phony headliners a long series of electro house DJs, Steve Aoki, Afrojack, Garth Emery, R3HAB, Wolfgang Gartner, Borgore, and a full collection of hip hop artists, Kendrick Lamar, Chance the Rapper, Cypress Hill, Schoolboy Q, Ab-Soul, Jay Rock, Nipsey Hussle … and you couldn’t make me happier! Just joking, it is very depressing, are the future festivals gonna just be a succession of DJs pretending to play music with their boring knob turning business? Sure, they will attract the Latino crowd with Latin-pop-rock artist Juanes, as well as a few hipsters with Rise Against, Metric and Weezer, but, if you ask me, this is a very thin attraction buried in a sea of rappers and DJs.
The festival, curated by Jay Z, is bicoastal for the first time, and its LA incarnation will take place at downtown Grand Park during Labor Day Weekend. Not only the line-up sucks big time, but the price is high: $200 for a 2-day pass and $629 for a VIP pass (against respectively $129 and $229 plus fee for the FYF fest). I wonder what you will get for these 600 bucks, champagne with Jay Z? Rather a beer I presume, because the festival is sponsored by Budweiser, a shitty beer for a shitty fest. Where is Solange when we need her?
