Culture Convention Culture.
The free sample economy has turned music festivals into pop-up lifestyle malls.
How do you decide what art you consume (and to some extent, who you are), when identity is distributed, infinitely variable, and constantly available? This used to be an easier question, based solely on scarcity of access. But now that they’re all at my fingertips, do I identify with a soft-spoken indie-popster from Seattle? A syrup-sipping rapper from Houston? An aging but still-vital rock veteran? Does location matter? Does time matter? How does a fan find a group to whom he/she can belong when the barriers that once made that identity concrete no longer make sense?
In a pre-Bonnaroo interview a few weeks ago, Father John Misty (or Josh Tillman, or J. Tillman, or “the drummer from Fleet Foxes” depending on your interest in detail and accuracy) put his ecstasy-addled finger on the purpose of what has become an integral part of the modern music experience: the festival.
“…in a festival there’s all kinds of people who have like no interest in seeing you, they have no idea who you are and they might just watch it on a whim or something. And I think some of the – you know, in all sincerity that is like kind of part of what’s you know, exciting about a festival slot.”
The popularity of music festivals (Wikipedia lists at least 132 separate events in the US, many of which are annual events) seems to indicate something about our society’s attempts to navigate the sheer amount of culture to which it is exposed. No longer is a concert a sensible value proposition for many people, in the same way that spending $15 for a physical album is hard to justify when so much music is freely available through YouTube or Spotify. Why spend $50 to see an artist do their thing when $225 (the cost of a general admission ticket to this year’s Austin City Limits) can get you upwards of 100 shows?
It’s not just the cost equation that’s changed, however. The real shift represented by music festivals is not about money or music but identity. When heading to a concert, as Tillman points out, “[…]people are kind of – they’ve entered a social contract with you, they’ve watched a few YouTube clips, they know what you do[.]” This expectation is true not only of the artist, but of the audience as well. A single performance by a known artist becomes a performative space for their fans: through their manner of dress, their behavior, even the act of showing up at all, a music fan signals his or her engagement with a specific community. However, at a show this is almost entirely intra-group exhibition - the people who show up are the ones who are already in on it, or who want to be. The more interesting proposition is to perform as part of a group to an audience outside of that group - which is where the festival circuit comes in.
Music festivals provide a safe and welcoming space for a sort of culture bazaar. At the recent Free Press Summer Fest in Houston, fans of zeitgeist-friendly Macklemore and 2 Chainz mingled with devotees of rock powerhouse Iggy Pop and troubled chanteuse Cat Power, among dozens of other acts. The overwhelmingly young audiences at these events seem to be searching for support for nascent identities. Some fans even identify enough with individual artists to wear fur coats in the middle of summer. Pop music has always been about disseminating cultural ideals, no matter what the mode of transmission, be it radio airtime or promotional LPs, CDs, and MP3s. With the risen tide of available entertainment granted by streaming online music, it seems as though we’ve grabbed onto the music festival as a way of creating an acceptable level of noise through which to wade.
Music festivals offer at least some respite from this sensation of drifting. If legendary singer Mavis Staples can garner a crowd comprised mostly of young people at 2pm on a Sunday in the Houston summer, against the forces of laziness, heat, and distraction, that must indicate that she’s relevant to more than just my individual experience. And if I look like them and act like them, maybe I’m one of them! And now I know at least one direction I can move through the endless and ever-growing morass of culture available to me.
Gone are the days when living in a small town cut off exposure to the culture-at-large of American society. Even rural areas often have the necessary internet access to discover Rihanna, Drake, Mumford & Sons. And so the problem faced by young people seeking an identity that fits becomes less about discovering something different from what’s around them and more about finding the one place out of thousands where they belong. For these seekers, music festivals are the new mall food court - a place to hang out in full view of their peers, ready to try on new identities being hocked at full-volume from every direction, and see which one fits. Given the space they seem to fill, is it any wonder that the biggest names (ACL and Coachella, two standard-bearers for festival culture) are expanding to multiple weekends?
