My 2011 Lollapalooza experience was typical: I saw fewer bands than planned, blew out three pairs of drugstore sunglasses thanks to the too-much-dancing that accompanied the too-much-drinking, and ruined two pairs of shorts, a T-shirt, and a pair of once-white shoes.
And I had a ball.
On Friday, as I weaved through a 1 o’clock crowd that was the same size as the previous year’s 4 o’clock crowd, I wasn’t sure I would be able to make such a pronouncement. Part (much) of the fun of a music festival is the sense of intimacy with a band you’ve never heard of; in the Olden Days, a body could still get that intimacy in the late afternoon. This year, one would’ve had to arrive with the food vendors.
While pushing through a group of dilated teenagers to get to the rear of the DJ tent, where Skrillex was exploding ears and minds with whatever we call whatever he does, I considered this question: Why do so many people attend music festivals these days? And why are there so many music festivals at all?
By that evening, when I’d reunited with my Canadian friends at a bar across the street from Grant Park, where they told me how wonderful it had been to watch My Morning Jacket and where I told them about wonderful it had been to dance with a nineteen-year-old Amherst student at Girl Talk, I had a revelation.
The rise in popularity of large-scale, multi-day music festivals – of the Bumbershoots and Bonnaroos and Coachellas and the Lollapaloozas – can be attributed to several factors:
It’s easier to get out the word because of the Internet.
We’re once again following Europe, where festivals have been popular for years.
Improved security and ticketing and general efficiency allows parents to feel safe in allowing all those sixteen year-olds I saw to go to a festival.
(Or maybe parents are so bad these days that they don’t give a shit.)
But there’s another reason.
Cellular phones.
Imagine Lollapalooza without your phone – ninety thousand people spread out over 120 acres, and somewhere, in all that vastness, your friend Doug, who just left you at the beer garden to evacuate the lobster corn dog he ate for lunch.
Ten minutes pass. Twenty. Where is that fucker?
Turns out Doug got distracted by Bright Eyes and a girl he met in college. But you don’t know that, and now you’re standing on a patch of asphalt that must be the same temperature as the sun-side of Mercury, trying to guard two rapidly-warming, sixteen-ounce Bud Lights, wondering why you let Doug convince you that the eight-hour drive from Nashville was a good idea, and most of all, looking and feeling like a jackass.
Not so in this day and age.
At Lollapalooza 2011, you would set down your Buds Light and send Doug a text message. He would immediately inform you that he’d meet you at Portugal. The Man later. You’d shrug and wander off to see Crystal Castles, and no one’s stomach would be roiling with the anxiety of loneliness and/or friend-loss resentment.
In the past five years, people have slowly and steadily realized that going to a music festival isn’t quite the slog it once was. There’s still the heat and the mud and the Port-a-potties and the three-day hangover to deal with, but at least you aren’t dealing with these things alone. Because there, by your side, like a cowboy’s six-shooter and a dip-induced cancerous growth in your gumline, is your phone.
In the bar after Day One, I took the Canadians through the finer points of my theory. They listened, then shrugged and said, “Yeah, that’s not a terrible idea,” and returned to their four-buck Budweisers. (Quite a bargain, I thought, for a bar right across the street from the festival grounds.)
I assumed that my idea had been forgotten until later, when one of them asked, “But don’t you think we all spend too much time on our phones during the show? Wouldn’t we maybe enjoy it more if we didn’t have phones?”
My shoulders slumped. She was right. As a result of all the coordinating and Tweeting and texting I had done all day, I figured I’d enjoyed 15 percent less music than I would have without my phone. I turned into the bar and forgot about my hypothesis.
Until the next day, when, while running screaming from the unlistenable Death From Above 1979, I got a text from a friend who I hadn’t known to be in Chicago.
“At Lolla. Where are you?”
We met at Drums and he and his brothers and my friends and I proceeded to have the time of our Saturday, trooping from The Pretty Reckless to Glitch Mob to Pretty Lights.
His text helped turn around my Lollapalooza experience. Sure, I had to invest 15 percent of my energy in staying in touch, but because of the phone in my pocket, I had something like a 30-percent-better time.
In the glow of Pretty Lights and all that friendship (and in the glow of the bottle of whiskey one of my friends had smuggled in), I tapped out a text to the Canadian:
“I was right! Our phones are making this so much better!”
She returned: “Why?”
With the heavy bass pumping and people around me bouncing around, my face crumpled.
Because, while the cell phone might be good at keeping people together, it isn’t so good at providing a forum for me to explain that, even though our phones sapped a little of our energy, they more than made up for it by allowing us to stay in contact with our friends, which in turn kept us satisfied with the festival experience.
We still had to get together for the conversation necessary to explain all of that.
“Meet back at the bar,” I texted. “I’ll explain there.”
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