I Don't Recognize ANYONE Who is Playing ANY Hip Music Festival
For someone whose life and career changed forever, mostly for the better, when I began attending the Gathering of the Juggalos, Insane Clown Posse’s annual festival of arts and culture, first for my 2013 book You Don’t Know Me But You Don’t Like Me, and then for more complicated reasons, I’m not terribly interested in music festivals in general.
When I worked at The A.V. Club, it had its own musical festival for a few years at least and if I attended, which is a very big if, I felt weirdly alienated and disconnected from the whole experience.
The same is true of the Pitchfork Festival when I worked for The Dissolve. It was a HUGE festival put on by my employer with massive, massive acts as headliners but the whole thing left me cold.
These festivals had nothing to do with me, really, though I suppose at least some of the ambivalence I felt towards them reflected my messy, painful feelings towards my former employers as well.
So I suppose it should not come as a surprise that, like many people my age, I have an unofficial yearly tradition of looking at the line-ups for Coachella or Bonnaroo and thinking to myself, “I don’t know who ANY of these people are.”
That’s not true, of course. Being old, I am most assuredly familiar with bands that were extremely popular when I was a kid, or in my twenties. For example Blondie is playing Coachella this year.
I know them! Debbie Harry invented rap and perfected it simultaneously with the song “Rapture.”
I’m also familiar with Idris Elba. He was in Cats! The felonious feline he unforgettably portrayed in his finest performance and film has violated every law known to man and beast, not unlike Ezra Miller.
Will Elba be singing selections from Cats? Probably not. He’s a DJ or something so I’m guessing he’ll probably be performing in that capacity, with maybe a song or two from Cats thrown in for good measure.
I recognize some of the other names as well, like Pusha T, who is very good at rapping about selling cocaine and probably feels kind of weird about his boss at GOOD Music taking such a strong pro-Hitler stance.
But I legitimately do not recognize ninety-five percent of the acts on the bill. And Coachella is a huge festival full of popular acts.
When I look at a lineup for a big festival and recognize a tiny percentage of the names on the bill I feel old and I feel lame and I feel vaguely guilty.
After all I am, among other things, a pop music writer. I’ve written books about pop music. I wrote a book that got four stars in Rolling Stone and was named one of the magazine’s 20 top music books of 2013. I’m one of the world’s preeminent “Weird Al” Yankovic historians.
That means that I write about music in a very personal, very unique, very idiosyncratic manner that does not, generally, involve writing about new music at all.
So I feel a little guilty about being so out of the loop where new music is concerned. But I don’t feel too guilty because I’m a forty-seven year old husband, father and small businessman whose life and career revolves around my family and weird little niches that, at the moment, include Nicolas Cage, John Travolta, James Belushi, cinematic failure, SNL movies, the Ernest P. Worrell series and movies about the film industry.
One of the reasons I’ve gone to the Gathering more than any other festival is because I recognize so many of its performers. That’s because the Gathering is a festival for old people who came of age musically during the 1990s, and consequently are way more familiar with acts whose popularity peaked in 1996 than contemporary artists.
I’m not going to beat myself up over not being familiar with new music because that’s just part of getting older. When you become a parent your priorities change accordingly and my boys get so much of the attention and energy that earlier would have gone to trying to keep up with new entertainment.
It’s funny. I wrote a blog post not too long ago that went into all of the important television shows I’ve never seen that did way better than my blog posts usually do and reached an audience unfamiliar with me or my writing.
Someone who clearly had no idea who I was or what my site was all about said he did not accept my apology, and that it was my job as a pop culture writer to experience everything.
I found that response amusing both because I never apologized for not being up to date on everything and also because I don’t see my job as having to remain current.
Oh sure, if I was a television critic for The New Yorker then I would feel obligated to see everything important but one of the nice things about being a weird cult writer who writes about weird shit for an incredibly small, niche audience is that you can write about whatever the hell you want, after all of the Control Nathan Rabin 4.0 pieces I need to churn out, of course.
I’ve paid a steep cost for that freedom in terms of making an exceedingly modest income and having a tiny audience that never seems to grow so I am going to make the most of the freedom to do what I want for people who appreciate and accept me in all of my brokenness, confusion and ignorance.
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