To get started, a ridiculously overlength post on the rock festival (southside) I went to last weekend. (Now with new and improved editing)
General Impressions:
The area sucks for a festival, it's completely flat, there isn't enough space in front of the stages to accomodate the larger crowds, which therefore spill out into the "non-concert" area containing such questionable entities as RedBull disco tents playing all the music most unbeffiting for a rock festival. Due to this you don't really get a feeling for the (sitze of the) crowd and a lot of the usual dynamics is lost.
It was fucking freezing! Coldest festival I've ever been to, down to 0C/30F, consequently I've got a cold now.
I went with an odd but excellent mix of people. Veterans and newbies, from the complete antisocial musical escapologist to whom a festival is a sequence of concerts, to the sociologist pondering possible thesis topics such a festival could provide. Great fun in total!
Low density of the "Design Junkies" cloging the streets of Munich. Meaning those copying the completely formalized (mostly retro) styles invented/popularized by Franz Ferdinand and such.
Most remarkable booth: "Event-Restaurant: Biergarten". Actually 5 identical tents with the following sequence of signs: "Asia" "Coffee Shop" "Barbeque" "Kebab" "Baguette"
Unified alternative culture.
I bought a new hat! (see the picture)
Now for the bands:
We started Friday with a bit of Feist, nice mellow Canadian music. Never heard of her before. Might be worth checking out further.
Later that day: Beatsteaks. Berlin Punk Rock (though Punk is a questionable attribute since they are actually quite good with their instruments). Best action of the festival. 20.000 people jumping in unison, at some times (e.g. Hey Joe, tribute to Joe Strummer) the area in front of the stage ressembled a 10.000 people mosh pit. I've never seen people crowd-surf so far away from the stage. And the mood wasn't destructively aggressive at all. Just a lot of very very positive energy. Mind blowingly amazing.
In the evening: Beck. While I like the stuff he does, it never really sucked me in that much. His show changed that. Most surreal, including at one point just him with a guitar and his band sitting around a real, fully set, dinner table drumming on the wine glasses and plates, and a short stint into Black Hole Sun which audislave had played earlier, it was all around refreshingly weird.
We left a bit early to catch System of a Down, which turned out to be a mistake, the new stuff isn't as diverse as the Toxicity songs, and the overall action just wasn't at the level it was at when I last saw them three years ago. It was still good, definately, but not worth missing the last ten minutes of Beck for.
On our way out: a bit of New Order. Unremarkable really.
Second Day:
Sarah Bettens: Again, not someone I had heard of before, but she played a good rock show.
Then came the best act of the festival: Wir sind Helden. Very intelligent and witty, pure unadulterated Rock. Their debut "Die Reklamation" of 2002 singlehandedly saved German language rock from itself by getting rid of the heavy duty depression and excess of meaning clad in bad metaphors.
In it's place they put lighthearted fresh and fun tunes, and lyrics that can be sad, sarcastic, bittingly ironic and witty, and have more relevance and more "message" in every song then the entire past decade of German language rock put together.
I saw them two years ago at frequency, which was their first big festival show. It was blatantly obvious at the time that they did not really know how to play such a huge crowd, they basically played a small club concert. It was still very good, and fun, but in the meantime they have gained the confidence and experience to play crowds of 20.000+
And play them they did, we expected them to be good, but to everybodies surprise they played the best rockshow of the festival.
We went up to the very front, just off center. There was quite a bit of pressure and crowd movement going on there even before the beginning, They came on stage to the Stranglers "No more heroes" and launched right into their first songs, with some hilarious fun rock posing.
The crowd went wild immidiately, I managed to hold on and not fall over or get pushed back until things settled a bit (being 191/6'3'' definately helped there).
The new songs were better then expected as well. They absolutely managed to exceed our high expectations.
Then:
Die rzte. Well what can I say, they've been around forever, their latest album is delightfully ridiculous, but their show suffered extremely from the crowd problems described above. Usually their interaction with the audience is unparalleld (they initiated a murmur mexican wave...), but if no dynamics can develop within the crowd (and if half the people are there, not because they like the music/band but because it's a headliner which you paid for and therefore must see), this kind of action by neccessity remains limited.
I still got some decent aggressive jumping/dancing action with Eva, the journalist to be who was with us, during "Immer Mitten in die Fresse rein".
Finally: Oasis. sucked. hard. Nobody cared for the new songs and at their best times, during the old songs, they sounded like a decent Oasis cover band. The best part: at some points scants of "Unrockbar" (unrockable, a song by the rzte) spread through the crowd. To add insult to injury the finished with a cover of "My Generation".
Sunday:
"And you will know us by the Trail of Dead": First of all they get my Award for best band name ever. They were very aggressive but the accoustics wweren't good enough to fully convey the rather rich tapestry of noise they produce.
2Raumwohnung, German electro, good crowd interaction (the singer got on the shoulders of a security guard and was carried through the entire crowd), Fun.
NIN: Wow. Most aggressive show of the festival by far. Surprisingly few people there, which allowed for some rather wild dancing. Closer and Hurt were very impressive.
Dinosaur Jr: Jesus, flash from the past. Rock stopped having long hair before I actually started listening to it! And Dinosaur Jr were big when I was a preteen know-it-all idiot kid who wouldn't do anything remotely as social as listen to music. The show was good rock but after three days of good rock I was quite saturated and it didn't stand out at all.
And finally: Rammstein. I'm not the biggest fan of their music but their stage shows are incomparable. I think there wasn't a single element of the stage that wasn't source or target of fire, rockets or flames at some point. Real on stage flamethrowers, fireballs fired from the ceiling down onto the stage, and so on. Also an inflatable raft to surf the crowd. Wow.
---
Theoretical musings.
Rock festivals are commercial venues. Their commercialization started over 30 years ago and has been almost entirely completed by now. In the process the experience has been completely formalized in order to be incorporated it into formal economic structures and calculations. A way of life becomes a lifestyle becomes a style to be manufactured by the cheapest labour available. Che Guevara TShirts made in communist China for US cooperations.
Music in this form can no longer provide rebellion, since the dominant social structure has become the market structure which, due to it's own formal nature, can coexist with and even incorporate any other social system that can be sufficiently formalized. Any social movement that deserves the name, and that would provide rebellion, would, by it's very nature as a movement be sufficiently coherent for the market to serve it's needs.
The issue here is that the market has become the central social structure not just for economic exchange, but also for creating values. Everything's ok as long we can make money from it. It's the formal and contentless nature of the market that means that no content based rebellion (which can be formalized into a style by it's very nature) against it can even make good sense, again the market will simply serve it's needs.
Ironically the rebellion of the 60s and 70s has therefore set free the forces of the market formerly contained in conservative values. The latter were successfully reduced without establishing anything in their place.
Douglas Coupland wrote at one point that the Generation X has been the first generation/lifestyle that has been heavily marketed from day one, and that was 15 years ago. Subversion of social norms is a lucrative enterprise nowadays.
Now what does that imply? Not much. On the topic of values and social content it probably means that it makes no sense to act as if we were acting against the market since that's inherently hypocritical. (Think flat earthers using the Internet to spread their BS, or the Punk band singing against "money" to a crowd that each payed a couple of hundred euroes for the weekend).
Furthermore all this does not imply that it doesn't work. Bottled water stills the thirst and the formalized and marketed rock festival provides escapism from normal everyday reality.
The thing that we feel is missing at the heart of things here would be authenticity. But authenticity is an elusive concept. It is to sociology/anthropology as empiricism is to epistemology; Simultaneously essential for all purposes and source of constant theoretical attack (deconstruction) over the last decades.
This needs some more polish and I need to bring some of the more heavy duty theoretical concepts down on this... I'll get to it eventually.
Personally it was time that I refilled my escapism batteries. While I'm stuck here in Munich they are taxed to the limits as reality is quite the bitch here.
But I also noticed that it wasn't really the kind of experience I'm after anymore. I prefer the somewhat smaller, less mainstream festivals (not because they are significantly less marketed/more authentic, which they aren't but because there are nicer people there).
General Impressions:
The area sucks for a festival, it's completely flat, there isn't enough space in front of the stages to accomodate the larger crowds, which therefore spill out into the "non-concert" area containing such questionable entities as RedBull disco tents playing all the music most unbeffiting for a rock festival. Due to this you don't really get a feeling for the (sitze of the) crowd and a lot of the usual dynamics is lost.
It was fucking freezing! Coldest festival I've ever been to, down to 0C/30F, consequently I've got a cold now.
I went with an odd but excellent mix of people. Veterans and newbies, from the complete antisocial musical escapologist to whom a festival is a sequence of concerts, to the sociologist pondering possible thesis topics such a festival could provide. Great fun in total!
Low density of the "Design Junkies" cloging the streets of Munich. Meaning those copying the completely formalized (mostly retro) styles invented/popularized by Franz Ferdinand and such.
Most remarkable booth: "Event-Restaurant: Biergarten". Actually 5 identical tents with the following sequence of signs: "Asia" "Coffee Shop" "Barbeque" "Kebab" "Baguette"
Unified alternative culture.
I bought a new hat! (see the picture)
Now for the bands:
We started Friday with a bit of Feist, nice mellow Canadian music. Never heard of her before. Might be worth checking out further.
Later that day: Beatsteaks. Berlin Punk Rock (though Punk is a questionable attribute since they are actually quite good with their instruments). Best action of the festival. 20.000 people jumping in unison, at some times (e.g. Hey Joe, tribute to Joe Strummer) the area in front of the stage ressembled a 10.000 people mosh pit. I've never seen people crowd-surf so far away from the stage. And the mood wasn't destructively aggressive at all. Just a lot of very very positive energy. Mind blowingly amazing.
In the evening: Beck. While I like the stuff he does, it never really sucked me in that much. His show changed that. Most surreal, including at one point just him with a guitar and his band sitting around a real, fully set, dinner table drumming on the wine glasses and plates, and a short stint into Black Hole Sun which audislave had played earlier, it was all around refreshingly weird.
We left a bit early to catch System of a Down, which turned out to be a mistake, the new stuff isn't as diverse as the Toxicity songs, and the overall action just wasn't at the level it was at when I last saw them three years ago. It was still good, definately, but not worth missing the last ten minutes of Beck for.
On our way out: a bit of New Order. Unremarkable really.
Second Day:
Sarah Bettens: Again, not someone I had heard of before, but she played a good rock show.
Then came the best act of the festival: Wir sind Helden. Very intelligent and witty, pure unadulterated Rock. Their debut "Die Reklamation" of 2002 singlehandedly saved German language rock from itself by getting rid of the heavy duty depression and excess of meaning clad in bad metaphors.
In it's place they put lighthearted fresh and fun tunes, and lyrics that can be sad, sarcastic, bittingly ironic and witty, and have more relevance and more "message" in every song then the entire past decade of German language rock put together.
I saw them two years ago at frequency, which was their first big festival show. It was blatantly obvious at the time that they did not really know how to play such a huge crowd, they basically played a small club concert. It was still very good, and fun, but in the meantime they have gained the confidence and experience to play crowds of 20.000+
And play them they did, we expected them to be good, but to everybodies surprise they played the best rockshow of the festival.
We went up to the very front, just off center. There was quite a bit of pressure and crowd movement going on there even before the beginning, They came on stage to the Stranglers "No more heroes" and launched right into their first songs, with some hilarious fun rock posing.
The crowd went wild immidiately, I managed to hold on and not fall over or get pushed back until things settled a bit (being 191/6'3'' definately helped there).
The new songs were better then expected as well. They absolutely managed to exceed our high expectations.
Then:
Die rzte. Well what can I say, they've been around forever, their latest album is delightfully ridiculous, but their show suffered extremely from the crowd problems described above. Usually their interaction with the audience is unparalleld (they initiated a murmur mexican wave...), but if no dynamics can develop within the crowd (and if half the people are there, not because they like the music/band but because it's a headliner which you paid for and therefore must see), this kind of action by neccessity remains limited.
I still got some decent aggressive jumping/dancing action with Eva, the journalist to be who was with us, during "Immer Mitten in die Fresse rein".
Finally: Oasis. sucked. hard. Nobody cared for the new songs and at their best times, during the old songs, they sounded like a decent Oasis cover band. The best part: at some points scants of "Unrockbar" (unrockable, a song by the rzte) spread through the crowd. To add insult to injury the finished with a cover of "My Generation".
Sunday:
"And you will know us by the Trail of Dead": First of all they get my Award for best band name ever. They were very aggressive but the accoustics wweren't good enough to fully convey the rather rich tapestry of noise they produce.
2Raumwohnung, German electro, good crowd interaction (the singer got on the shoulders of a security guard and was carried through the entire crowd), Fun.
NIN: Wow. Most aggressive show of the festival by far. Surprisingly few people there, which allowed for some rather wild dancing. Closer and Hurt were very impressive.
Dinosaur Jr: Jesus, flash from the past. Rock stopped having long hair before I actually started listening to it! And Dinosaur Jr were big when I was a preteen know-it-all idiot kid who wouldn't do anything remotely as social as listen to music. The show was good rock but after three days of good rock I was quite saturated and it didn't stand out at all.
And finally: Rammstein. I'm not the biggest fan of their music but their stage shows are incomparable. I think there wasn't a single element of the stage that wasn't source or target of fire, rockets or flames at some point. Real on stage flamethrowers, fireballs fired from the ceiling down onto the stage, and so on. Also an inflatable raft to surf the crowd. Wow.
---
Theoretical musings.
Rock festivals are commercial venues. Their commercialization started over 30 years ago and has been almost entirely completed by now. In the process the experience has been completely formalized in order to be incorporated it into formal economic structures and calculations. A way of life becomes a lifestyle becomes a style to be manufactured by the cheapest labour available. Che Guevara TShirts made in communist China for US cooperations.
Music in this form can no longer provide rebellion, since the dominant social structure has become the market structure which, due to it's own formal nature, can coexist with and even incorporate any other social system that can be sufficiently formalized. Any social movement that deserves the name, and that would provide rebellion, would, by it's very nature as a movement be sufficiently coherent for the market to serve it's needs.
The issue here is that the market has become the central social structure not just for economic exchange, but also for creating values. Everything's ok as long we can make money from it. It's the formal and contentless nature of the market that means that no content based rebellion (which can be formalized into a style by it's very nature) against it can even make good sense, again the market will simply serve it's needs.
Ironically the rebellion of the 60s and 70s has therefore set free the forces of the market formerly contained in conservative values. The latter were successfully reduced without establishing anything in their place.
Douglas Coupland wrote at one point that the Generation X has been the first generation/lifestyle that has been heavily marketed from day one, and that was 15 years ago. Subversion of social norms is a lucrative enterprise nowadays.
Now what does that imply? Not much. On the topic of values and social content it probably means that it makes no sense to act as if we were acting against the market since that's inherently hypocritical. (Think flat earthers using the Internet to spread their BS, or the Punk band singing against "money" to a crowd that each payed a couple of hundred euroes for the weekend).
Furthermore all this does not imply that it doesn't work. Bottled water stills the thirst and the formalized and marketed rock festival provides escapism from normal everyday reality.
The thing that we feel is missing at the heart of things here would be authenticity. But authenticity is an elusive concept. It is to sociology/anthropology as empiricism is to epistemology; Simultaneously essential for all purposes and source of constant theoretical attack (deconstruction) over the last decades.
This needs some more polish and I need to bring some of the more heavy duty theoretical concepts down on this... I'll get to it eventually.
Personally it was time that I refilled my escapism batteries. While I'm stuck here in Munich they are taxed to the limits as reality is quite the bitch here.
But I also noticed that it wasn't really the kind of experience I'm after anymore. I prefer the somewhat smaller, less mainstream festivals (not because they are significantly less marketed/more authentic, which they aren't but because there are nicer people there).
I went to Hurricane myself last weekend and saw almost the same bands. I also thought beatsteaks were really good, other ones that really rocked at Hurricane were SOAD, QOTSA, NIN and Ska-P
And welcome to the site by the way!!