Lollaloons, Music Tunes & Freedom Fumes
Now I hear beats everywhere I rove. The pumping of the train. The dropping of the rain. Sometimes I’m alone and I hear the beat in my brain. I attended Lollapaloozalaoapoaallozzapoallozaalollazpoalloozalooza a few days ago. It was my first music festival. For many years I was stuck in the 1960’s, but since I have begun writing my own lyrics my appreciation for all genres of music has flowered.
Freedom and liberation and inspiration floated everywhere. I kept thinking about freedom. A music festival is the ultimate expression of freedom. Everyone acted as they pleased. Fans smoked pot in full public view without fear of arrest. The security seemed stricter about people sneaking in food than sneaking in alcohol or drugs. Everyone expressed their peculiar identities through hats and dirty shirts they bought in high school (I wore my Jim Morrison Doors shirt on Saturday. I purchased it freshman year while at Elk Grove High School.). Girls wore bikini tops and jean shorts and didn’t care that every nearby guy stared at their exposed skin. I didn’t realize how many people have tattoos until surrounded by dragons and butterflies and flowers in the dried fields of Grant Park.
The colors of the diversity and the freedom and the music melted and swarmed together to create one new and brilliant color. A light blue. The musicians leaned with all of their weight on the definition of music. Jamie Lidell did a white British funk fun groove; I had the most fun at his show. Newton Faulkner showed me his ability to simultaneously strum acoustic chords and thump a beat on the body of his guitar. He closed his show with a raucous and fun acoustic cover of Queen’s Bohemian Rhapsody (shout out to Univ. of Illinois friend Zenobia Ravji, who is the niece of Queen lead singer Freddie Mercury). Saul Williams jumped furiously around the stage trying to scare and awaken white people with his race conscious lyrics and his urban guitar riffs. His spoken word poetry makes me jealous of his lyrical command. I admire the courage of musicians and artists who throw all of their blood and chance for a practical, normal life on the floor to blindly and hotly pursue the impractical dream of becoming a rock ‘n’ roll star. I admire them because I got a law degree instead.
Freedom is the perfect state for humans. This festival allowed and encouraged freedom to flourish. But, America allows that too. In both the festival and in America, freedom is allowed but is rarely seized. Idiots abounded at Lolla. Most of the people didn’t give a damn about the music, brilliant though it was. Many of the people there were 20 year old punks and ditzes who took the Metra in from the white suburbs. Their parents have money. They wore expensively torn clothes from Hollister. Lolla was the thing to do that weekend and the place to get drunk. The slightly older 26 year olds were no better. They all looked unique when compared to society at-large, but they all looked the same when compared to other 26 year olds at the concert. They wore bandanas and tattoos and they smoked and drank. The proportion of people who smoked surprised me. It seemed that 82.7% of the entire country smoked cigarettes or pot, and perhaps they do. They wore groovy hats and refused to shave (some of the girls too). They wore pins and shirts preaching about the environment, but at the end of each day the Grant Park fields were impossible to walk through without crushing a plastic cup or bottle with every step. They littered without shame, or at the least trampled the litter of others without offering to recycle any of it. Most of these people appeared poorly educated and without grand futures. When rebellion from a dominant society results in the creation of an identifiable and cohesive sub-culture then it is no longer rebellion; it is conformity. The hippies rebelled from the dominant culture to conform to a sub-culture, but in the process forgot the original idea: expression of individuality. So too with this generation of self-proclaimed rebels (sorry, sometimes I like fragments). I didn’t see individuals; I saw people who conformed just as much to the sub-culture as the kids wearing Hollister. It is all ironic and pathetic.
Whenever people get drunk or high I become an observer. As many of you know, I have never been drunk or high, so I have done much observing. I sat on the trampled tan grass while I was waiting for the Kanye West concert. A stupid, drunk girl dropped her cup of beer on the ground near me and it splashed all over the left side of my favorite cowboy shirt. It mostly dried after about 30 minutes. Then another drunk girl dropped her beer near where I sat. Her cup had twice as much beer as the first cup. She apologized profusely and we became friends for two hours. I also made friends with some cool chemical engineers from Florida.
By the end of each day my feet stung as I walked through the beds of jellyfish. I was starving and thirsty and my legs cramped up. I had a headache and my contacts dried out from the dust blowing off the softball diamonds and all of the pot and cigarette smoke. I don’t give a damn. I loved it. My body still hurts. On Monday, I got trapped in the stairwell of my building and had to go down 42 floors of stairs to escape, which doubled my aches. The music pounds in my head. Notes have dangled from every steel beam and gentle leaf seen on my Loop walks to the UBS Tower. I hear a beat in the 32 year old drugged out mother with gray hair who sits on the west side of the Madison St. bridge with her daughter everyday and shakes a cup to beg for spare change from the slick suited corporate men walking to Union and Ogilvie Stations to leave for white homes (I have become one of them; Borg). When she does not jangle her cup at a regular interval, my mind forces her to do so. I hear an urban beat backing up Shakespeare’s poetic rhythm as I read Julius Ceasar on my daily Metra train rides to Union Station.
The music. The irony. The freedom. Yea.
Comment by Brian on 7 August 2008 at 6:39 am:
Did you see Radiohead? If so, how were they?
Comment by Brandon Ruiz on 7 August 2008 at 10:14 am:
Billy, you are the white kid from the suburbs who took Metra to get to the festival, not sure what you’re talking about there. Anyway, this was interesting…ok I glossed over some of it, but read the personal insights. See the thing is that no matter how much people try to be individuals, they’re always going to seek shelter in a group. It’s human nature to be part of some sort of group, that’s why individualism is such a silly concept.
Comment by JM Doran on 7 August 2008 at 10:59 am:
Individualism is not a silly concept.
Comment by Brandon Ruiz on 7 August 2008 at 11:13 am:
Wow Doran, your daunting rebuttal has left me sputtering and gibbering in search of an appropriate response…
Comment by Billy Joe Mills on 7 August 2008 at 11:27 am:
Yes, I saw Radiohead. I enjoyed them; however, I believe that they are a mediocre band overall. They are monotonous and lack inter and intra-song diversity. He seems to whine the same way in every song.
Wilco, Kanye, Steel Train, those listed in the main post, Gnarls Barkley and a couple others were great.
I added this to the post:
I admire the courage of musicians and artists who throw all of their blood and chance for a practical, normal life on the floor to blindly and hotly pursue the impractical dream of becoming a rock ‘n’ roll star. I admire them because I got a law degree instead.
Comment by JM Doran on 7 August 2008 at 11:44 am:
I apologize for my previous comment. I barely even remember posting it. It was more of an emotive, knee-jerk response to your last statement, Brandon. You see, I so thoroughly identify myself as a member of the rationalist, American tradition that I get all worked up when someone criticizes a symbol so closely associated with it — like individualism. I will endeavor to keep such automatic, groupthink reactions to myself in the future.
Comment by e on 7 August 2008 at 6:48 pm:
You try too hard. It’s sad.
Comment by Diogenes the Dog on 7 August 2008 at 9:23 pm:
I have to say, I disagree with the sentiment that individuality is impossible when we naturally gravitate toward the protection offered by groups. It is possible to be an individual within a group if one’s group is not a hard-defined clique. Think of your weekly poker game, the church youth group you were part of, or the people you were drinking with last night. You would hardly consider yourselves to be the same person. There’s any number of things on which you differ and if you try to tell me for one second that you consider yourselves to be identical I will jam a fondue fork into my head for every ounce of belief I possess for that statement.
Personally, I consider myself to be an individual, though those who’ve read what I’ve posted will likely think me little more than your typical, cynical, latte-drinking, baby-killing, wine-sipping, elitist liberal prick. I, on the other hand, see myself as a liberal who just happens to be a prick. But I digress.
When we examine each other as more than stereotypes we become human. It’s how people in DC, and this seems to be an increasingly rare phenomenon, who are diametrically opposed on most issues can be amicable with each other, even friends.
Only when we have developed our own identities can we truly appreciate one another as people. In most cases, this happens with maturity.
On an unrelated note, there is no end to my love of Saul Williams who, in my opinion, is a lyrical god.
That said, I think the vast majority of people who go to these festivals are pusillanimous wankers with conviction that will not outlast the next verse, much less the show (not meaning to pick on you here Billy). Go to a corporate show and you get corporate drones, one of several reasons I don’t go. Yes, I know, it is unfair of me, especially considering what I just said about seeing people as more than stereotypes. Many of these people will likely grow up to be decent human beings with, at the very least, some ideas of their own. For now, though, I know them only as a herd of like-minded assholes who twice ruined Billy’s shirt, which I’m sure looks very nice.
Seriously, though, when you go an event where most acts present are there because of their commercial appeal, you’re going to get people who flock to that commercial culture. And commercial art thrives, depends, requires consistency for its survival. In art, risk is rarely rewarded in any great quantity, at least, not enough to get the attention of a major label. So finding a sameness in its audience should not be surprising.
In summation, individuality does not preclude belonging to a group, in the search for identity some people take a wrong turn and wind up trying to buy one, with any luck the zombies will grow a frontal lobe and become something interesting, and Saul Williams is god. That is all.
Comment by Brandon Ruiz on 8 August 2008 at 8:26 pm:
Now we have to get into definitions a bit here on the individualism argument. Through my good friend dictionary.com, individualism has many meanings. The definition it is often associated with is: 1) the pursuit of individual rather than common or collective interests; egoism or 2) a social theory advocating the liberty, rights, or independent action of the individual.
Those are what I think are questionable at best. I have no problem with admitting to: 1) individual character; individuality. 2)an individual peculiarity.
As a political philosophy I’m anti-individualist because it stresses individual differences when in reality our similarities dwarf our differences. Furthermore, there’s an almost total disregard for context and everyone is assumed to be able to do anything if only they want to. I suppose this is true in the most technical sense. I COULD go out and kill someone, but due to social factors and personal beliefs, I don’t. It’s really the divorcing of people from their contexts that rankles me about individualism as a philosophy.
Comment by kukulcan143 on 9 August 2008 at 10:51 am:
Hey, at least soda was only $2 and Rage Against the Machine rocked…
The field was absolutely disgusting at the end of the last concerts.
Comment by Carissa v Ceske Republika on 9 August 2008 at 3:51 pm:
Too bad we didn’t run into one another…it was a good lolla.