My friend Tony has been to Pitchfork Music Festival every year they’ve had it. That includes the first one, when it was called Intonation Festival and was run by an outside group who brought in the then-up-and-coming, then-Chicago-based website to pick the bands (this may or may not still be the arrangement, depending on whom you ask).
Six years ago, Tony moved into an apartment within a mile of where the festival is held (not necessarily intentional, more a happy accident), and each year since he’s thrown a big, weekend-long party throughout. He invites everyone he knows, and we blow up the spot for however long we can.
This year, however, will be the last time that happens.
He’s moving out, and we’re getting older. It used to be a three-day non-stop party, but that idea has been dismantled, piece-by-piece, over the last few years. First, it was people bowing out of Sunday. Next, the Friday night after-party was cancelled in favor of one big Saturday blow-out. Then, groups of people began to go for only one day, Friday or Saturday, whichever was more convenient. Later, people would talk a big game, but then cancel last minute. A bummer, but also totally understandable, as we grow out of a single-minded desire to have fun and instead must focus on a million other things.
More than anything else, though, it’s just time. Time for him to move out and time for us to find another way. This was the last one because it is the last one. The sun sets just as surely as it rises.
***
That said, let’s not make too much of this. Well-known bands play in a city park for three days, and people come to watch them do it. Simultaneously, those same people buy beer and food and beer and records and beer and drugs and beer and posters or t-shirts. At 10PM each night, the shows end and everyone scatters to the Chicago winds, to do whatever they plan to do with the remainder of their evening in a town where bars are open until 4AM. Then they come back the next day and do it again.
The fact that my buds and I have had such a slick set-up for this particular festival means precisely dick to anyone else, but it always meant a whole hell of a lot to us. Not because festivals are anything particularly special, but because we’re lucky to have a large group of friends who enjoy these things. Pitchfork tends to be something to which we look forward every year, even if some things about it are super lame (free water free water MORE FREE WATER).
This year, fifteen or so of us came and went throughout the weekend. I personally saw 9 sets from a wide variety of bands in the two days I was there. I roamed the grounds some combination of half-drunk, stoned, exhausted, enthralled, and ready to party, and there was much to see, hear, and feel all the while. If this was the last year, we aimed to do it right, to the best of our abilities.
Below, then, some quotes and thoughts that summed up the weekend best.
***
“Fuck you, you stupid cunt!”
“Oh yeah? Well, your dress is stupid-looking! And where’d you get those sunglasses? Forever 21?”
Let’s begin with the first and most obvious reason music festivals don’t matter: this isn’t Woodstock, and we aren’t first-generation hippies. No one’s making any broad cultural statements anymore. What people make statements with at Pitchfork is their taste in clothes, their taste in music, and their ability to look good on a summer day. Some more successfully than others, but the sheer amount of effort on display is enough to make any fashion designer or marketing professional smile. People have been convinced that it makes sense to wear nice clothes in a dusty park on which they’ll sit and sweat for 10 hours without shelter. America is an amazing place sometimes.
A quick note to the bros in NBA (or NBA-ish) jerseys: if you’re comfortable like that, cool. If you’re not, but want to fit in, fight another battle. Anytime you can look around and see literally thousands of other people making the exact same wardrobe decision as you, move in a different direction.
“There’s a dance party going on up there and I want to be a part of it.”
Prior to the festival I knew of tUnE-yArDs, I enjoyed some of what I’d heard, and I was interested in seeing what she came up with live. What I was not expecting was to wander over during the first song of her set and see a throng of people bouncing up and down in front of a candy-colored stage from which blasted percussive, energetic and tastefully melodic pop. The band kept the shit tight, which allowed her to put on a show of which, once found, my buds and I were desperate to partake.
That…was…fucking…intense.”
– Exhausted nearby Asian teenager, to no one in particular, following Danny Brown’s set
Holy shit. The area in front of the stage looked like a war zone afterward. If super aggressive dub-step rap is your thing, this Detroit MC gets your vote. Danny Brown rapped without a backing track, too, and kept his flow up nice. Very impressive.
“The way she moves is just…wow.”
St. Vincent is a trip, man. Mixing in elements of performance art and arena rock that would make Lady Gaga and Muse both swoon, her sub-headlining set served notice that this is the successor to the art-rock throne. At one point she head-butted the bass drum during a song, and throughout her show tip-toed around the stage in a balletic way that looked like floating. By the time she played a guitar solo while sitting atop a bouncer’s shoulders as he walked her along the barricade so kids in the front row could touch her while she screamed in their faces (real metal), it became obvious that the time she spent touring alongside David Byrne a couple years back was time well-spent. She fucking shredded, too.
“He’s like the dude on the pretzel box, throwing the most awesome dance party.”
– Me, before finding out Giorgio Moroder is Italian, not German
Giorgio Moroder’s set was far more entertaining than it had any right to be. He himself called it the best gig he ever played, which may have been a bit of an overstatement from the guy who in some ways designed the sound of European disco, but even so. The ultra-cheesy video effects throughout his hour only further made the point that we were experiencing a unique thing we should enjoy as much as possible because we might never see something like it again. So we did.
“Beck loves guitar! He loves to play the guitar!”
– My friend Drew, during an enjoyable, thoroughly slopped-out Beck guitar solo
As for Friday night’s headliner, Beck seemed not so much a super-famous rock star who’s written more big hits than you probably remember; as he did a theoretical high school friend’s cool older brother who has an awesome job and does his own thing. The ramshackle career-spanning set delivered more than a few less-than-true notes and more than one strange A-to-B, but there was a focused, utilitarian vibe throughout not that far removed from watching a craftsman make a cabinet, or blow glass. The fact that the same guy wrote “Devil’s Haircut” and “Lost Cause” and “Sexx Laws” and “Loser” is wild enough, but that he has a band that can play them all during the same set in front of twenty thousand people will blow your mind if you think too hard on it.
What are you doing with your life? Beck does this, and it’s great.
“You were at the Madison show, right? Yeah, I remember you.”
Jeff Mangum said that into the mic to an audience member in the middle of Neutral Milk Hotel’s Saturday night headlining set the way you or I would choose paper or plastic at the grocery store. It was also pretty much the only time he interacted with the enraptured crowd aside from post-song “thank you”s. The aura around Neutral Milk Hotel is a little overblown, and Pitchfork deserves all the shit they get for going back and changing In The Aeroplane Over The Sea‘s archived rating to a 10.0, but the band came correct as headliners. Mangum stood to one side of the stage in front of a microphone with his guitar, everyone else to the other. He played and sang throughout, and if another musician or three or eight was needed on a song, he or she or they came out and rocked it; if not, he or she or they stayed off-stage until needed again. The solo songs were borderline shamanic experiences to behold, and the full-band ones delivered O.G. indie pop symphonies packed with very real, very powerful moments of breath-taking beauty. Catch ’em if you can: Mangum doesn’t seem like he gives much of a fuck one way or the other if you’re there, but you will.
“We probably should, shouldn’t we?”
– Me, at 4:45 AM Sunday, on Tony’s front porch, when someone suggested packing it in
Eventually, we came to the end. Once those birds started chirping and Morning hopped aboard its sleigh, it was time to take stock of the situation. The shows long over, my festival at an end, I needed at least a few hours of sleep before jumping in a friend’s back seat for the ride home to Milwaukee, lest my Sunday, Monday, and Tuesday were shot to hell.
***
The allure of these festivals, aside from the music and the beer and the music and the beer, is that, if you want to, they allow you to exit your life for a little while. To do something different than what you usually would do, behave in ways different than you usually behave, see and think things new and different, too. A certain personality gets to take some time off, some time for ourselves, and do whatever, until it ends, after which we keep the memories when everything else goes away.
We get Cloud Nothings to make us consider starting a jam-punk band, or Sharon Van Etten to chastely fall madly in love with for an hour. We go to show after show after show for one sunk cost paid months in advance, and if at some point we need to lay down and close our eyes for a little while, we can do that, too (just make sure to protect your head).
Gym shorts and bare feet? It is awful hot out. Drinking before noon? We are heading over at 2.
Tony will still go every year, and those of us that can fit for an overnight stay wherever he moves will join him if we can, for a day, or two, or whatever number of hours our busy lives and kids and houses allow. Pitchfork won’t mean a huge party weekend anymore, probably little other than hanging out with friends, doing something fun and cool and different than usual, and watching good bands play in a park on Chicago’s west side for thousands of people on a (hopefully) beautiful summer day.
Which is all it’s ever meant, of course. And that should always be enough.
Pics from Pitchfork Music Festival.