What Your Favorite Music Festival Says About You

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Noisey, Vice’s music division, has an amusing look at the different subcultures attached to various festivals. Of course “it’s not a fucking festival” Burning Man gets a mention:

BURNING MAN

You’re having a mid-life crisis, so you decide to leave the materialistic life you lead as a computer programmer behind and split a thousand dollar trailer (with wifi and air conditioning) with some people who will forever be referred to as your “Burning Man Friends.” You buy a vintage top hat and goggles for the affair, you’ve built a sweet art car for cruising the Playa, and you have a friend named Rainbow who is bringing acid from Mexico. Even though you own a Canon EOS Rebel camera, you use a disposable camera to capture the grittiness that IS Burning Man, and you and your fellow Burners use them as #tbts every Thursday for an entire year.

Burners be like “yeah right, acid doesn’t come from Mexico!”

Some other highlights:

COACHELLA

Your dumb friend bought tickets to weekend one instead of weekend two AND RUINED EVERYTHING, so you’ve spent months trying to make the swap. You’re LITERALLY starving yourself to fit into the Free People romper you bought specifically for this occasion—or you’ve spent months doing dumbell bicep curls, barbell bicep curls, hammer bicep curls, and cable bicep curls to fill out that neon Urban tank (SUN’S OUT GUNS OUT, BABY!)—and tell everyone how stoked you are to finally see alt-J. None of your friends knows who alt-J is, and you feel really hip. Hip like a hipster!

OUTSIDE LANDS

Your older brother who works for Google hooked you up with some free tix, and you still think flower crowns are a thing. You haven’t caught on to the fact that San Francisco summers are cold as fuck, so you freeze your ass off in a crochet dress you bought from the H&M Loves Coachella collection. You still think Chromeo is an indie band, and “know a guy” who buried vodka and drugs behind a bush somewhere in Golden Gate Park. You’re also a foodie!

TREASURE ISLAND MUSIC FESTIVAL

You rode on a branded sailboat to the festival while watching Mikal Cronin perform on the boat for a commercial. You love MGMT, and you Instagram the ferris wheel at the festival using the hashtag #NotCoachella. Your molly kicked in at 6 PM while you were dancing in the “silent disco tent” (that exists because it’s zany) with your fellow tech bros.

ULTRA MIAMI

You become sexually aggressive when you hear Steve Aoki, and the tape over your nipples is falling off because you sweat more than the average person. Your kandi is majestic. Unfortunately, you peaked on the party bus on the way there.


SXSW, photo by Steven Ruud

 

SXSW

You are a rapper and you want people to listen to your mixtape, you are a band that thought of a really quirky viral stunt that you can’t wait to pull on Sixth Street, you are a music publicist whose schedule is SO INSANE this week, you are a music writer who is SO OVER South By, you are a brand manager for a deeply uncool household product who heard that SXSW is hip, you are a student at UT who gets how it all works, you are big in the garage rock scene and can remember when this festival was cool, you are Rachel Ray, you are an influencer, you are an #influencer, you are Trae the Truth, you have an app, you are standing in line for Fader Fort, you are certain that you are more important than the other people here, you are a street style blogger, you are a street style icon, you have a college radio show, you are a mid-tier marketing executive at Vevo, you’re an Austin resident just hoping to get out and catch some live music, you are sick of it all and ironically going to PF Chang’s, you just happen to be in town and are unironically going to PF Chang’s, you are someone who’s been coming for years because you love discovering great bands, you are a cultural ambassador for a Scandinavian country, you have a quirky interview show on YouTube, you just lurrrrve breakfast tacos, you can’t believe how cheap beer is here compared to New York, you are hoping to build, you work in social media, you are Wiz Khalifa.

See the full list at Noisey.

 

 

5 comments on “What Your Favorite Music Festival Says About You

  1. I’m kinda starting to hate all forms of music these days. It’s just too much to keep up with. There’s always a DJ in every camp and everyone thinks they’re so amazing and you’re forced to like them or be uncool. So you listen to them do their DJ thing and it doesn’t sound too bad but certainly not good enough to get your feet tapping. Meanwhile everyone in camp is dancing like they’re making love to the sky and fucking the Earth in the ass. It’s just a little awkward.

    • What does this lineup say about you:

      A Winged Victory for the SullenA Winged Victory for the Sullen
      Amen Dunes
      Back to the Soil
      Ben Frost
      Beyond Zero: 1914-1918
      Big Ears Kick Off
      Bill Frisell & Bill Morrison: ‘The Great Flood’
      Bill Morrison Shorts
      Bing & Ruth
      Clark
      Coupler
      Decasia
      Demdike Stare: ‘HÄXAN: Witchcraft Through The Ages’ re-scored
      Eraserhead
      Grouper
      Hildur Guðnadóttir
      Holly Herndon
      Jamie xx
      Jozef Van Wissem
      Kronos Quartet presents The Music of Terry Riley, featuring ‘The Cusp of Magic’ with Wu Man
      Kronos Quartet: “Views from Here to the Heavens (for Scott Fraser)” with Nels Cline
      Kronos Quartet: ’40 Canons’ with Bryce Dessner
      Kronos Quartet: ‘Tundra Songs’ with Tanya Tagaq
      Kronos Quartet: Folk Songs with Rhiannon Giddens & Sam Amidon
      La Vie de Bohème
      Laurie Anderson & Kronos Quartet: ‘Landfall’
      Little Annie
      Loscil
      Max Richter: ‘The Blue Notebooks’ & ‘Infra’ with the American Contemporary Music Ensemble
      Max Richter: ‘Vivaldi: Recomposed’ & ‘The Leftovers’ with the Knoxville Symphony Orchestra, violin soloist Yuki Numata Resnick, and ACME
      My Winnipeg
      Nazoranai: A Film From Rock Fish Stew’s Ongoing Big Ears Documentary
      Nels Cline
      Nels Cline & Norton Wisdom: Stained Radiance
      Nosaj Thing
      Omar Souleyman
      Panel: Technology’s Place in Creativity
      Perfume Genius
      Rachel Grimes
      Rhiannon Giddens
      Rival Consoles
      Ryley Walker
      Sam Amidon
      Silver Apples
      Spark of Being
      SQÜRL (Jim Jarmusch and Carter Logan): Live Score with Man Ray Films
      SQÜRL (Jim Jarmusch, Carter Logan, and Jozef van Wissem)
      Steve Gunn
      Swans
      Tanya Tagaq
      Terry Riley with Gyan Riley & Tracy Silverman
      The Bad Plus: “On Sacred Ground: Stravinsky’s ‘The Rite of Spring'”
      The Miners’ Hymns
      The Music Room
      tUnE-yArDs
      Tyondai Braxton: DJ Set
      Tyondai Braxton: HIVE
      William Tyler: “Corduroy Roads”
      Wu Man
      Zs

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