Tag Archives: outsidelands

Apr 11 2015

What Your Favorite Music Festival Says About You

novum crafts headdresses

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.

 

 

Aug 9 2014

Flower Crowns Light Before Kanye Flop

The St Regis is a great place to live in the city

The St Regis is a great place to live in the city

Beyonce and Jay-Z have been in town, chilling at the St Regis in the Presidential Suite. Definitely a Burner friendly hotel, for those who can afford it – $30,000 per night for J, B, and their child who was born with a Burner name: Blue Ivy.

Their home boy Kanye West, Burner Name “Yeezus” is also in town. He was performing at Outside Lands in Golden Gate Park, home to many celebrations of San Francisco’s music and culture over the years. Last year the crowd wept as Paul McCartney sang “Yesterday”, this year the crowd wept when Kanye turned the Auto-Tune off. Hear for yourself:

diddy voodoo childIs this all a prelude to the mighty trinity making a pilgrimage into Black Rock this year? It would be happening in the footsteps of trendsetter P.Diddy’s playa storming visit last year, and Apple’s $3.2 billion acquisition of Dr Dre (alleged secret mastermind behind Burning Man) and Jimmy Iovine and their Beats. They will be competing against Google’s Burner founders, who want more Temporary Autonomous Zones like Burning Man, and paid $3.2 billion for a Nest.

Bring on more hiphop at Burning Man, says Burners.Me. Kanye, though, doesn’t seem to have gone over quite so well with the discerning San Francisco crowd.

From Billboard:

There was a mellow beginning and a repeatedly “Bloody” end to the first day of the lucky seventh edition of Outside Lands, the festival so beloved by San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park that organizers Another Planet have a contract to host it there until at least 2021. Don’t worry, though, it wasn’t real blood — just an attempt by Kanye West to extract some from the crowd by playing his current favorite song by himself over and over.

8:17 PM: As the sun completely makes way for a beautiful moon, this year’s main advancement in flower crown technology reveals itself: Some of these suckers light up now.

8:36 PM: Kanye West cuts off his “Clique” in order to address members of the press who he says look for something negative to write about him, “instead of embracing the moment, embracing the time, the era, the season that they’re living in — called Yeezy season.” Yeezon.

8:49 PM: Yeezus is in control now, and he stops the song “Power” dead in its tracks. “I like that song and all,” he notes, taking off his couture face mask, “but I want to play a little of the last song now.” He instructs the crowd to make “circles” so people can mosh when the beat to “Blood On The Leaves” drops. “This ain’t no radio shit,” he says. “This ain’t no concierge, maitre d’ music, trying to sound as smooth as possible.”

9:00 PM: As we’re all toasting to the scumbags and assholes on “Runaway,” a man in a wheelchair briefly stands up, grinning widely.

9:10 PM: “At the Yeezy show, everyone is a star,” Kanye croons through Auto-tune. “I promote self-confidence! If you’re a friend of mine, you’re really just a friend of yourself!”

9:20 PM: Snippets early hits come fast and furious, a blur that “All Falls Down” under “All of The Lights.”

9:50 PM:“Blood On The Leaves” is back again to close the show, along with renewed orders to make more mosh pit circles. Kanye adores when the beat drops on this track so much that he pulls it back to release it for the third and final time, leaving the stage in foggy silence. He’ll be a tough act to follow tomorrow, but plenty of artists are ready to go for it.

Fish sticks, anyone?