Radiohead played at the 2004 Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival in 2004. This year’s lineup lists The Stone Roses, Blur, Phoenix and the Red Hot Chili Peppers as headliners.
PRO: Festivals introduce music fans to new groups while offering bands the opportunity to reunite
In 2012, Coachella reincarnated Tupac. Tupac. In all his pixelated glory. You don’t need another reason to like festivals.
But if you really needed another reason, here’s five:
1. Festivals are generally great opportunities for broken-up bands to reunite and play, maybe just for one last hurrah. Take Coachella. In 2003, Iggy Pop and the Stooges reunited there; in 2004, the Pixies; and in 2010, Pavement, just to name a few.
2. The existence of these festivals can bring bands that are still together but don’t otherwise tour to the area. Many bands hop the festival circuit, using the highly populated all-day concerts as a way to tone down their tour while still reaching major cities and big crowds. It would be preferable for the bands to hit numerous venues across the country, but years of heavy traveling can take its toll. Musicians could randomly play a club or two a year in front of 100 people, or they could play big-name festivals and reach thousands. Modest Mouse is a band that has taken to only playing big shows, this year playing as one of the Coachella headliners.
3. As a festival-goer, you can learn about tons of bands you might not have heard of before. Granted, you won’t like most of them, but there’s the potential for you to find a rare gem among the washed-up scene bands and cute pop that make up some of the lesser-known supporting acts at most events.
4. Festivals are fun. There’s something about the atmosphere associated with them — huge crowds of passionate music fans dancing to some of their favorite music for hours that turn into days. Even when you don’t know the band, the feeling can be infectious.
5. Lastly, festivals are not all absurdly expensive. Certainly, many of the bigger ones cost $300 or more, but there are affordable options on the East Coast. There’s fall’s Virgin Mobile Freefest ($0), summer’s Vans Warped Tour ($32.50) or even spring’s Bamboozle, which gives attendees the option of one-day passes at $65, a relative bargain compared with other festivals that only offer three-day passes for $300 or more. Sure, lineup quality suffers somewhat (see Warped Tour’s slowly devolving lineup), but the music lovers’ free-for-all atmosphere is still the same and the opportunities for a good time are still plentiful.
It can be hard to feel excited about music festivals when the cost of attendance or even travel somehow surpasses the cost of the books you bought for the last two semesters, but that doesn’t mean festivals should be discounted altogether. The amount of fun a concert-goer has is directly proportional to how much fun he or she plans to have while there, so don’t focus on the negatives. Find a doable festival and make the most of it.
–Kelsey
CON: Festivals don’t bring anything new to the table except rising ticket costs and a good story
There was a time in my life, not so long ago, when I would have given anything to be able to attend a major summer music festival. My heart would always sink when I’d see the lineup for Lollapalooza or Coachella, and quickly realize that as much as I wanted to go, there was no way I could make it out to Chicago, much less Indio, Calif.
As I got older, these lofty dreams of traveling around America to see a festival became more of a reality. A few festivals have popped up on the East Coast, such as Governors Ball and Firefly, and the possibility of traveling to Tennessee doesn’t seem as absurd as it once did.
But do I really want to go anymore? Not especially.
We are still living in the age of the music festival, but the concept is now worn out. The same headliners keep popping up, when they were only worth traveling for a couple years ago. Take the Coachella lineup this year. At the top of the bill are the Red Hot Chili Peppers, Passion Pit, Phoenix and Pretty Lights. When I first saw the announcement back in February, I said to myself: “Is this deja vu?”
I can understand why a festival like Coachella would be fine with putting out a lineup that feels copied and pasted from a past year. It seems no matter which bands play, people will attend the festival. Maybe it’s for the experience. Maybe it’s for the tradition. The public seems frustratingly content, which might allow festival-bookers to be more comfortable (read: lazy) in staying with the same bands when planning next year’s festivals.
This brings up another question: Do festival-goers really care about the music at all? If they did, they wouldn’t be satisfied with the Red Hot Chili Peppers at the front of this year’s bill or hearing “Sleepyhead,” “1901,” and half-baked dubstep. The people who are purchasing these extremely expensive tickets seem to be bigger fans of experience than music. If they were truly paying for the bands, they’d be more willing to spend $10 to $20 when the smaller and debatably more interesting bands come through their cities on tour.
Festivals used to be yearly events I’d dream about. Now that I am old enough and able to attend them if I wanted to, I have grown less than interested. And I don’t see that changing anytime soon — I’d take a tiny house show over an over-the-top music festival any day.
–Emily
