This year, I’m not entirely sure I’m fit to write a “best of” list that speaks for all of society. Then again, lists like these shouldn’t be thought of as the final word on a year’s cultural output, even for the person who wrote the list. Tastes change, people discover music from years past and realized they overlooked it.
For the final day of this year’s Pitchfork Music Festival, I ran about Union Park to try and catch most of the bands scheduled to perform. I treated it like a live sampler that record labels hand out, catching a couple songs here and there, only to dash off to another stage soon thereafter.
The musical acts that rose to the top of the pack on the second day of this year’s Pitchfork Music Festival all had one thing in common: Energy. Specifically, they knew how to wield it. Whether they brought it themselves, infused the crowd with it, or did some combination of the two, Saturday’s lineup had a nice slice of groups that kept the energy high: Chrissy Murderbot, No Age, OFF!, The Dismemberment Plan, and DJ Shadow.
Sometime after 7 p.m., Das Racist killed it. For every other act performing the first day of this year’s Pitchfork Music Festival, the K.O. came when the Brooklyn rap trio dropped their infectious new single, “Michael Jackson.” The tune’s chorus is simple, kinda dumb, hilarious, and downright catchy:“Michael Jackson/A million dollars/If you feelin’ me/Holler”.
Pitchfork Music Festival is smack dab in the middle of the summer festival season. After spending half a hot season sweatin’ it out to black metal, sissy bounce, and indie pop at street fests, one comes to accumulate a list of what to prepare for during the bigger festivals such as Pitchfork. Here are a handful of survival tips.
It’s been seven years since I first heard of TV On The Radio, seven years since I got tickets to Last Call with Carson Daly—yes, that Carson Daly—just to see the band play, seven years since I fell for a group I never saw coming. They’ll be taking the stage Sunday night to close this year’s Pitchfork Music Festival, and I can’t help but think about watching the little art-rock-band-that-could grow into the arena-ready powerhouse they’ve become.
Few bands playing this year’s Pitchfork Music Festival seem to inspire the same level of personal prose as The Dismemberment Plan. Saturday marks what appears to be the final show by the D.C. post-punk band, which recently reunited and played a handful of shows behind the reissue of their classic 1999 album, Emergency & I.
The Pitchfork Music Festival will kick into gear Friday afternoon at Chicago’s Union Park. Now in its sixth year, the three-day event has come to mirror the cultural omnipresence of the music-critique site it’s named after.
There’s the fantasy I’ve had about candy conventions, one I suppose many folks my age have dreamed up, too. It’s a mixture of Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory (yes, the movie and not the book) and a Simpsons episode that sees Homer and Marge attend a candy industry gathering.
Then I think, well, will this be another half-baked tumblr, with just a few terribly written posts that quickly finds its way to the graveyard of poorly executed Internet concepts? Then I think, well, isn’t the whole idea of cooking something other than pasta or rice a little extravagant?