I spent four days mid-June in Manchester, Tennessee attending Bonnaroo Music and Arts Festival. Having attended the festival last year, I thought I would be a little more prepared for a music, booze, and drug-packed weekend.
I was wrong.
Instead of being chilled out, I anxiously tried to understand the average Bonnaroo attendee. Were they drugged out hippies? College frat boys? And where did I fit in?
Of the thirty-four artists I saw that weekend a few put on especially captivating performances. Cloud Nothings, although sounding hoarse and tired, gave the crowd their all on Thursday night. “Psychic Trauma” and “Fall In” were the two standouts of the set, and their 8:30 PM timeslot allowed for more dramatic stage lighting than I'd expect to see at a punk show. My big discovery of Thursday evening was Polica. Something about their alienated, spacey sound didn't grab me at first listen, but in concert it felt absolutely alive.
The Friday lineup stacked Vampire Weekend at the same time as Chvrches, and Neutral Milk Hotel 45 minutes before Phoenix, so we raced around the campground, catching 20 minutes of each set before landing at Kanye West an hour early. All the “Fuck Kanye” scribbled on the Porta Potties, the stories about his significantly delayed set in 2008, and speculation on whether he would raise North above his head like Simba in The Lion King was all waiting for me as the concert began.
The show started on time, revealing a gargantuan rectangular LED screen in the middle of the stage. It wasn't long before Kanye stopped a song by yelling, “Cut that shit! Cut that shit out!” and demanding the audience recognize him. My favorite remark of the evening was, “If you're a fan of me, you're a fan of your goddamn self.” It's true that Kanye has a big, outrageous personality. He causes controversy everywhere he goes, and this Bonnaroo was no exception: he spent his set screaming, “Where the press at?!” in a couple different iterations. He played his hits, but it was obvious that just being a superstar wasn't enough for him. He told the audience that he was the number one rock star in the world, that he didn't care about anyone who was alive.Hhe knew that sounded bad, but clarified by saying he compares himself to people like Walt Disney, Henry Ford, and Shakespeare. I came to Kanye expecting to be shocked and amused, and I left feeling pretty damn satisfied.
The other two standout shows of the weekend were Bridget Everett and the Tender Moments and A$AP Ferg. We saw Bridget Everett after narrowly missing tickets to see Broad City's Abbi Jacobson and Ilana Glazer. Bridget came out after Hannibal Burress finished up, towering over her band mates in a slinky red dress and high heels. Swinging a bottle in a paper bag, Bridget Everett proceeded to sing songs about her over-the-top sex life, stopping only to seduce audience members by smothering them in her DDD breasts or to talk about her childhood. I watched as one college-aged boy after another stood up and left the Comedy Tent as Bridgett rambled on about her vagina and straddled a stool onstage. She settled on one twenty-something in particular, and ended the set by sitting on his face. I walked out of the Comedy Tent giddy that such a show had been featured at Bonnaroo.
A day later around the same time I was watching A$AP Ferg at The Other Tent. He covered other A$AP Mob songs like “Move That Dope” before moving into some of his own material. More than any other performer I saw that weekend, A$AP Ferg made interacting with his audience his number one priority for the set. He asked for pretty girls to crowd surf up to the stage, twerk, and take their tops off. I stood in the back, arms folded, half considering it just for the experience. Girl after girl took the stage until it was completely full. Once the song began the girls started to dance while large bodyguards watched from the side of the stage. After whatever twerking song that was chosen was over, Ferg had the crowd chant, “Get the fuck off my stage” until all the girls were gone. It was a very strange and uncomfortable experience for me as a woman, especially when a couple of the girls tried to stay onstage. Other controversial things A$AP Ferg did during his set included telling everyone in the audience to run at “the fat guy with the beard in the middle,” and bringing up people from the audience to freestyle.
Looking back on Bonnaroo well over a month later, I'd call it an exciting, sometimes befuddling and almost always stimulating experience. The food is overpriced and the audience questionable, but the lineup is consistently too good to pass up. Bring your wine coolers and flower headdresses, and I'll see you at the farm next year.
