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July 24, 2005
Lollapalooza's missing purpose
Woodstock was the most famous music festival. It was a hippie summit and featured some of the most dynamic folk and rock of the era.
Live Aid was a call to feed starving Africans, doubling as a rock-and-pop summit. At Live Aid, U2 cemented its status as a band with a mission and a killer arena presence.
Twenty years later, Live 8 was a call to influence the world's policymakers and help African nations overcome abject poverty. Like its predecessor, Live 8 (with free admission) attracted some of the world's top musical acts, and U2 again demonstrated its change-the-world verve and ability to rawk a festival crowd.
Farm Aid picked up the Live Aid vibe and through the years with the help of people like Willie Nelson, John Mellencamp and Bob Dylan, has promoted the cause of the ever-shrinking American family-owned farm, sometimes to big crowds, sometimes not. Twenty years later, it's still an event.
Other long-running musical festivals aren't about changing the world, but they're often the yearly olympics of their genres, like MerleFest (Americana), Montreux (jazz), Chicago Blues Festival (blues), or the Great American Brass Band Festival (brass bands).
Arriving on the heels of this year's buzzworthy Live 8 festival is Lollapalooza, a weekend-long music confab in Chicago's Grant Park. With a name that means "something outstanding or unusual," Lollapalooza is a big festival. Some 30,000 people. Lots of security. Colorful, trendy graphics. And 99 percent well-heeled white people.
But what does Lollapalooza celebrate? To rally behind? To commune about? It's hard to tell. New and allternative music, perhaps, but that's not explained in any of the festival's marketing, nor does it explain the appearance of Billy Idol on the ticket.
After attending this weekend's show, Lollapalooza was really more like... a nicely organized but unfocused trade show. With a zig-zag assortment of old and new bands, some country-party, and some retro (50-year-old Billy Idol and his band were pretty tight) and prominence of sponsors like SBC (SBC?) and Budweiser, Lollapalooza was a full venue, but emotionally vacant. A Stepford festival. Cause-less. Devoid of a big-picture reason for being.
Previous incarnations of Lollapalooza have been shaky; last year's show was cancelled due to poor ticket sales. At one point, Lollapalooza had taken a six-year break.
Organizers smartly located this year's show in Chicago; Grant Park is a diamond locale. But I doubt the event's future word of mouth; in lacking the basics, such as a purpose/mission statement, defined values, and an easy-to-understand and promote positioning statement, Lollapalooza quickly adds up to a blase and expensive ($85 per ticket) trip to the park.
Nothing outstanding or unusual about that.
UPDATE: Kudos to Lolla organizers: They emailed a survey to ticket purchasers, asking for feedback in preparation for a 2006 show, including this question: "When you think of Lollapalooza, what is the first word or phrase that comes to mind?" I answered "unfocused."
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A better comparison for Lollapalooza is Intonation (http://www.intonationmusicfest.com), a much smaller but more successful festival held in Chicago a few weeks earlier. A quick technorati/bloglines/icerocket search for Intonation and Lollapalooza will make it clear why one festival fails (continually) and one was everything it set out to be. Here is Pitchfork's coverage of the event: http://pitchforkmedia.com/features/live/festivals/intonation05/
Ah, thanks for providing insight on the event. I had wondered what I was missing regarding the message of the event, and it seems that I wasn't missing a thing: there was no message!
I love your comparison to a badly-organized trade show! The biggest mistake that most exhibitors make when going to a show is not to know (a) the show's purpose and (b) their own purpose/message at the show. It seems that this festival did what many exhibitors do--said, "Well, because everyone else is going" and let it go at that.
Thanks for the insight!
Diary of a Shameless Self-Promoter, http://heidimiller.libsyn.com
How about just a place to go see good bands? Or value? Any single concert by any of those bands will start at $25 (or $150, if you add up all the ticketmaster extra charges) -- isn't the $85 quite a deal?
Can't festivals just be about the music, for the fans of that music, once again?
I dunno, I was there and I thought the whole point was to enjoy the music and atmosphere. Since its not in Perry's hands anymore, its run by an entertainment company, whose purpose was not to support some cause, it was to make money lets be clear about that. You can read my experience there on my blog. I had a great time, didn't you?
Couldn't agree more with Ollie and Bruno - it's actually refreshing to have a gathering of acts sans umbrella ideology or "cause." It's so tiring to have everything needlessly defined by washed-up hippies clinging to trumped-up achievements and memories that grow more and more fantastical with every passing year.
Lollapalooza was originally meant as a farewell to the band Janes Addiction now it is meant to be a celebration of music. If one band concerts dont have to have a cause why should a large one have too. It is put on for the single purpose of enjoying music.
