I have always been intrigued by the art and/or consumer science of festival flyer design. The festival flyer is not just a one-dimensional announcement simply announcing, “These bands are playing our music festival.” It is an important marketing tool to brand the festival experience and display artistic diversity across the festival lineup. As genres like ‘indie’ and ‘electro’ begin to fractal into chillwave, dubstep, and other made-up words, having a wide range of names that are strategically positioned on a flyer can change the entire consumer perception of a festival. Even if all of the wristbands are going to sell out no matter what.
One day we’ll look back at festival flyers like they are important historical artifacts that represent the intersection of music and culture. Just kidding--old flyers will just be forgotten .jpg files, chilling in internet eternity in the same digital graveyard as MySpace profiles. It is more important to analyze a new flyer when it is released in order to try to understand the current hierarchy of buzz.
One of my low points last year was selling my Coachella tickets because I had finals. Actually, the real low point was watching Kanye West close out Coachella 2011 from my laptop in the fifth-floor stacks of the library. Alone. Yep, definitely much lower. You see, after attending the show in 2010 and having near-religious experiences during the sets of Jay-Z, Muse, Tiësto, Phoenix, and many others, I vowed to make the yearly hajj to Indio, California, to be a part of the love fest.
I messed up last year. After reading the lineup, announced yesterday, there is no way I will mess up in 2012. And neither should you.
Radiohead didn’t show up to play the Occupy Wall Street protests, as was rumored late last week. But Jeff Mangum of Neutral Milk Hotel did. It’s a little like expecting the 82nd Airborne Division and getting the Luxembourg Navy, and that makes it all the more fitting. The protests will likely end up a lot like Mangum’s career: a yelp from the margins riding a momentary unfocused energy likely to collapse into itself before it takes any real shape.
Unless you’re the kind of person who spent more money on library fines than clothes in 1997, Neutral Milk Hotel weren’t even a blip to you. But for a second they were the hot shit in Lilliput: two very good albums of tweaky lo-fi indie rock on the label that’d later put out Arcade Fire. Mangum’s surrealist songs (about two-headed boys, the King of the Carrot Flowers, and the ghost of Anne Frank) and truth-hungry twee-trumpet of a voice were striking. Put those records on now and they still are. But just as he was peaking with promise, he dropped out of view, literally disappearing after 1998’s In the Aeroplane Over the Sea (which became a cult classic in absentia).
Nirvana, “Territorial Pissings”
Here is a professionally shot and edited video of Nirvana, playing “Territorial Pissings” at a show in Seattle on Halloween of 1991. It comes from the deluxe 20th anniversary reissue of Nevermind that’s out next week. It’s a tight, blistering version, but there’s nothing revelatory about it, and if you already feel inundated by the steady torrent of covers, tributes, and essays that have accompanied the album’s anniversary, we totally understand if you choose not to click. But just know this: You’ll be missing the opportunity to see Dave Grohl wearing white shorts over white long johns.
1. Jay-Z and Kanye West, “Otis”
This, the first "single" from Kanye and Jay’s Watch The Throne (single in quotes because Hov claimed there would be no official single from the album), dropped Wednesday night on Funkmaster Flex’s New York radio show (you should do yourself a favor and listen to Flex’s accompanying rant). The last time Kanye West flipped an Otis Redding sample he made the greatest song of his career (Late Registration's "Gone"). So stakes were high on this one. "Otis" doesn’t quit flip the Stax legend’s "Try A Little Tenderness" as much as it fluffs its hair and puts it front and center. But where the beat is a little underwhelming, the interplay between Jay and Kanye is stellar, as the two trade bars, and use the end of each other’s rhymes as jumping off points for their own. Jay-Z: “I got five passports, I’m never going to jail.” Kanye: “I made Jesus walk, I’m never going to hell.” Don’t sweat the technique.
