Spring Break
A Rock Pilgrimage
Grant Snider
Issue date: 8/18/08 Section: Culture
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It's an experience that promises thrills and challenges on par with shoplifting from Wal-Mart or necking in a deserted parking lot - with only slightly less messy consequences.
Ignoring the fact that my days of shoplifting and necking are long past (hell, they never even existed), I journeyed to Chicago in late July for the Pitchfork Music Festival. I'd made an identical pilgrimage as an impressionable undergraduate only two summers before. Apparently, memories of near-heatstroke fade more quickly than memories of seeing a year's worth of great music in only one weekend.
Arriving at four in the morning, the twinkling Chicago skyline could have been a fatigue-induced mirage. Later, I was assured otherwise by the recurring roar of the 'L' going by, as I tried in vain to sleep in past 9:30 a.m.
The sky was gray and intermittently pouring as I shuffled into Chicago's Union Park with other festival goers in the early afternoon. Indie kids in thrift-store outfits huddled under umbrellas and smoked cigarettes. As the band Caribou played a fantastic set of dream-pop soundscapes and Brian Wilsonesque melodies, the rain stopped for good. The crowd was soggy but appreciative.
Pitchfork, by nature, is a music journalism hype machine. It is charged with introducing a vast but narrow-minded audience of indie rock devotees to hip, unproven new acts (Vampire Weekend, Fleet Foxes, Bon Iver) while keeping tabs on established groups they've poured their energy into popularizing (Animal Collective, The Hold Steady, Spoon). Pitchfork also attempts to pay homage to older, influential artists who achieved success outside of the current indie/college rock infrastructure (Dinosaur Jr., Sebadoh, Ghostface Killah and Raekwon, Public Enemy).
Pitchfork's mission makes for an interesting blend of music, at least to the quasi-intellectual young white male. But every large festival brings the dilemma: with multiple stages and crowds of ever-rabid fans to navigate, which bands are worth the battle for a close spot, which bands are worth glimpsing from afar, and which bands should be neglected entirely to take care of bodily functions?
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