- Lollapalooza certainly doesn't market itself as a premiere bastion for innovative electronic music. What with headliners like the nauseatingly ubiquitous Kings of Leon and Snoop Dogg, this festival was positioned more for the 16-to-20-something-year-old Pitchfork-reading crowd. That said, Lollapalooza has had an ever-growing appreciation for DJs, evidenced this year by a towering cylindrical stage featuring turntablists and laptop maestros. While the venues reserved for The Killers and their ilk were bigger and roomier, the glorified DJ booth bested them with its unique semi-circle setup, industrial strength fog machines, a net of hanging LEDs and enough luminous light panels to embarrass Time Square. Amongst the many beat bangers were A-Trak, Hercules and Love Affair and Deadmau5.
Chicago has hosted the revamped three-day Grant Park experience since 2005 and, being an Illinois native, I've made an event of it for several years now. The greatest joy has been tracking the rise in electronic artists, and the subsequent growth in the audiences interested in hearing them. 2007 saw the much talked-about return of two space-helmeted robots, with 2008 spawning a DJ-exclusive stage. Not surprisingly, a look at America's other big-ticketed festivals (Coachella, Bonnaroo, Rothbury, etc.) proves that the Windy City isn't the only place dance's upsurge in popularity is happening. Thus, my 2009 voyage was treated as both a vacation and study of the forces propelling electronic music forward in the States.
Heading to Lollapalooza, my hypothesis for the jump in young U.S. listeners was accredited to anger; anger at the outgoing Bush years; anger at a suffering economy; and anger at the most common source of angsty teen grievances, parents. Given that the best-slotted acts at the festival (Boyz Noize, MSTRKRFT, Simian Mobile Disco, Bassnectar) all tend toward harder, driving techno, my theory made sense. What better release than a long bout of intense raving? I imagined. But after conversations with San Francisco's Bassnectar and Simian Mobile Disco of the UK, I found my conjecture far too cerebral and borderline pretentious.
Both acts agree that the seemingly overnight explosion in dance's stateside appreciation is derived, in part, from its relative newness. "[America], culturally, seems way behind in electronic music," Bassnectar, AKA Lorin Ashton, told me. He describes feeling "less relevant, less interesting" across the pond. "I don't need to go over there and do it for them because they already have enough people. Whereas in the States, no one's doing it." It's a common lament, but he's quick to offer the upshot, "Now we'll be playing…on a Monday night in Missouri or Mississippi and you have shoulder-to-shoulder freakshit crowds just ready to go nuts." James of SMD, an affable curly-headed chum of more than six feet, agrees: "We've seen a big change in the last five years since we've been coming over here. Seems like there has been a real shift toward it recently."
Still, I believe there must be another element besides newness that's drawing people in. Bassnectar deems "raw power" as the attraction. "No acoustic sound is going to reach that level of heaviness. That's why electronically engineered music has the potential to go beyond what rock & roll and what all these traditional forms of music have done." His set was a perfect exhibition of this hectic energy, blasting trademark techno glitch. A small surprise was the sampling of Kid Cudi's "Day and Night." This track seemed too easy, too obvious but almost every DJ at Lollapalooza played the worn-out club banger because, well, the crowds were asking for it. With the exception of a laugh-inducing waltz, the performance was a rush of seriously broken beats. Normally I could find fault in a show this psychotic, but as the final set on Saturday, Bassnectar's mad circus was the charge essential to revving festival-goers up for the bar-hopping and house-partying to come.
Simian alluded to heaviness as well. "We've been trying to push playing longer format tunes...that play for six or seven minutes, which is short for Europe," James described of their recent stylings, then added, "Over here, it's really like that's dragging on. Two minutes a tune. Really fast, really hard." Like Bassnectar, they gave themselves over to the sweaty ravers in attendance. Though I didn't see it firsthand, the boys told me of a girl slammed frightfully hard against the press pit rail that required security aid. The incident, though isolated, stands as a good example of the "dancing" taking place nearest the stage all weekend. Giant mobs gave in to rough pushing that often bordered on moshing.
This harshness brings me, for better or worse, back to my linkage of anger to popular American electronic. After wading through a weekend of thrashing arms and wild fist pumps, I'm still inclined to believe that kids are asking for a level of violence in dance. Boyz Noize and MSTRKRFT supplied more of the ruckus, even on the final day when you'd imagine exhaustion to have set in with most attendees.
However, with such unique audio entering their ears, maybe these listeners are just asking DJs to push limits. After all, not every DJ offered such frenzied sound. Andy Butler of Hercules and Love Affair provided a Saturday afternoon break with breezy disco and innocuous funk. Sunday night's blowout from Deadmau5 also gave Grant Park a solid mix of rawk and relaxing. The veteran had a firm understanding for how far to push the crowd, letting softer, meandering trance soothe his hyperactive audience in between up-tempo techno. Ear-to-ear grins and innumerable high fives displayed at both of these sets allow me to trust that the kids don't just want to rage. They're more than happy to be aurally taken down the path less traveled.