This post originally appeared on Frontier Psychiatrist on April 5th, 2013.
What am I doing at Lollapalooza Brasil? I know zero Portuguese, there’s a #Lolla in my own city of Chicago, and it smells like shit because instead of big, beautiful downtown Grant Park, I am listening to music in the grassy interior of a horse racing track which wasn’t properly cleaned beforehand. It’s raining and I am alone.
But it’s not all bad. The rain will go away, the danceable indie-rock of Copacabana Club is sounding sexy and I’m within minutes of entering the park. The singer comes down the gated area that connects to the stage and commiserates with the fans and crowd surfs and things are looking better. As the crowd slowly filters inside, I walk around the park a couple times to get my bearings, waiting for Cake to play in Sao Paulo, a circumstance I never predicted I would have experience. I am waiting for my friend who entered the line to get tickets two hours ago. It is getting dark and storm clouds are moving in. “Never There” is playing and I get these texts:
There is a big dust up. Some people are cutting the line and the security isn’t doing anything so others are yelling.
All the cashiers except one have now left. I’m next and there is no one attending.
And the people in front of me are trying to negotiate! This is nuts.
The police are here. Fuck me with a screwdriver!!!!
Then my friend, an American expat with enough knowledge of Portuguese to help me through the day, stops responding to my texts and I’m thinking he’s arrested and I’m panicking and what the hell am I going to do and then…of course you’re reading this right now and I lived through it and he wasn’t arrested and we had a (mostly) enjoyable time. It’s a music festival. I wouldn’t be here if it weren’t for fun –and neither would thousands of other people.
The Flaming Lips are next, one of my favorite live acts. My friend and I are walking from one end of the park to the other (a distance nowhere nearly as long as that of Grant Park), dodging as much mud as we can (a futile endeavor), listening to the beginning of their set, most of which sounded like new stuff, plus plenty of tracks from Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots. As always, lead singer Wayne Coyne was pushing the boundaries of live music, but his performance art and vague nurturing of doll-baby connected to wires fell flat not only with me, but seemed to confuse the unimpressed crowd. Of course, it didn’t help that his trademark ramblings included the hypothetical scenario of an airplane crashing into the surrounding Sao Paulo skyline. Add a sound system unable to handle the band’s psychedelic sounds, and it wasn’t one of their best shows.
So some bands were good (Toro y Moi), some bands were bad (Temper Trap). So what? There’s more to Lollapalooza than just the music. In Chicago, the fest also includes various local restaurants curated by Michelin-starred chef Graham Elliot, imported and craft beer tents for those who don’t dig on Budweiser, as well as an avenue of local merchants, artists, non-profits, hoping you’ll buy, support or sign-up for whatever product or idea they’re selling. In Sao Paulo, there seemed to be nothing particularly local or even Brazilian.
Or was there? Many Brazilians pointed out how the festival’s disorganization was entirely stereotypically Brazilian. First off, the food: no. Just no. I had one slice of awful pizza the whole weekend, complete with unmelted mozzarella and undercooked sausage, and didn’t have the stomach to try their American burger, despite my usually adventurous tongue (See: China). Beer? Only Heineken. To be fair, the propagation of the product was efficient: Give two tickets; get one beer. Simple. Except for the process of acquiring the tickets. My friend and I commented on how ridiculous it was that there be multiple ticket windows open, with many people standing idly behind them. What were these people doing? Were they getting a cut of the R$350 (~$175) single-day entrance fee? When someone outside the line heard us speaking English and asked us to get them tickets, a Brazilian in front of us explained his sincere shame of the corruption and laziness that can be typical of Brazilian logistics.
Particularly for someone like me, a Chicagoan who has been to Lollapalooza in Chicago, who not only enjoyed Franz Ferdinand both times, but skipped the Black Keys both times, it was disappointing to hear these negative assessments from locals. No free water refills, no hand sanitizer outside the bathrooms (some of which segregated by male/female).
That said, the stages weren’t branded by corporations as they are in American music festivals. There were mobile food, beer, and snack vendors walking through the crowd. A Ferris wheel (when it was running) was a welcome diversion. Tomahawk put on a set that made me wonder why I had waited so long to listen to them. Passion Pit had a surprise stand-out set on Friday night; I had no idea Brazilians would be so into the Killers or Two Door Cinema Club, but there was a massive crowd for both (the latter a headliner, the former a daytime act). You must have seen the new Queens of the Stone Age track by now. And if the amount of Black Keys shirts I saw on Saturday mean anything, apparently the #lolla organizers know what they’re doing putting on a show in Sao Paulo.
At this point, many festivals are diluted clones with little to offer in difference from the other major festivals, national or international. A lot of the bands here were either at the 2012 version of Lolla or will be in Chicago in just a few months. But there is something unique of being a foreigner at a music festival. There’s a bizarre bridge of the discomfort of not knowing where you are, along with the reassuring sounds of seeing bands that are familiar, as well as having the hopefully prospect of exploring unknown artists. Attending a music festival in a foreign country, is somewhere between absurd and insane, and I highly recommend it, and ultimately, it isn’t entirely unenjoyable, no matter how hard a festival tries. Alas, I did not attend on Sunday, but only because I had the good fortune to be invited to an Easter Sunday with a Brazilian family, but more on that in my next piece.
For the future, Lolla Brazil should invest in more national pride: more Brazilian headliners (like hip-hop / afro-soul / electronic artist Criolo), more Brazilian food, more Brazilian sponsors. Make it a destination festival, and we won’t mind caking our shoes in horse manure to a soundtrack of some musical artists, that may not be mind-blowing (save Tomahawk), but are entirely enjoyable and solid enough to make the trip worthwhile. The festival has the potential of Sao Paulo itself: make me want to come back, and I will. Until then, Lolla, ciao.
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