TUNE-YARDS
What a long strange trip it’s been.
After four days of battling the blistering heat, sleeping under the Tennessee stars, wandering about the 700-acre campground and singing along with musical legends, my body is begging for rest. My feet are worn, my eyes are slipping shut, my fingernails are buried under heaps of dirt. But I survived my first Bonnaroo, and live to tell the tales of an extraordinary weekend.
The eleventh annual Bonnaroo Music and Arts Festival gathered more than 80,000 music lovers to the small town of Manchester, Tennessee for four days of peace, love, and music. While Woodstock may have pioneered the festival movement in America, Bonnaroo has taken over where the hippie extravaganza left off. Bustling with eco-friendly activism, throngs of naked bodies twirling around and mudslides forming across the farm, Bonnaroo successfully transformed technology-obsessed Americans into carefree and wild-spirited festi-lovers - if only for the weekend.
The small town of Manchester, Tennessee has welcomed the bulging crowds of Bonnaroo Music and Arts Festival for eleven years - opening its quiet roads and grassy knolls to infiltration by hippies, hipsters, burnouts, ravers, rockers and every other category of music lovers imaginable. Giant RVs, cars stuffed to the brim with supplies and hitchhiking hopefuls invade the nearby Walmart en route to the festival, gearing up for four days of foregoing electricity and showers in favor of nature exploration and musical madness. Excitement flairs during the hours-long wait to the entrance, everyone eager to set up camp and start boogying down!
Now that Week 2 of Coachella is over, the reality is setting in: the end is here. Put away your camping gear, your laser lights should find their way back into your closet, and for godsake put those weird 'fivefinger' shoes in your attic (unless Coachella is only the start of your festival season). For all of you Junkies who just can't get enough, this is the withdrawal period. Symptoms include and are not limited to:
- Coachella word vomit: you try to mention your epic weekend in every conversation you have.
- Coachella Facebook Stalking: when you sit in front of your computer flipping through all your friends (even strangers) Coachella albums.
- Plain old post-festival depression.
The official lineup for this year's Lollapalooza Festival has been announced! Taking place on August 3 - 5 in Grant Park, Chicago, this year's festival is sure to be one for the record books.
Artists include The Red Hot Chili Peppers, The Black Keys, a recently reunited Black Sabbath, Jack White, Florence + the Machine, At the Drive-In, Bassnectar, The Shins, Avicii, Justice, The Weeknd, Sigur Ros, a recently reunited Afgan Whigs, M83, Frank Ocean, Nero, Die Antwoord, Tune-Yards, SBTRKT, The Walkmen, Sharon Van Etten, The War on Drugs, Twin Shadow, Toro y Moi, Wale, Zed's Dead, Childish Gambino and many more! For the full lineup, click here.
Get your tickets here, but hurry up, they'll sell out quick!
Bright Eyes – Lover I Don’t Have to Love
Once upon a time, in a small Pennsylvania town filled with troubled kids falling in and out of tortured love, there existed, hands down, the best, most potent remedy for lonesome pre/teen heartbreak in all of the land: AOL Instant Messenger Away Messages.
How do away messages work, exactly? For those of you who weren’t on the AIM circuit, an away message is sort of like the equivalent to today’s Facebook status or Twitter update – a brief amount of space with limited characters, providing the user with a precious platform to voice their intended-for-all-to-read messages. What they were originally supposed to be for was to let your buds know where you were if you weren’t answering your messages. So, if someone messaged, say, Sally, and Sally was out mowing the lawn, then Sally’s away message might read: “Mowing the lawn. BBL,” or something of the like. Get it?
Buffalos graze in the horizon, a moose lifts its snout to the ripe air and lion cubs playfully paw at each other on the gorge. It would seem as though the petrified animals of the Natural History Museum come to life as tUnE-YaRdS, the clever stage moniker of performer Merill Garbus, approaches the stage confidently. She unleashes an a capella string of chants and yodels, her energy immersing the audience immediately as bodies begin to sway with a natural rhythm and feet stomp to the beat of the drums. The first song, "Hatari" is comprised mostly of animalistic sounds and unintelligible words, making it even more powerful when she cries out towards the end of the song, "There is a natural sound that wild things make when they're bound." The energetic opening song sets the tone, and the rest of her 45-minute performance does not disappoint. She has assembled a backing band that is as nontraditional and quirky as her music: two women share one set of drums and one male plays bass while tUnE-YaRdS, a jovial woman with wild hair, clutches the microphone with both hands, leaning into it eagerly as she releases powerful sounds that seem to infuse classic folk with pure noise.
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