Short, cute, loud girls with an overdeveloped sense of entitlement love The Shins.
They steam across the drying mud around the Bud Light Stage's soundboard — alone, in pairs, in quartets, in packs, pods and schools — as if it weren't already packed, Vienna-sausages-in-the-can tight, with several tens of thousands of people. Screaming into cell phones. Relating obscure facts about the New Mexico-based band to all within earshot. Sloshing beer onto others' clothing, with nary an "excuse me" or apology.
They do this in order to get to an even more crowded section closer to the stage, and to a band whose high pop-culture profile saw it appear on the Gilmore Girls and the soundtrack to Garden State last year. The girls do it regardless of the obvious fact that they'll never get as close as they want. They do it even though they'll probably spend more time yelling to one another than actually watching the band, and leave halfway through The Shins' set, fighting their way back through the crowd to try and see another act on another stage.
They do it just to have done it, to have been there.
That's what rock festivals are for.
Welcome to day three of Lollapalooza.
In 1991, the innovative road show spearheaded by Jane's Addiction frontman Perry Farrell captured college rock's graduation and commencement into the wider world. It defined the parameters of alternative music for the decade and set a protocol that would be followed by everything from Lilith Fair to the Warped Tour. Many music fans now in their late 20s and 30s remember the festival's eclectic combination of fringe acts, emerging arena stars, lefty politics and contemporized carnival fare (The Jim Rose Circus Sideshow, anyone?) as one of their generation's defining cultural moments.
They also remember the tour's subsequent descent into disorganization and lineups loaded with mainstream heavy metal as a symbol of the death of indie rock as they knew it. By the time Lollapalooza 1998 was canceled in order to give the powers that be a chance to find some perspective, most of its first wave of supporters had long since abandoned it, and newer cavalcades of hip had appeared to take its place.
Nonetheless, the festival rose from its own ashes in '03, splitting the difference between its original cutting-edge image and later pandering, to hit the road for a comparatively short 30-date tour. But the show's disappointing box office was a harbinger; the '04 itinerary was shut down due to slow advance ticket sales.
Enter Capital Sports & Entertainment, the company that runs the annual weekend-long Austin City Limits Music Festival. Capital bought the Lollapalooza name from Farrell, and last summer rolled out a single event bearing that moniker in downtown Chicago's sprawling Grant Park. At two days, five stages and around 70 acts, the new Lollapalooza was clearly modeled on the extremely successful ACL fest, and drew more than 60,000 attendees.
This year, Capital upped the ante considerably, expanding the schedule to three days, and putting 130 performers on eight stages.
The question of whether the world needs a new Lollapalooza is moot. While the cool names and cool ideas of its '90s incarnation may have implied otherwise, the festival wasn't definitive, but rather representative. It didn't draw the line where underground music entered the mainstream consciousness or make the bands that participated famous; it just showed them in what was then an appropriately forward-thinking light. Lollapalooza was just the hippest package going at the time.
Set against the backdrop of the information age, this year's model was instantly recognizable as a sign of the times instead of as a tastemaker — what was always true is just a lot more obvious these days. Lollapalooza is still dedicated to a qualified eclecticism that emphasizes hyped semi-obscure pop and rock acts — this weekend featured the likes of Wilco, Death Cab for Cutie and She Wants Revenge — while embracing everything from techno to bluegrass. Yet it still isn't capable of breaking an unknown act; on those counts, the shindig has hardly changed at all. That it relies so heavily on that area where indie rock attains a higher public profile is just that more conspicuous at a time when TV-show references regarding pop culture have almost caught up to Internet chatter.
Every major city has at least one radio-station-sponsored rock fest or city-sponsored art fest or independent music fest or some damn thing. Diehard fans have grown accustomed to traveling long distances for days-long events like New York's CMJ Showcase or New Orleans' Voodoo Music Fest. (Not to mention Austin City Limits.)
Each summer is packed with multi-band tours crisscrossing the country. At this point, a single event, a BIG one, just makes sense. And given Pop America's weirdly parallel dichotomist tendencies toward nostalgia — you know, where the ironists always embrace the same long-dead trend the sincere fans do, to the point where nobody can figure out if they actually like something or not, and somebody gets rich in the process — a savvy promoter could do worse than attaching it to the almost universally recognizable Lollapalooza name.
A lot worse. Early reports are putting the number of fans that spent last weekend careening (and later trudging) from stage to stage at Grant Park — and hearing everything from hometown pop-punk (The Smoking Popes) to Latin- and reggae-flavored genre bending (Manu Chao) to household names (Lollapalooza vets Red Hot Chili Peppers) — at around 200,000.
Two hundred thousand.
That's a lot of people for a girl to bump into in her quest to get closer to The Shins. But she'll always be able to tell people she was there.
For Lollapalooza highlights, lowlights and in-betweens, check out www.blurbex.com.
This article appears in Aug 9-15, 2006.