It was a really bad week for music festivals, huh?

How Burning Man and Electric Zoo became chaotic Fyre Festival-style timeline addictions. Plus, let's unpack that new Laneway line-up, shall we?

Sep 08, 2023

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Music festivals: the best places in the world; potentially, also the worst.

If you’re heading to Randall's Island, there are two ways to get there: by car, or the subway. The picturesque green space – an equal distance between Central Park and Rikers Island – is well worth a visit if you’re ever lucky enough to find yourself in New York. Grab a bagel, take a stroll, feel the serenity, then walk over to a small salt marsh looking out over Harlem River and the Robert F Kennedy toll bridge.

That area is known as Little Hell Gate, an apt name considering what happened there this past weekend. As 85,000 people began arriving to take in the annual three-day festival Electric Zoo, organisers sent out a series of desperate tweets. The first one cancelled the entire first day, citing unbuilt stages and “unparalleled challenges”.

Day two didn’t go to plan either, its opening delayed by another two hours. As day three got underway on Sunday, organisers realised they’d overpacked the festival site. They closed the front gates. Apologies were made. Refunds were promised. A warning was issued. “If you are on your way or were planning to come later, we kindly ask that you refrain from coming to the festival site,” they said.

By this stage, festival goers were rightfully infuriated. They weren’t getting the Electric Zoo experience they’d been promised, an electronic dance music festival where “reality melds into dreamland for an ethereal experience beyond imagination”.

Did they stay calm? Did they feel the serenity of Randall’s Island? Did they gaze out over Little Hell Gate’s salt marsh and fuhgeddaboudit?

Erm, no. They did not do any of that. Instead, they did this…

Meanwhile, about 4000 kilometres away, another festival disaster was unfolding, this time for a different reason. Burning Man, the annual “counter-culture” event attended by Silicon Valley tech bros, glitter-dipped content-obsessed influencers and people who enjoy Devil Sticks, was well underway when heavy rain began falling.

Burning Man is held in a dried up lake in Blackrock, Nevada. There is a single road in and out. A little bit of rain is all that’s needed to turn the site’s desert dust bowl into a mudbath. That’s exactly what happened. The rain fell. Everyone’s campervans got stuck. Portaloos overflowed. A stay-in-place order was issued for the festival’s 75,000-odd residents. They ate tins of tuna, if they were lucky enough to have bought extra supplies. President Joe Biden was briefed in case things got really out of hand.

That, along with Electric Zoo, made Twitter (I will never call it ‘X’) a great place to hang out again, recalling the good old days of Fyre Festival. Footage of Diplo and Chris Rock hitchhiking their way out of there went viral; so did videos of Muse’s Matt Bellamy cycling his way out of hell. “We’re stuck, in that we can’t move … but we’re enjoying it,” one punter, who definitely did not look like he was enjoying it, told CNN.

I kept refreshing my feed, my eyeballs in disbelief at seeing things like this…

I haven’t been to a proper, multi-stage, super-rowdy music festival since pre-Covid. My bones ache for that feeling of a 6pm beer, the sun slowly setting, a shuffle between stages as an evening’s entertainment stretches ahead, the constant noise of the crowd soundtracking the day. (I have tickets to see Skrillex, JPEGMAFIA and Mark Rebillet at Listen In on October 1, so my hope is that can sort me out.)

But after Splendour in the Grass’ soggy situation last year, along with Laneway’s Auckland event being washed out in January, one thing is clear: climate change is wreaking havoc on my favourite ever thing. If you’re heading to an outdoor music festival these days, sunny summer days are no longer a guarantee. You’ll need to pack sunblock, a poncho, scroggin, thermals, extra rations and, perhaps, an emergency kit.

The last thing anyone attending a music festival wants to do is wind up in a three-part Netflix disaster documentary. Thanks to Burning Man and Electric Zoo, we might have two more coming our way very soon.

Speaking of Laneway…

The St Jerome’s Laneway Music Festival has been booking female headliners before it was cool to call out music festivals for failing to book female headliners. Florence + the Machine, The xx and Street Chant played the very first Auckland leg of the Australasian festival, and ever since, Laneway has made a point of providing the country’s most diverse lineups by a country mile or two.

Over the years, FKA Twigs, Banks, Grimes, Laura Marling, Bat For Lashes, Angel Olsen, Courtney Barnett, Lorde, Ladyhawke, Tiny Ruins, St Vincent, Tash Sultana, Julia Jacklin, Billie Eilish, Nao, Jorja Smith, Aldous Harding, Stella Donnelly, Mitski, Benee and Jess B have all been able to play large stages here thanks to Laneway. Some of those artists haven’t been back, so that’s been the only place anyone has been able to see them. (It’s also the only place anyone ever got to see a Jacinda Ardern DJ set.)

The poster for this year’s January event, which we didn’t get to experience thanks to Cyclone Gabrielle turning Western Springs into a lake, included Haim and Phoebe Bridges in the biggest possible fonts organisers had on hand. The line-up was so popular the venue was forced to upgrade to Western Springs, double the size of Laneway’s previous home at Albert Park.

Which makes this week’s line-up announcement for its 2024 event all the more puzzling. Laneway's staying at Western Springs. This is good. It's also moving dates, to Waitangi Day. This is also good. To fill that stadium on a big day off in Auckland requires a mighty fine lineup.

On Tuesday, this is what they gave us…

The problem’s right there in those top three decks. If you’re announcing a music festival with zero female headliners in 2023, you’re going to get called out for it. It didn’t take long for the Facebook comments to roll in. They quickly got turned into this Stuff story. Here’s the headline no promoter ever wants written about their festival…

I don’t know what’s going on behind the scenes. Maybe a big name dropped out at the last minute? Perhaps their dream line-up just didn’t come through. But something seems to have changed. Stormzy is great, but the British rapper is the kind of performer you want for Bay Dreams or Rhythm & Vines, not an indie fest that’s been headlined by Tame Impala and The 1975. I have no problem at all with Steve Lacy, Dominic Fike or UMO – great acts all well worth seeing live – except for one thing: group all those names together and they’re all men. All of them. Men. To a man.

It’s possibly unfair to have a go at a music festival after the past three years of Covid and weather cancellations. They’ve had no income. There’s probably no money to splash around on big headliners like Olivia Rodrigo, Lana Del Rey, Fever Ray or Caroline Polachek. But the fact remains that if you add any one of those names into the mix, Laneway’s line-up suddenly looks a whole lot ~~different~~ better.

Until then, it remains problematic. Tickets go on sale on September 12. For the first time in Laneway’s New Zealand history, I’m not sure I’ll be getting one for myself.

You should probably binge this…

Painkiller is dope! Sorry. Dad joke. This six-part Netflix series retells the Oxycontin tale in graphic detail, from the Sackler family who delivered a highly addictive opioid painkiller to the masses, to the doctors who were influenced by Purdue’s persuasive drug reps, to the average Americans that found themselves hooked on a product they’d been told was harmless. While the first couple of episodes can be a little like Wikipedia recitals, by episode five Painkiller has morphed into a gripping yarn that had me frantically typing, “Did that really happen?” into a Google search bar. Yes, mostly, it really did – even the dancing Oxycontin cosplay pills.

I have some notes…

Taylor Swift outraged her New Zealand fanbase when she skipped Aotearoa on her Eras tour in favour of playing several massive Australian shows. It was proof that Aotearoa needs an enormodome, a stadium capable of holding 80,000-100,000 stans asap. But Swifties have another reason to be outraged: the concert film of that tour also does not appear to be coming here, Stuff reports. Ouchie.
A virtual Abba band has become a money, money, money-making machine, bringing in $2 million a week. Bloomberg breaks down the Abba Voyage tour, which is almost certainly going to spark a new trend: expect Michael Jackson, 2Pac and Biggie virtual tours to be announced any minute now.
Spoiler alert: Rotten Tomatoes is rotten to its core. Vulture finds that movie studios are gaming the review aggregate site by paying critics to write positive reviews. “Rotten Tomatoes is something the studios can game. So they do,” says one filmmaker. If you’re worried, use Metacritic instead.
Jimmy Fallon isn’t on air because of the writers strikes, but he’s making headlines and they’re not good ones. Rolling Stone spoke to dozens of former staff members who all say the same thing: his late night show is a tense working environment. Reading this report, one thing stood out to me: if your workplace has “crying rooms” and staff hoping for a quick death then it might be time for a change.
Finally, I’ll leave you with some music. There are new James Blake, Olivia Rodrigo, Romy and Chemical Brothers albums to dive into this weekend, but I’ve been spending my time with the “lost” collaboration album from Danger Mouse and Jemini The Gifted One. Recorded between 2003-2004, Born Again has never seen the light of day, until now. Here’s the first single, ‘Brooklyn Bazquiat’.