Pitchfork Music Festival 2009: An Obscured View

Looking over the crowd on a splendidly cool Sunday night at the 2009 Pitchfork Music Festival I’m both exhilarated and conflicted. Here, in a park in the middle of the midwest, are musicians from all over the globe performing to an equally diverse(ish) audience.  We gush over each other in a glorious cycle of  mutual admiration.

It’s a festival that’s curated for the particular, not the universal. It’s a fest for THIS weekend THIS year, and never to be carbon-copied and rebranded, C3-style, in as many DMA markets as possible this summer. It’s a great experience. Now… what to take a picture of?

Ahhh, music in the age of blogging — when everyone’s a journalist whether they have credentials or not, and when a festivalgoer’s camera is just as likely to point towards the crowd (or towards themselves) as it is to the band on stage. When it seems fans must decide what’s most important: being there, or showing others that you were there. Or further still… how close were you? Did you have an all-access lanyard? How much better was the food in the press tent than in the the park? What celebs were there? What secret show did you make it to and how little did you have to pay?

All these things are secondary to the actual festival, but as we’ve seen since the rise of “indie movies” in the 90s with the Sundance Film Festival (and now increasingly so at SXSW and Cochella music fests), the frills are what make the fest… the frosting is what makes the cake.  The cake was good this year. The frosting? Well, it looked good from where I was standing, but you’ll have to ask someone else.

Brian’s recap of Saturday here .

Brian’s recap of Sunday, Part 1 here.