Festival Fails: A Collection of Horrors, Hilarity & Humiliation

RHCP Drops The Ball at Coachella ’13

With enough smash hits to fill a two-hour set, there was no shortage of potential singalongs and jump-fest jams in store for rockers of every kind on the polo fields for Red Hot Chili Peppers’ headlining 2013 Coachella performance. On their home turf, however, the Californication rockers were rough around the edges and fell short of the epic finale Coachella truly deserved. The fan consensus was that singer Anthony Kiedis was a melodic mess through several songs – most notably “Under The Bridge,” while the set was a mailed-in run of color-by-numbers hits with little mojo or gusto. Without any remarkable changes, new covers (beyond the obligatory Stevie classic “Higher Ground”) or variation of even visual presence (Kiedis sporting the Off! cap, a shirtless Flea, etc), the Chilis‘ bow on the weekend left the taste of fail in the mouths of many.

3 Words: Country-Infused EDM

Thanks to Avicii’s surprise changeup at Ultra Music Festival last year, we all now know that “country EDM” exists, and we’re far worse off for it. The set was alienating, bizarre and not at all what fans were hoping for at one of the biggest festivals on the planet. Listen below, if you can make it through the trap/hopscotch oddity intro.

Rain + Festivals + Clumsiness = Fail

Looks like they made the most of it, at least.

Atoms For Peace Play to Space-Bar Zombies at Treasure Island 2013

It’s the crowd, not the talent.

There was a new interpretive value to the chorus of set-ender “this is fucked… up… fucked up,” of Atoms For Peace’s lamenting performance of “Black Swan” at Treasure Island 2013. An achingly beautiful, rhythmically psychedelic beat-blizzard in live performance, Thom Yorke, Flea, Nigel Godrich and friends delivered what was arguably the most enchanting live experience I’d seen all year. And I watched 12,000 people yawn their way through it, after expending their enthusiasm on a play button. Music played on actual instruments was met with flaccid interest after a wildly enthusiastic play-button overdose of bass-drop beat buzzing at Treasure Island’s EDM-centric festival in San Francisco.

The thought is inescapable, impossible to dress as another idea. Standing among the listless hordes in the AFP crowd after watching the same lot lose their minds all day to space-bar wizards like DJ Falcon, I was surrounded by Generation Pfizer, a youth awash in pharmaceutical behavioral correction/enhancement. Their spectrum of sensory stimuli is so blown out that these kids’ only recourse is to savor the disconnecting consciousness-purgatory buzz of endlessly repeated beats blasting from an iTunes playlist and out through the monitors. I watched no less than a dozen people running in place in the crowd. Just fucking running. In place.

Here is a full gallery of DJ Falcon looking at a laptop and drinking a beer.