Culture Kill Art Kill Culture

GRANT PARK- A number of friends have recently inquired as to what my thoughts were about attending the recently passed Lollapalooza Music Festival in Grant Park. On paper, it sounded like a great way to spend a weekend. Sure, tickets were $205 for a full-weekend pass, but we’re talking about Radiohead. Yes, several other high quality bands are on the bill and assuredly turned in some quality performances and earned some new (if not loyal, diehard) fans. Point taken.

I’m not a big fan of crowds. They fucking suck. Ask anyone who’s lived here for over four years and he/she would surely tell you that the first weekend in August is the absolute worst time to hold an outdoor music festival. Thousands of people, hundred degree heat, six-dollar bottles of water, five-dollar beers; Where’s the logic in that ratio? Where’s the common sense in making tens of thousands of online purchases for this event in April, May, or June. While being wrapped up in the dawn of Spring and the crisp, refreshing weather that is quickly making young people forget about the worst winter ever, they are foreseeing no valid reason that could possibly keep them from pledging just over two-Benjamins to Perry Ferrell’s coke-fund, and putting aside Aug 1-3 to bake in the sun, dehydrate themselves beyond possible comprehension, incurring the probability of massive heat stroke, and blackouts.

To Hell with that.

The main idea of Sigmund Freud’s crowd behavior theory is that people who are in a crowd act differently towards people than those who are thinking individually. The minds of the group would merge together to form a way of thinking. Each member’s enthusiasm would be increased as a result, and one becomes less aware of the true nature of one’s actions. *

Crowds aren’t a collection of individuals. A crowd is an individual in and of itself. It’s a fucking juggernaut of like-mindedness unlike any other social phenomenon I can think of. We’ve been exposed to countless cinematic depictions of skyscraper-sized monsters. J.J. Abrams’ Cloverfield was the most recent re-introduction of a mind-jarring “thing” so blindly ambitious in its pursuit of total destruction it’s a wonder it wasn’t also hell-bent on chopping the planet up and snorting it up its perpetually flaring nostrils.

We fear these “things” because we are unable to comprehend the reasons behind their will. The age-old question of whether or not size does matter is answered in this hypothetical situation: A gigantic, fire breathing demolition-obsessed fuck bomb cares nothing about the path of its destruction, or the thoughts that race through the minds of its victims. It doesn’t chew. It swallows the whole scene whole.

There is little to no significant difference between these fictitious super-killers and large groups of individuals whose collective consciousnesses unite to become one true thought: Crowds are the strongest man made monsters of all because when the strength of numbers increases, fear all but dissolves like sugar in a cup of coffee.

The thing is, Radiohead may be the perfect example of a band that transcends time and space with self-assured tranquil sonic urgency its a wonder we’re not issued their entire collection once we’re freed of a womb. I can’t come up with a valid explanation as to why we aren’t required to have at least some exposure to the band’s music before, during, or after we go through our formative years. There is no reason to assume such exposure wouldn’t enhance our collective ability to approach life without a newly innate appreciation for the pursuit of excellence-in any field, ever. Long story short, Radiohead is great, and has nearly forced me to cross a line I said I never would again.

But being amidst such a substantial legion of people baking in the seed, white-hot twilight of an August afternoon doesn’t have a shred of the appeal necessary to convince me any band (even the aforementioned Brits) could lift me out of this reality.

While seeing Radiohead alone, or within a closed, segmented arena where I could keep constant tabs on my friends while still enjoying the stress free environment in which one should be entitled to see his/her favorite bands–is a refreshing reality, witnessing one of their shows amidst a gargantuan slew of 16-34 year-olds strung out on whatever they’ve used to fuck themselves up as quickly as possible, is most definitely not.

Young people are obsessed with finding a niche, a group, a social click with people they feel comfortable with. Those who dress like them, or those they wished they could dress like. Over a very short amount of time, they become walking talking carbon copies of one another, and are never happier than when they’re strolling to the mall, or the bar with their friends. It’s when they are forced to part ways with their peers that the fear sets in. They find they aren’t nearly as gung-ho about dressing differently, and they water down their fashion-sense.

Think about a 20 year old kid who’s going to school downtown heading out to the western suburbs for summer vacation. They simmer down to how left their choice of apparel has gone by shifting it back slightly (not all the way) to the right. The sheer joy they experience representing a different (clothing) line of thinking downtown, where they’ve adopted a new identity, diminishes when they re-migrate west to a safer suburb where they’ve already laid the groundwork for the person they morphed into in their youth.

Their old friends, the one their pioneered through their formative years with, expect certain familiarity from them, and they are quicker to respond to that than one would think. Let’s say they wore cargo-shorts to school everyday senior year in high school, offsetting the normalcy of that with a band t-shirt and chuck taylors. Now, they wear skinny-as-shit pants everyday, despite the fact that it may by 95 degrees out, tighter t-shirts, and the same Chucks (now with obligatory holes in them, and pen marks)… They’ll more than likely keep those new string-cheese-ass pants in their drawers, and resort, if not back to the cargo shorts, to something like a pair of cut off-not-as-tight jean shorts. This is a chameleon keeping it real. Once the force field of their new “pre-hipster” group has disappeared, they have to take these altered actions for survival in their old stomping grounds.

The funny thing is, we’re all just people. That’s a clichéd & over used sentence, but so many books have been written on related subjects it’s impossible to formulate any unique perspective on anything without regurgitating/plagiarizing a literary morsel from those who have done it before.

Anything new written on the subject is merely a new interpretation of an old hypothesis. That being said, crowds; large scary and over generalized, or small; more specific, and identifiable are as vital to human culture/sub cultural than any allotted amount of money one can bring in. It doesn’t matter if you live in the sticks or the penthouse, if you cannot occasionally latch onto a group you feel comfortable being a part of, or identifying with, you’re up shit creek.

Yeah, shit creek.