The Go! Team – I was excited to finally see these guys in person. Their songs don’t feel very varied but an energetic performance had the crowd dancing early.
Andrew Bird – An all around beautiful set that I wished was longer, was pleasantly surprised to see the large turnout of fans singing the lyrics.
She & Him – The crowd for their set was a mixture of horny boys ogling Zooey and teenagers waiting for Lil’ Wayne (whom nearly crushed me as I tried to escape the area afterwards). Zooey belting a stunning rendition of ‘I Put A Spell On You’ had the crowd, me and everyone else within a mile radius totally floored.
Iggy & The Stooges – So excited to see the incredibly odd and outlandish Iggy performance I have only seen on TV, in person. Completely memorizing & inappropriate for the children in the crowd when he started the set with a chant of ‘F&CK!, SH$T!”
Moby – Friend who ventured in said the Teany DJ put on a great set.
Nine Inch Nails – Hands down, my favourite set of the entire festival. Absolutely blew the roof off the entire place with a performance that was hard to look away from. The backdrop, the vocals, the setlist, everything was perfect and utterly amazing. Trent Reznor said we were the best audience they’d had in a long while and they were actually really happy to be there – hell yeah! Brooklyn Vegan’s Bao Nguyen was there and took some great pictures, head over here to take a look and check the setlist.
I also saw STP, Kanye West and Bob Dylan as well but no accompanying pictures. It’s well known that BD puts on an underwhelming show & did so again this weekend, but that’s not why you go see him, you go see Dylan because it’s Dylan.
Stone Temple Pilots came on 30 mins late and because of that, played a shorter set. The set was filled with all the old classics, opening with ‘Vaseline’. The crowd still left happy.
Kanye on the other hand is the opposite, you go to see him for the theatrical performance that he is going to put on. I came in expecting fireworks and lightshows but instead, it was a stripped down show. There were no annoying sound bites about being the best or that he was the performer we all were waiting for. Instead, there was a more humble nod to Nine Inch Nails being his equal, just a different genre, and he actually had some intelligent commentary regarding the slowing failing music industry. Asking us if it was necessarily a bad thing for record label execs to make a few less million.
Overall, a really great experience. I was happy to spend two days there at my first, real festival. It was very smoothly run with not too much over the top branding all over the place like many events tend to have lately. I have a major complaint in regards to staff not being able to help at times (ME: ‘Hi, I got a bit turned around, where is the press parking lot?’ THEM: ‘Uh, don’t know’ ME: ‘Ok, how about the press entrance, it was near there’ THEM:’Uh, don’t know’ – I asked TEN people) and being rude, though the ladies at the quesadilla stand were so sweet I made it a point of going there twice.
