Kendra Brea Cooper
This past weekend, Lollapalooza took over Chicago. Acts like Outkast and Childish Gambino took the stage, and festival goers took on a different kind of life inside the gates. While festivals are expensive and no-doubt part of the money making machine, they have moments of resistance to that same system, the one outside the gates.
Standing skin to skin with strangers to have an experience through music and art is a rebellious act. Sometimes it seems that people are only this close outside festival gates if they're at a Black Friday sale buying a T.V. in Best Buy. Here, the closeness has nothing to do with material consumption, but is actually an experience that will start conversations and create communities.
Music festivals like Lollapalooza give us the chance to experiment with the great definer: clothing. You can live inside these gates wearing a giant rainbow, fox costume, or just your bathing suit. Just break free from the everyday restrictions of "style".
Dancing is free movement. Dancing is the movement considered unproductive outside festival gates unless it's entertaining and making money. It's the lack of productiveness that makes it rebellious. Dancing is movement unattached to any job and economy, making it part of paradise.
On any other day, mud is quickly cleaned off for the benefits of fitting in and appearing in control. At Lollapalooza or any other music festival, mud is a badge of honour. Mud is the resistance to any standard set by working day life, and the pressures of looking "put together" by separation from nature. It's also fun to play in.
The world is scheduled. We wear time around our wrists and live by a set of numbers that dictate meetings and meals. A music festival like Lollapalooza is an escape from the tick tock number watching. Live in the moment by refusing to let a system set up to regulate your actions minute by minute control how you experience time, and life.
Going to a festival means that you'd rather spend your money on an experience. It means that you prefer to pull yourself away from the T.V. and the shopping mall, and sit on the grass and play in the mud for a weekend. It is a resistance to the consumption of material goods that we're told connect us to each other, but really have us competing.
Lollapalooza it set up right in the middle of a city. In some ways, it is the experience of another world, right in between the one we've constructed. It's a chance to see what the world might be like if we spent our time differently, like other festivals such as Burning Man where people practice a different economy all together.
In a cut-throat individualist society full of hierarchies of privilege, simply lifting someone up to crowd surf in a wheel chair so that they can experience the festival equally is an act of rebellion towards a sometimes very selfish world. This is what community looks like.
From face paint to music, expression is rebellion. You probably can't walk into work with a tiger painted on your face, but here you can spend days in it. You can be a walking work of art, instead of an employee number or a customer.
The musical acts might be scheduled, but you aren't. Festivals are a chance to dump the watch and let your heart lead you from person to person and stage to stage. The hour doesn't tell you when to eat, when to meet, or when to sleep.
Pop culture and all that ideology sitting in the blind spot. Also crafts.
