3:30 - Perry Farrell feat. Paul Green's School of Rock All-Stars & Slash
We started off the last day of the festival right. For some reason Claire had elected to receive text message spam from the festival, which mostly served to inform us about worthless product promotions, but did let us know that this afternoon the greatest guitarist of the hair metal era is going to be performing on the kids stage with the most effeminate lead singer of the alternative rock era. The set only lasted about 20 minutes and they played all covers. Perry and Slash did their best (which is to say, very little) to tone down their rock star ways. If you look closely in these pictures, Slash has a cigarette in his mouth for the entire show, and Perry would go over to the side of the stage between songs to have a glass of champagne. Perry would also introduce each of the songs for the children in a tone that was really more patronizing that child-friendly (like, before playing "Jane Says", he would remark, "this is a song about a girl that's very confused"). But even when it was clear that they were just phoning in the performance, they still rocked pretty hard, so I can't really complain.
4:00 - Chromeo
After we left the kids' stage, we walked by the neighboring stage where Black Kids were playing. Claire and I had both heard their single and thought they might be fun. We were mistaken. They sucked. So we went over to the next stage to see Chromeo, who were pumping out the good-time party jams without any of the Black Kids' bullshit hipster posturing. And I believe science has proven definitively that nothing gets a party going like a fat Puerto Rican guy on a vocoder.
5:00 - Saul Williams
Saul Williams is a bit of an aberration in the world of hip-hop. He's a rapper (of sorts) who started out as a poet, and borrows as much of his style from industrial rock as he does from hip-hop (and is indeed produced by Trent Reznor). He could write lyrical circles around Jay-Z, Lil' Wayne, or pretty much any commercial rapper in the game. He writes about empowerment and unity without soundin naive, and can get angry without seeming militant. His set was certainly one of the highlights of the festival, coming out looking like an afro-centric version of Aladdin Sane-era Bowie, with his band dressed up like something out of an early-seventies Funkadelic lineup. He assaulted his audience with a barrage of break beats, guitar noise, and angry slam poetry. He also brought his 12-year-old daughter on stage as his only backup singer, and she was totally adorable.
6:15 - Gnarls Barkley
On my way to the next stage, I happened to catch the end of Blues Traveler's set and see enough to lament the tragedy of John Popper staving off death by losing hundreds of pounds and at the same time, lose all of his stage presence (though their cover of "I Want You to Want Me" sounded surprisingly good).
Dangermouse and Cee-lo arrived on stage dressed in tweed jackets and bow ties like a pair of stuffy boarding school teachers, with their band of students in khakis and maroon sweater vests. And while I'm always a strong supporter of bands in uniform, I was expecting a higher level of pageantry from the Gnarls guys. They put on a decent enough show, playing though most of their most recent album (which is pretty much just a more fine-tuned, less-inspired version of their debut). I'm far enough removed from the summer of '06 that I was able to enjoy "Crazy" without feeling suffocated by its overexposure, but certainly the highlight of their set was a cover of Radiohead's "Reckoner" that was easily on par with the version that Radiohead had played themselves two nights previous. Following the song Cee-lo made a bashful appeal for Thom Yorke's approval, which seemed completely unnecessary, but was certainly endearing.
8:30 - Kanye West
Throughout the entire festival, rumors had been floating around that the Junior Senator from Illinois might be making an appearance sometime during the festival, possibly along fellow hometown heroes Wilco, or otherwise Kanye, and while Claire and I were staking out our spot for Kanye, it was all anybody was talking about. Of course, anybody following the news could see that it would me a monumental blunder for Obama to have appeared at a rock festival, given the recent attacks from the McCain camp on his celebrity status. And anyway, there's only room on Kanye West's stage for one oversized ego, which was very well represented. I was somewhat disappointed in his stage show, given how elaborate his set has been for his current tour and how elaborate Radiohead's light show was the night before. So with a stripped-down version on his full set, we had to settle for a mind-blowing light show clearly lifted from Daft Punk's show here last year. I'm still not sure if I would have been more impressed with Nine Inch Nails' set on the other end of the park, but I was still pleasantly surprised with Kanye's performance. For a brilliant producer that rarely ever gets any credit as an MC, Kanye totally owned that stage for the hour and a half that he was on. Of course, he was well supported by his arsenal of smoke machines and flood lights that kept the level of drama high and sent anybody with epilepsy straight to the hospital. Midway through the set, he went into a self-indulgent rant about his own place in history and the importance of progress in art, which would be easy to slag off as the crass narcissism of a man with a god complex, but it's hard to think of anybody else in hip-hop with as much appreciation for genuine creativity (even if he's often co-opting more than he is creating). Later he went to the side of the stage to take a breather while his band jammed on an abbreviated version of "Don't Stop Believing", and you could see him on the monitor smiling, not a smirk of self-satisfaction, but of a giddy child living out his dreams.
1 comment:
I was so stoned at Radiohead, I was CONVINCED that Obama was in the helicopter that was flighing over the crown.
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