Glastonbury

[shakahislop]

yep, there's a whole big massive infrastructure of authoritarianism underpinning the buoyant atmosphere of love and peace at glasto

= double armored fences, pop-up heliports & no drone zones, 10s of 1000s of security busybodies and petty jobsworths suddenly elevated to roles where they can have anyone canned for subjective breaches of the labyrinthine T&C, layers upon layers of of privileged access based on wristbands and superexpensive tickets/elite freebies, tom cruise, sinister, secretive strategies for managing the masses and general disdain among the locals and festival hierarchies for the lumpen ticket-buying normies, lack of care for inevitable casualties, highrollers on golfcarts head off for gourmet nosh at their superluxury yurts, ripoff junk food and comestibles for the rest to the point where it's expected and laughable, ironic sweatshop bucket hats, meme shades and naff inflatables on an epic scale

and the throbbing heart of it is financial behemoths spewing corporate product over cowed crowds from behind impenetrable barriers. it's a farm after all

it's been a while since i read a deviating description of glastonbury like this. the online (and real life) conversation that i see fits into a really narrow band.

 

[shakahislop]

What lines?

the ones that come to mind are things like: it doesn't matter what the bands are, there's loads on and it will be good anyway; the line-up is incredibly diverse and covers everything; you walk around and stumble across all kinds of weird and wonderful happenings; stormzy's appearance was a big risk but a gamechanger for what people think of that kind of music; jay-z's appearance was a gamechanger for acceptance of rap music; it's all for charity and the eavises are very nice people for doing all of this; more subtly, the idea that the festival has anything to do with non-mainstream culture

 

[shakahislop]

one thing that seems obvious is that the festival and the clientele move in tandem with one another: the festival responds to the public. and also the council, the police and the bbc, in different ways. you can see it year on year the way that the festival adapts and conforms to what the punters are after. and in doing so also changes the kind of punter that turns up. you can see it in the safety and the increasing level of organisation. one really noticeable thing since i started going in 2004 is the pace of stimulation and the extent to which that stimulation comes from things that are provided by the festival rather than other punters. you could say that 2004 is long after the exciting period of the festival. but over that 20 years everything has conformed to how the people have changed. partly coz of who is included. but also coz a new breed of human has come along.

 

[sufi]

the ones that come to mind are things like: it doesn't matter what the bands are, there's loads on and it will be good anyway; the line-up is incredibly diverse and covers everything; you walk around and stumble across all kinds of weird and wonderful happenings; stormzy's appearance was a big risk but a gamechanger for what people think of that kind of music; jay-z's appearance was a gamechanger for acceptance of rap music; it's all for charity and the eavises are very nice people for doing all of this; more subtly, the idea that the festival has anything to do with non-mainstream culture

... also the tales of wild hedonism and debauchery, all that fantastical chaos is happening in a tightly controlled environment

 

[shakahislop]

musically it only gets safer and safer. there's good things here and there. it's not nothing. but the idea that it's a musically diverse place is both widely held and totally wrong. they book five hundred things but within a narrow band. slim chances of coming across anything you haven't heard before. less than your average weekend in nyc armed with nycnoise and resident advisor. every now and then i hear something that makes my ears prick up. in about 2014 i came across one of the teklife geezers and in maybe 2017 came across something like amapiano or gqom or that kind of thing that i'd never heard before. but its rare and it's buried under d&b and the most boring guitars. i wondered how much of it is about the preferences of aging bookers. but i think a lot of it is because that's what the punters want and the thing slowly twists itself to their needs. the other thing i wonder about that is whether the uk - coz it's more and more a uk based lineup, the weak pound and brexit formalities make it hard and expensive to book stuff from outside - is getting narrower musically as well. but that last part is speculating.

 

[shakahislop]

a bit like your post sufi - there's a sense of being subject to a touring machine. the festival thing went through a boom in the mid-00s that has never gone away. the cogs are well oiled and you're subjected to them. the eavises as well. needing to book the things that get 150,000 tickets sold and the only way to get them is via the machinery

 

[shakahislop]

we must of said in this thread before, there's a lot about glastonbury which resembles hajj

 

[hmg]

I liked it when there were still a few dogs running about, on and off strings.

Even the green fields are polished up and hiviz. The chai tent that used to do a nice line in mushroom infused Chocolate bars now only offers vegan flapjacks, and that's not the sort of progress I can get behind

 

[sufi]