Features | Festivals
Pitchfork Music Festival 2007
By Chet Betz, Clayton Purdom, & Peter Hepburn | 25 August 2007
Day One: Friday, July 13
Before and After Zwan
by Chet Betz
On a Friday evening in Chicago -- shortly after having my heart ripped out, dissected, reconfigured, and put back in my chest, beating with a new rhythm and pumping buckets of sweat out of my forehead -- I joined esteemed colleagues Dom Sinacola and Mark Abraham at Stage GZA as the tremors of Slint's new song "King's Approach" rumbled across Union Park. Dom and Mark to me: "So, Chet, we were wondering if you could explain to us what's so great about Spiderland?"
I wanted to laugh. Then I saw that they were serious, and I wanted to cry. Which is kind of how Steve Albini described his reaction to "Washer" back in '91 when he reviewed Spiderland ("TEN FUCKING STARS") for Melody Maker:
When I first heard Brian McMahan whisper the pathetic words to "Washer", I was embarrassed for him. When I listened to the song again, the content eluded me and I was staggered by the sophistication and subtle beauty of the phrasing. The third time, the story made me sad nearly to tears. Genius.
He concludes by encouraging pretty much everyone who read that review to kick themselves for not catching Slint live. "In ten years," he says, "you'll lie like the cocksucker you are and say you did anyway." Well, now I can stop kicking myself. Now I don't have to be a lying cocksucker. I saw it. I saw it and it was pretty much just like listening to the record. But it was also like watching the record be lived out in front of me, and I was experiencing the spare and elegant but blisteringly pathos-charged narratives of Spiderland with an audience that included people who knew the text and were captivated by its every moment unfolding. It was almost less a concert and more like an author giving a killer book-reading. Of a book that you've only ever digested by tape, one where the author does the reading.
But you know the cliché: it's reassuring when there are certain things that don't change. Albini called the album "flawless," and while that's a piece of hyperbole that rockets itself out of the realm of dispute into semantics you just accept or reject, Spiderland is an incredibly whole and measured work. I won't go into all my reasons for loving it. But to address Dom and Mark's question in the context of what I saw, heard, and felt that evening, I witnessed music that affected people differently while at the same time bringing them all to the same towering climax; it allowed for their individualities even as it united them in its own pangs and outbursts of keening dissonance and pulsing noise. Its intentions were strong-willed while also willfully waiting for the listeners to engage, to interpret, to color by perception. And this quality is of Spiderland itself, for it is as dry and unaffected as it is sublimely cathartic, right down to the cover photo that looks like a Kerouac paperback picture as shot by Erwitt (in actuality a picture of the band taken by Will Oldham). Mark later paraphrased for me how one of Peter's friends had said that "the whole point of the album is the internal dynamics of sound production and so playing it live kind of defeats the point." Which is a fairly good point that happens to miss the point because it takes just one of the things that makes Spiderland exceptional aesthetically and then projects that as the purpose for a poetic substance and structure that holds visceral power in just about any setting. And the details of Pajo's knifing guitar and Walford's misanthropic drums were plenty clarion enough.
What I experienced live was an amplified, manifested version of what I experience when I listen to the record -- something as open and suggestive as the best ambient music while also being as forceful as the best rock; around me everyone moved in their own groove and showed their own emotional reaction to the black obelisk that was resonating in front of them, filling the air with a million frequencies all carrying one mysterious signal. One kid spasmed, one raved, one smiled, one cried, and I think I was probably doing all of the above plus speaking in tongues and putting a hip out of joint.
The post-rock genre that many claim Spiderland sired never had the same balance, substituted noodles for akimbo angles, couldn't often manage to be so simultaneously intuitive and unpredictable. In their winks and the elliptical yet poignant character of their words, in the restrained and alien play of instruments spooling out lines that have everything and nothing to do with each other, Slint wrote and composed Spiderland with supreme care, with a precise knowledge of how to create an ambiguity that is rich for its breadth and potent for its sharpness. And when they decide to unleash the floodgates, as at the end of "Washer" and "Good Morning, Captain," they decimate self-consciousness, lay waste to inhibitive barriers, and punch a beast of a wormhole in all the space and distance that the jaded music listener tries to put between himself and the thing he claimed to once love. This is shit that's as vulnerable as a babe, heavy as a lead pipe, and to be swept up in a mass of people getting their hearts and asses kicked by it was alone worth the price of my Pitchfork tickets.
Though the fact is maybe a little unnerving, Pitchfork's first evening represented two of my top ten albums of all time in Spiderland and GZA's Liquid Swords. But while GZA was GZA, almost inevitably his album suffered due to missing guests and thus truncated song times. Add to that remixes, a ton of non-album tracks at the end to fill in, and a Killah Priest who couldn't do so little as remember half the words to the best song he ever had and ever will have anything to do with ("B.I.B.L.E."), and it wasn't even like listening to Liquid Swords. I mean, I was still holding up my W two hours later and grinning from ear to ear, but it didn't touch what Slint did -- which was just play, note for loaded note, a masterpiece. I don't know if I can compare it to the Clipse owning mine and Clay's faces, the other Pitchfork highlight for me and perhaps even the best rap performance I have ever seen, but Slint gave me something damn special. They showed me that they believed in the power of their old album as much as they'd made me believe in it in the first place. They showed me other people who believed the same. And those people and the band and I all acted out that belief together. Music can be a community of faith, if I may wax sentimental. So "flawless" is impossible to qualify, but Steve was right.
Ten fucking stars, indeed.
*****
Day Two: Saturday, July 14
Pusha, Give Me Back My Face: A Few Notes on Rap and Pitchfork
by Clayton Purdom
The potential gulf separating rap fan from rapper at the Pitchfork Music Festival could have been insurmountable. I overheard hipsters at Reckless Records earlier on Friday, once in reference to The Chronic as a “a really sweet record to have on vinyl” (no, dude) and once again when two dudes looking at a Caetano Veloso record made some painfully perfunctory Ghostface reference. I mean, how many people do you see slip MF Doom between Belle & Sebastian and Mclusky on their Facebook page? There’s an obvious culture gap here, and I’ll not belabor the point or demean Pitchfork’s audience unnecessarily, but let’s just admit: most indie rock kids/hipsters look at hip-hop as a genre worthy of token embracement, and there’s nothing hugely wrong with that except that a concert full of people feeling like this can make for a somewhat disjunctive experience. I might not be talking about you, but I am talking about a lot of people you know.
If I’ve bristled your feathers, blogger, know that I hold myself in no high esteem. I’m another suburban kid who listened to rap as a token genre myself until some point six or seven years ago when something clicked and I began to furrow so deeply into the genre that at times I have to remind myself that I, you know, like guitars, too. I am an indie rock kid as much as anyone else at the end of the day; I just happen to have befriended a couple of really, really ardent rap fans and picked up some of their fervency along the way. I can’t dance, really, and from the stage I certainly am another putrid, sweaty, tight-shirted dude in need of a haircut. Enough about me: this is all just to emphasize that A) I headed into the Pitchfork Music Festival curious almost exclusively about how De La Soul, the Clipse, and the Cool Kids would fare, and B) my expectations thereof were low. I love these artists, they’re why I bought a ticket to the festival, but I imagined ironic blunts being sparked; I feared the dance moves that might hit me; I was deeply cautious of the potential for wackness. You may now re-read the first sentence of this piece.
I slept on getting tickets for Friday’s Liquid Swords (1995) run-through, and though the record’s a frontrunner for best. thing. ever. the general consensus is that I missed a misfired show of half-ass karaoke, albeit a Wu one. (The afterparty I attended instead, featuring an incendiary Cappadonna who moved the crowd so hard C-Rayz Wallz melted like a snowball in comparison, seems to have been the better bet.) De La’s festival-closing set was as good as one could’ve expected, meaning really really really: twenty years in the game, they’ve developed a dynamic at once riotous and tight, closer to Battles’ stage presence than anything else from the weekend. But the setlist skewed a bit too Grind Date (2004) for a festival appearance, and Mace’s sincere thanks to “the Pitchfork” for inviting them and “the Pornographers” for opening for them elicited chuckles, widening that chasm. Trugoy peppered the set with the occasional explanation of “hip-hop culture,” which was met with appreciative headnods in some corners and exasperated groans in mine. Plus, they kept doing that fucking thing where they act like the crowd’s not yelling loud enough, and, dudes, I’m not gonna bust a fucking blood vessel for you.
De La Soul was a safe bet for this audience, so safe they killed themselves on their second record to avoid shit like this (right?), but the Cool Kids were, if possible, even safer, two beloved Chicago kids that outdress the hippest hipsters and owe a solid 70% of their current fame to Pitchfork acclaim. Their heavily crowd-surfed set felt like a coming of age (Chuck’s parents were there!), and, while the Kids have a couple of tours to go before they perfect the fresh freeze-poses and silly mic interplay of their heroes, their fierce aesthetic dazzles, as ever. The two peeks they gave past their MySpace page were illuminating: a further refinement of their thunderous minimalism, on one hand, and a Miami bass track that seemed, like a good Spoon song, to punch the brain repeatedly on some pleasure node that has been there forever, untouched, waiting for this very song to discover and pummel it. The crowd ate this shit up, and the Cool Kids ate that shit up, a goddamn coprophilic orgy of mutual appreciation that I was happy to help lubricate.
But what Pusha T did on Saturday afternoon, at a 7:00 show sandwiched between Iron & Wine and Yoko Ono, with Mastodon having just pulled a solid wedge of Pitchfork’s most visceral music listeners to the other stage, was without question the most entranced, nuanced, feral, and outright enjoyable rap performance I’ve ever seen -- other witnesses, e-mail me if you disagree. I’m honestly interested in other interpretations, because what I saw on that stage (echoed in every conversation I’ve had subsequently) was an artist aflame with inspiration, pushing more manic meaning into each word than the admirable De La Soul triumvirate managed in ninety minutes. Where De La’s set thrived on unimpeachable professionalism, a set of polished stage tricks, Pusha seemed to be inventing on the spot the stage presence that in ten years he will be merely rehashing. It felt like the birth of something, and Pusha himself seemed as scared of it as we were. Maybe this is the fate of all great live performers but Pusha’s prowls, his wild-eyed surprised enunciation, his surges toward the audience like a tethered junkyard dog threatening to break free, his wheezing, incredulous cackle at the Clipse’s most deplorable punchlines, his stern furious “walk-the-dog” across the stage representing both some insolent beaux and hip hop at large, his wryly defiant claim of “album of the year” -- I was too stunned at times to remember to throw my hands up.
Pusha did more than bridge the gulf between rap fan and rapper. He eradicated that gulf, shifting continents, connecting with the audience on some tittering ecstatic wavelength as if finally performing to an audience that feels Hell Hath No Fury as much as he does. “I know ya’ll have a peaceful festival here and all,” he panted at one point, “but I know how ya’ll really get down in Chicago,” before the noxious synth of “Chinese New Year” got a throng of decidedly un-hard dudes screaming about killing people. Pusha understood that there was something inherently ridiculous in the situation we were all in, and in comments like this he acknowledged and defused it. This ability to inclusively address this insecurity was part of what elevated the performance, and while Malice’s aloofness was appropriate -- Clipse have a reputation to maintain, of course -- it was Pusha’s convivial laughs that made the performance the festival’s high, shining light. His attention was so fully on the audience, his stare so intent and searching, that all ironic posturing and notions of artistic reverence were shattered immediately, melting all of the enthusiasm of the weekend into a single scalding simmer, the brooding physical proof of Hell Hath No Fury’s intensity.
That the fans -- the fans, who the Clipse constantly praise -- not only received this performance but reciprocated it, eventually eliciting a grin even from glum-faced Malice, is a feather in Pitchfork’s cap and a challenge to my typified idea of the average indie rock fan. A challenge, that is, but not a rebuke: I’m willing to change my stereotypes as soon as people who namedrop Fishscale (2006) start accepting how fucking great but less cool More Fish (2006) was, too. My point is that the credit goes to the Clipse for deeming something in the crowd worth delivering to. As much fun as De La Soul were having, and as much fun as the crowd obviously had during De La’s set, that old barrier stood strong. Next month Chicago’s endless string of festivals brings together the Shins, Wolf Parade, Minus the Bear, and Snoop Dogg for the Download Festival, a lineup made in the fever dreams of a total dipshit. There is no end in sight, in other words, to token rap fandom, which is okay, I guess, because it affords me a lot of opportunities for snootiness. And snootiness is okay, too, because it was a crucial ingredient to what happened on Saturday: an audience full of the nation’s most exclusivist music fans were miraculously, metaphysically confronted by an overwhelmingly inclusive musical presence. Pusha and Malice can add to their string of recent accomplishments (among them revivifying a genre that has lain largely stagnant for the last five years) that if only for an afternoon in Chicago they made real a type of hip-hop fandom that existed comfortably within the boundaries of Cat Power and Mastodon, VA Beach and Bucktown, white guilt and black fury.
*****
Day Three: Sunday, July 15
Chevapchichi Turns Everything Around: Mixed-Grill and Malkmus
by Peter Hepburn
By Sunday I was burnt out. Not sun-burnt, amazingly, but just ready to not spend another day in a giant field full of cool kids with bad haircuts. That shit wears you out. There's something about that many neon t-shirts and half-sleeve tattoos that just sucks at the soul. I hit a certain point with irony and then I just want to start punching motherfuckers, and that impulse always grabs me while I'm waiting 20 minutes for the porta-john and watching every single person try to wash their hands in the porta-sink that had obviously run out of water a long time ago. Pretty unusually early in the afternoon I was chain-smoking, drinking heavily, and talking infrequently.
The day started inauspiciously, which didn't help. Deerhunter did well, but watching Ponys get screwed over by the sound-guys was pretty awful. I've run a soundboard, and I know this shit is tricky, but when no sound is coming out of the speakers and the band is playing off their amps, you're doing something very, very wrong. I had high hopes for Brightblack Morning Light, but when I started having trouble telling whether they were actually playing or still sound-checking, my expectations were quickly scaled back (to be fair, I didn't stick around long enough to confirm anything).
I went off early to find some chevapchichi, a meat product whose popularity lead to an early sell-out on Saturday (as I was standing all of five people from the front of the line). The origins of the product were helpfully laid out with a series of fractions and pictograms. The cow (1/2) and the sheep (1/4) seemed resigned to their fates, but there was something about the pleased, almost coy expression on the pig's face that I found both unnerving and deeply inviting. Determined not to miss out on this eastern European meat mash-up again, I skipped most of Menomena's set. Reports on the set, coupled with the downright deliciousness of the chevapchichi, lead me to believe that I made the right decision.
Once Sea & Cake vacated the left stage we finally hit the part of the day where things become interesting. Jamie Lidell managed to be suitably goofy, charming, and over-the-top to pull off the set all by his lonesome. Sure, some of it was just singing over prerecorded beats, but when he set to actually building the songs from scratch, he had the crowd wrapped around his finger.
Next up was the set I had been looking forward to all weekend. As an unreconstructed Pavement fan I've tried quite a few times to catch Stephen Malkmus gigs, and yet something always comes up. As it stood, this was my second time seeing the man play, and the first time as a solo act, so I was excited, if not maybe a bit apprehensive. There were so many ways that this could go wrong. And then he strode out, tan and beautiful as always, decked out in a pink button-down shirt and khakis, and opened with "Heaven is a Truck." It was clear everything was gonna be okay. He proceeded to rip through a bunch of Pavement tracks (including "Trigger Cut" and "In the Mouth of a Desert" with the always-charming Bob Nastanovich on drums, an instrument that he still obviously can't play), and he even nailed Silver Jews' classic "Blue Arrangements." And the audience was almost totally indifferent. Seriously, I think Voxtrot drew more applause the day before. Maybe there were too many solo jams, maybe his banter was just too trite and mean, or maybe the crowd was a bunch of twits.
After that, and with the end in sight, the remaining three acts passed pretty quickly. Of Montreal, either due to some fundamental misgivings about the quality of their songs or simply looking for yet another way to cloak the deep, depressing core of most of their songs in weirdness and sunshine, really have gone full-bore into the spectacle that is their live show. They were one giant hamster-ball away from Flaming Lips levels of absurdity. The New Pornographers, by contrast, stuck to the music, and fared pretty well for it. Not even the muddled sound on the left stage could ruin "The Slow Descent into Alcoholism" or the sadly appropriate "From Blown Speakers." De La Soul finished things out with a long set, Prince Paul sitting quietly in the middle of them doing nothing for almost all of it. And then it was out into the night, facing the long ride back to the South Side and the decidedly pleasant prospect of not interacting with another hipster for a few days at least.
Before and After Zwan
by Chet Betz
On a Friday evening in Chicago -- shortly after having my heart ripped out, dissected, reconfigured, and put back in my chest, beating with a new rhythm and pumping buckets of sweat out of my forehead -- I joined esteemed colleagues Dom Sinacola and Mark Abraham at Stage GZA as the tremors of Slint's new song "King's Approach" rumbled across Union Park. Dom and Mark to me: "So, Chet, we were wondering if you could explain to us what's so great about Spiderland?"
I wanted to laugh. Then I saw that they were serious, and I wanted to cry. Which is kind of how Steve Albini described his reaction to "Washer" back in '91 when he reviewed Spiderland ("TEN FUCKING STARS") for Melody Maker:
When I first heard Brian McMahan whisper the pathetic words to "Washer", I was embarrassed for him. When I listened to the song again, the content eluded me and I was staggered by the sophistication and subtle beauty of the phrasing. The third time, the story made me sad nearly to tears. Genius.
He concludes by encouraging pretty much everyone who read that review to kick themselves for not catching Slint live. "In ten years," he says, "you'll lie like the cocksucker you are and say you did anyway." Well, now I can stop kicking myself. Now I don't have to be a lying cocksucker. I saw it. I saw it and it was pretty much just like listening to the record. But it was also like watching the record be lived out in front of me, and I was experiencing the spare and elegant but blisteringly pathos-charged narratives of Spiderland with an audience that included people who knew the text and were captivated by its every moment unfolding. It was almost less a concert and more like an author giving a killer book-reading. Of a book that you've only ever digested by tape, one where the author does the reading.
But you know the cliché: it's reassuring when there are certain things that don't change. Albini called the album "flawless," and while that's a piece of hyperbole that rockets itself out of the realm of dispute into semantics you just accept or reject, Spiderland is an incredibly whole and measured work. I won't go into all my reasons for loving it. But to address Dom and Mark's question in the context of what I saw, heard, and felt that evening, I witnessed music that affected people differently while at the same time bringing them all to the same towering climax; it allowed for their individualities even as it united them in its own pangs and outbursts of keening dissonance and pulsing noise. Its intentions were strong-willed while also willfully waiting for the listeners to engage, to interpret, to color by perception. And this quality is of Spiderland itself, for it is as dry and unaffected as it is sublimely cathartic, right down to the cover photo that looks like a Kerouac paperback picture as shot by Erwitt (in actuality a picture of the band taken by Will Oldham). Mark later paraphrased for me how one of Peter's friends had said that "the whole point of the album is the internal dynamics of sound production and so playing it live kind of defeats the point." Which is a fairly good point that happens to miss the point because it takes just one of the things that makes Spiderland exceptional aesthetically and then projects that as the purpose for a poetic substance and structure that holds visceral power in just about any setting. And the details of Pajo's knifing guitar and Walford's misanthropic drums were plenty clarion enough.
What I experienced live was an amplified, manifested version of what I experience when I listen to the record -- something as open and suggestive as the best ambient music while also being as forceful as the best rock; around me everyone moved in their own groove and showed their own emotional reaction to the black obelisk that was resonating in front of them, filling the air with a million frequencies all carrying one mysterious signal. One kid spasmed, one raved, one smiled, one cried, and I think I was probably doing all of the above plus speaking in tongues and putting a hip out of joint.
The post-rock genre that many claim Spiderland sired never had the same balance, substituted noodles for akimbo angles, couldn't often manage to be so simultaneously intuitive and unpredictable. In their winks and the elliptical yet poignant character of their words, in the restrained and alien play of instruments spooling out lines that have everything and nothing to do with each other, Slint wrote and composed Spiderland with supreme care, with a precise knowledge of how to create an ambiguity that is rich for its breadth and potent for its sharpness. And when they decide to unleash the floodgates, as at the end of "Washer" and "Good Morning, Captain," they decimate self-consciousness, lay waste to inhibitive barriers, and punch a beast of a wormhole in all the space and distance that the jaded music listener tries to put between himself and the thing he claimed to once love. This is shit that's as vulnerable as a babe, heavy as a lead pipe, and to be swept up in a mass of people getting their hearts and asses kicked by it was alone worth the price of my Pitchfork tickets.
Though the fact is maybe a little unnerving, Pitchfork's first evening represented two of my top ten albums of all time in Spiderland and GZA's Liquid Swords. But while GZA was GZA, almost inevitably his album suffered due to missing guests and thus truncated song times. Add to that remixes, a ton of non-album tracks at the end to fill in, and a Killah Priest who couldn't do so little as remember half the words to the best song he ever had and ever will have anything to do with ("B.I.B.L.E."), and it wasn't even like listening to Liquid Swords. I mean, I was still holding up my W two hours later and grinning from ear to ear, but it didn't touch what Slint did -- which was just play, note for loaded note, a masterpiece. I don't know if I can compare it to the Clipse owning mine and Clay's faces, the other Pitchfork highlight for me and perhaps even the best rap performance I have ever seen, but Slint gave me something damn special. They showed me that they believed in the power of their old album as much as they'd made me believe in it in the first place. They showed me other people who believed the same. And those people and the band and I all acted out that belief together. Music can be a community of faith, if I may wax sentimental. So "flawless" is impossible to qualify, but Steve was right.
Ten fucking stars, indeed.
*****
Day Two: Saturday, July 14
Pusha, Give Me Back My Face: A Few Notes on Rap and Pitchfork
by Clayton Purdom
The potential gulf separating rap fan from rapper at the Pitchfork Music Festival could have been insurmountable. I overheard hipsters at Reckless Records earlier on Friday, once in reference to The Chronic as a “a really sweet record to have on vinyl” (no, dude) and once again when two dudes looking at a Caetano Veloso record made some painfully perfunctory Ghostface reference. I mean, how many people do you see slip MF Doom between Belle & Sebastian and Mclusky on their Facebook page? There’s an obvious culture gap here, and I’ll not belabor the point or demean Pitchfork’s audience unnecessarily, but let’s just admit: most indie rock kids/hipsters look at hip-hop as a genre worthy of token embracement, and there’s nothing hugely wrong with that except that a concert full of people feeling like this can make for a somewhat disjunctive experience. I might not be talking about you, but I am talking about a lot of people you know.
If I’ve bristled your feathers, blogger, know that I hold myself in no high esteem. I’m another suburban kid who listened to rap as a token genre myself until some point six or seven years ago when something clicked and I began to furrow so deeply into the genre that at times I have to remind myself that I, you know, like guitars, too. I am an indie rock kid as much as anyone else at the end of the day; I just happen to have befriended a couple of really, really ardent rap fans and picked up some of their fervency along the way. I can’t dance, really, and from the stage I certainly am another putrid, sweaty, tight-shirted dude in need of a haircut. Enough about me: this is all just to emphasize that A) I headed into the Pitchfork Music Festival curious almost exclusively about how De La Soul, the Clipse, and the Cool Kids would fare, and B) my expectations thereof were low. I love these artists, they’re why I bought a ticket to the festival, but I imagined ironic blunts being sparked; I feared the dance moves that might hit me; I was deeply cautious of the potential for wackness. You may now re-read the first sentence of this piece.
I slept on getting tickets for Friday’s Liquid Swords (1995) run-through, and though the record’s a frontrunner for best. thing. ever. the general consensus is that I missed a misfired show of half-ass karaoke, albeit a Wu one. (The afterparty I attended instead, featuring an incendiary Cappadonna who moved the crowd so hard C-Rayz Wallz melted like a snowball in comparison, seems to have been the better bet.) De La’s festival-closing set was as good as one could’ve expected, meaning really really really: twenty years in the game, they’ve developed a dynamic at once riotous and tight, closer to Battles’ stage presence than anything else from the weekend. But the setlist skewed a bit too Grind Date (2004) for a festival appearance, and Mace’s sincere thanks to “the Pitchfork” for inviting them and “the Pornographers” for opening for them elicited chuckles, widening that chasm. Trugoy peppered the set with the occasional explanation of “hip-hop culture,” which was met with appreciative headnods in some corners and exasperated groans in mine. Plus, they kept doing that fucking thing where they act like the crowd’s not yelling loud enough, and, dudes, I’m not gonna bust a fucking blood vessel for you.
De La Soul was a safe bet for this audience, so safe they killed themselves on their second record to avoid shit like this (right?), but the Cool Kids were, if possible, even safer, two beloved Chicago kids that outdress the hippest hipsters and owe a solid 70% of their current fame to Pitchfork acclaim. Their heavily crowd-surfed set felt like a coming of age (Chuck’s parents were there!), and, while the Kids have a couple of tours to go before they perfect the fresh freeze-poses and silly mic interplay of their heroes, their fierce aesthetic dazzles, as ever. The two peeks they gave past their MySpace page were illuminating: a further refinement of their thunderous minimalism, on one hand, and a Miami bass track that seemed, like a good Spoon song, to punch the brain repeatedly on some pleasure node that has been there forever, untouched, waiting for this very song to discover and pummel it. The crowd ate this shit up, and the Cool Kids ate that shit up, a goddamn coprophilic orgy of mutual appreciation that I was happy to help lubricate.
But what Pusha T did on Saturday afternoon, at a 7:00 show sandwiched between Iron & Wine and Yoko Ono, with Mastodon having just pulled a solid wedge of Pitchfork’s most visceral music listeners to the other stage, was without question the most entranced, nuanced, feral, and outright enjoyable rap performance I’ve ever seen -- other witnesses, e-mail me if you disagree. I’m honestly interested in other interpretations, because what I saw on that stage (echoed in every conversation I’ve had subsequently) was an artist aflame with inspiration, pushing more manic meaning into each word than the admirable De La Soul triumvirate managed in ninety minutes. Where De La’s set thrived on unimpeachable professionalism, a set of polished stage tricks, Pusha seemed to be inventing on the spot the stage presence that in ten years he will be merely rehashing. It felt like the birth of something, and Pusha himself seemed as scared of it as we were. Maybe this is the fate of all great live performers but Pusha’s prowls, his wild-eyed surprised enunciation, his surges toward the audience like a tethered junkyard dog threatening to break free, his wheezing, incredulous cackle at the Clipse’s most deplorable punchlines, his stern furious “walk-the-dog” across the stage representing both some insolent beaux and hip hop at large, his wryly defiant claim of “album of the year” -- I was too stunned at times to remember to throw my hands up.
Pusha did more than bridge the gulf between rap fan and rapper. He eradicated that gulf, shifting continents, connecting with the audience on some tittering ecstatic wavelength as if finally performing to an audience that feels Hell Hath No Fury as much as he does. “I know ya’ll have a peaceful festival here and all,” he panted at one point, “but I know how ya’ll really get down in Chicago,” before the noxious synth of “Chinese New Year” got a throng of decidedly un-hard dudes screaming about killing people. Pusha understood that there was something inherently ridiculous in the situation we were all in, and in comments like this he acknowledged and defused it. This ability to inclusively address this insecurity was part of what elevated the performance, and while Malice’s aloofness was appropriate -- Clipse have a reputation to maintain, of course -- it was Pusha’s convivial laughs that made the performance the festival’s high, shining light. His attention was so fully on the audience, his stare so intent and searching, that all ironic posturing and notions of artistic reverence were shattered immediately, melting all of the enthusiasm of the weekend into a single scalding simmer, the brooding physical proof of Hell Hath No Fury’s intensity.
That the fans -- the fans, who the Clipse constantly praise -- not only received this performance but reciprocated it, eventually eliciting a grin even from glum-faced Malice, is a feather in Pitchfork’s cap and a challenge to my typified idea of the average indie rock fan. A challenge, that is, but not a rebuke: I’m willing to change my stereotypes as soon as people who namedrop Fishscale (2006) start accepting how fucking great but less cool More Fish (2006) was, too. My point is that the credit goes to the Clipse for deeming something in the crowd worth delivering to. As much fun as De La Soul were having, and as much fun as the crowd obviously had during De La’s set, that old barrier stood strong. Next month Chicago’s endless string of festivals brings together the Shins, Wolf Parade, Minus the Bear, and Snoop Dogg for the Download Festival, a lineup made in the fever dreams of a total dipshit. There is no end in sight, in other words, to token rap fandom, which is okay, I guess, because it affords me a lot of opportunities for snootiness. And snootiness is okay, too, because it was a crucial ingredient to what happened on Saturday: an audience full of the nation’s most exclusivist music fans were miraculously, metaphysically confronted by an overwhelmingly inclusive musical presence. Pusha and Malice can add to their string of recent accomplishments (among them revivifying a genre that has lain largely stagnant for the last five years) that if only for an afternoon in Chicago they made real a type of hip-hop fandom that existed comfortably within the boundaries of Cat Power and Mastodon, VA Beach and Bucktown, white guilt and black fury.
*****
Day Three: Sunday, July 15
Chevapchichi Turns Everything Around: Mixed-Grill and Malkmus
by Peter Hepburn
By Sunday I was burnt out. Not sun-burnt, amazingly, but just ready to not spend another day in a giant field full of cool kids with bad haircuts. That shit wears you out. There's something about that many neon t-shirts and half-sleeve tattoos that just sucks at the soul. I hit a certain point with irony and then I just want to start punching motherfuckers, and that impulse always grabs me while I'm waiting 20 minutes for the porta-john and watching every single person try to wash their hands in the porta-sink that had obviously run out of water a long time ago. Pretty unusually early in the afternoon I was chain-smoking, drinking heavily, and talking infrequently.
The day started inauspiciously, which didn't help. Deerhunter did well, but watching Ponys get screwed over by the sound-guys was pretty awful. I've run a soundboard, and I know this shit is tricky, but when no sound is coming out of the speakers and the band is playing off their amps, you're doing something very, very wrong. I had high hopes for Brightblack Morning Light, but when I started having trouble telling whether they were actually playing or still sound-checking, my expectations were quickly scaled back (to be fair, I didn't stick around long enough to confirm anything).
I went off early to find some chevapchichi, a meat product whose popularity lead to an early sell-out on Saturday (as I was standing all of five people from the front of the line). The origins of the product were helpfully laid out with a series of fractions and pictograms. The cow (1/2) and the sheep (1/4) seemed resigned to their fates, but there was something about the pleased, almost coy expression on the pig's face that I found both unnerving and deeply inviting. Determined not to miss out on this eastern European meat mash-up again, I skipped most of Menomena's set. Reports on the set, coupled with the downright deliciousness of the chevapchichi, lead me to believe that I made the right decision.
Once Sea & Cake vacated the left stage we finally hit the part of the day where things become interesting. Jamie Lidell managed to be suitably goofy, charming, and over-the-top to pull off the set all by his lonesome. Sure, some of it was just singing over prerecorded beats, but when he set to actually building the songs from scratch, he had the crowd wrapped around his finger.
Next up was the set I had been looking forward to all weekend. As an unreconstructed Pavement fan I've tried quite a few times to catch Stephen Malkmus gigs, and yet something always comes up. As it stood, this was my second time seeing the man play, and the first time as a solo act, so I was excited, if not maybe a bit apprehensive. There were so many ways that this could go wrong. And then he strode out, tan and beautiful as always, decked out in a pink button-down shirt and khakis, and opened with "Heaven is a Truck." It was clear everything was gonna be okay. He proceeded to rip through a bunch of Pavement tracks (including "Trigger Cut" and "In the Mouth of a Desert" with the always-charming Bob Nastanovich on drums, an instrument that he still obviously can't play), and he even nailed Silver Jews' classic "Blue Arrangements." And the audience was almost totally indifferent. Seriously, I think Voxtrot drew more applause the day before. Maybe there were too many solo jams, maybe his banter was just too trite and mean, or maybe the crowd was a bunch of twits.
After that, and with the end in sight, the remaining three acts passed pretty quickly. Of Montreal, either due to some fundamental misgivings about the quality of their songs or simply looking for yet another way to cloak the deep, depressing core of most of their songs in weirdness and sunshine, really have gone full-bore into the spectacle that is their live show. They were one giant hamster-ball away from Flaming Lips levels of absurdity. The New Pornographers, by contrast, stuck to the music, and fared pretty well for it. Not even the muddled sound on the left stage could ruin "The Slow Descent into Alcoholism" or the sadly appropriate "From Blown Speakers." De La Soul finished things out with a long set, Prince Paul sitting quietly in the middle of them doing nothing for almost all of it. And then it was out into the night, facing the long ride back to the South Side and the decidedly pleasant prospect of not interacting with another hipster for a few days at least.