Lollapalooza 2011 has come and gone but I won’t soon forget what happened as the festival celebrated its 20th birthday along Chicago’s lakefront in Grant Park in true spectacle and ultimate glory. Like it always is, my Lolla experience was a complete and utter mind-blower. Once again I was sucked in by the sheer magnitude of it all and forever changed, whether I wanted to be or not. And this year, the massive party was bigger than it’s ever been with a record-setting 275,000 fans (90,000 per day) who all got their rock on to the tune of 130 bands over three days.
But before I tell you about the music, I’ll be completely honest and tell you that as a fan and a concert reviewer my relationship with Lollapalooza is very complicated and super complex. It’s a love/hate sort of thing. Part of me loves going to the festival to immerse myself in the endless river of intoxicating sonic pleasure. And I love the fact that so many people have gathered to embark on a life-altering and communal adventure like no other. But another part of me feels that the whole thing is just too damn big, and way too overwhelming at times. Because of this, much of the intimacy, uniqueness and sacredness of the live music experience is compromised and forsaken.
And as I struggled to make sense of my relationship with Lollapalooza, I decided to go back to Lolla’s etymological roots in hopes of writing you a different kind of concert review.
My curiosity led me to Webster’s dictionary, where I was reminded that “lollapalooza” is defined as “...an extraordinary or unusual thing, a person, or event, an exceptional example or instance.”
So instead of writing about Lollapalooza as just an event or just “an unusual thing” – which it certainly is – I’m going to share with you a concert review experiment in the form of an open letter/review to Lollapalooza as “a person.”
Dear Lollapalooza 2011,
There’s no easy way to say what I’m about to tell you, so I’ll just be completely honest and tell you that you make me crazy. Crazy good and crazy bad. You have a special way of making me want to cry, laugh, smile and go nuts all at the same time when I go to your festival. I don’t know how you do it, but somehow you know how to manipulate all my emotional buttons, and still I come back to you each year acting as if nothing happened. Am I addicted to you? Or do I just love being psychologically abused and manipulated by you because I love the way it feels?
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