Midway through the first day of last weekend’s first-ever All Points West music festival, Canadian indie super-group The New Pornographers gave a spirited, main-stage run through of “My Rights Versus Yours,” cementing the hooky tune, which first appeared as the power-popped lead track on last year’s Challengers, as the unofficial anthem of the three-day weekend.
“Same thing as it was last time,” sang lead Pornographer Carl Newman over shiny keyboards and backing harmonies, “but now it’s your rights versus mine.”
Your rights were the central issue at All Points West: what you could do; what you couldn’t; why or why not; and when, how many times, and for how long.
The over-21 and booze prone discovered that, should they want to watch laptop hipster Girl Talk conduct an onstage mash-up party while sipping overpriced swill from a plastic cup, they’d need to find a basically non-existent sight line between the nearest Beer Pen (an enclosed area serving as the only place one cold buy or consume anything fermented) and the Bullet Stage (the other two stages had even goofier names that I’ll graciously leave out of print); a handy tabbed wristband system attempted to ensure no one bought more than five over the entire day.
You wouldn’t necessarily have needed a drink to enjoy multi-instrumentalist and songwriter Andrew Bird—booked against Girl Talk on day one, but I caught some of both—as he whistled his way through a subtle set of his violin-looped and glockenspiel-augmented witty pop; it’s contemplative stuff, perhaps excepting the crowd-jolting punch of “Fake Palindromes” that the Chicago native doused us with, flamboyantly bending its vocal melody at whim.
By days two and three, when the serious musicianship of, respectively, Philly live hip-hop crew The Roots and jammy former Phish guitarist Trey Anastasio each reigned over hour-long sets, the crowd simply switched to different altered states. I’ll presume beer-tent sales diminished as attendees all around puffed on recreational joints, the modern music festival being the curious place where, while the Roots take a mini-jazz odyssey or barefoot hippie chicks dance to a noodly six-string, certain rights suddenly come into general acceptance, despite being serious public infractions in the larger world.
But what do I know about being a member of the public? As someone who dubiously practices in a form of journalism that mostly entails seeing bands for free, I gladly affixed my sticky press pass to my jeans each day in an effort to seamlessly glide into the various stages’ photo pits, something that wasn’t lost on me as The New Pornographers’ Newman repeated a lyric—”The truth in one free afternoon”—over and over in the bridge to “My Rights.”
The ticketed masses, paying $100 a day after Ticketmaster heaped surcharges upon their general admission purchases, came en masse for Radiohead’s two-night, back-to-back stint on evenings one and two. And Radiohead, dreamers that they are, tried their best to set the world to rights: Without special issued-by-the-band-only credentials, no one was getting into the area in front of the stage—leveling everyone, finally, on the same (literal) field—especially me.
Drunk or sober, stoned or straight, the bulk of the audience roared (then shushed) for every number the Oxford quintet unveiled. “How To Disappear Completely” so completely entranced me that, mid-song, I ceased to look at anything at all: not the band, not the bizarre vertical light installation that hung around them on stage nor the color-filtered, security camera–style images relaying claustrophobically close shots of Jonny Greenwood’s slender finger operating the Ondes Martinot or a zoom in on his bassist Colin Greenwood’s “No Age” tee as eerily displayed on giant monitors.
Between rarities (the title track from Kid A) and crowd pleasers (the band played “Paranoid Android” only on the first night, giving us better OK Computer fare like “Exit Music” on Saturday), the Radiohead crowd was as appreciatively engaged as anyone cramped in a crowded cage on the Jersey side of the Hudson could possibly be.
Necessary statutes were obeyed, long lines were waited in; rights, perhaps, were stripped away for an arguably greater good.
Somalian rapper K’naan, who surely knows better than us the chaos that ensues when everyone tries to get theirs all at once, told a decidedly un-hip-hop, anti–rock ‘n’ roll story about another festival he played where his set got cut short. “If I can’t play the song, then I can’t play the song,” he told the audience about the closing number he had to omit. “There’s rules,” he added.
“Same thing as it was last time,” sang lead Pornographer Carl Newman over shiny keyboards and backing harmonies, “but now it’s your rights versus mine.”
Your rights were the central issue at All Points West: what you could do; what you couldn’t; why or why not; and when, how many times, and for how long.
The over-21 and booze prone discovered that, should they want to watch laptop hipster Girl Talk conduct an onstage mash-up party while sipping overpriced swill from a plastic cup, they’d need to find a basically non-existent sight line between the nearest Beer Pen (an enclosed area serving as the only place one cold buy or consume anything fermented) and the Bullet Stage (the other two stages had even goofier names that I’ll graciously leave out of print); a handy tabbed wristband system attempted to ensure no one bought more than five over the entire day.
You wouldn’t necessarily have needed a drink to enjoy multi-instrumentalist and songwriter Andrew Bird—booked against Girl Talk on day one, but I caught some of both—as he whistled his way through a subtle set of his violin-looped and glockenspiel-augmented witty pop; it’s contemplative stuff, perhaps excepting the crowd-jolting punch of “Fake Palindromes” that the Chicago native doused us with, flamboyantly bending its vocal melody at whim.
By days two and three, when the serious musicianship of, respectively, Philly live hip-hop crew The Roots and jammy former Phish guitarist Trey Anastasio each reigned over hour-long sets, the crowd simply switched to different altered states. I’ll presume beer-tent sales diminished as attendees all around puffed on recreational joints, the modern music festival being the curious place where, while the Roots take a mini-jazz odyssey or barefoot hippie chicks dance to a noodly six-string, certain rights suddenly come into general acceptance, despite being serious public infractions in the larger world.
But what do I know about being a member of the public? As someone who dubiously practices in a form of journalism that mostly entails seeing bands for free, I gladly affixed my sticky press pass to my jeans each day in an effort to seamlessly glide into the various stages’ photo pits, something that wasn’t lost on me as The New Pornographers’ Newman repeated a lyric—”The truth in one free afternoon”—over and over in the bridge to “My Rights.”
The ticketed masses, paying $100 a day after Ticketmaster heaped surcharges upon their general admission purchases, came en masse for Radiohead’s two-night, back-to-back stint on evenings one and two. And Radiohead, dreamers that they are, tried their best to set the world to rights: Without special issued-by-the-band-only credentials, no one was getting into the area in front of the stage—leveling everyone, finally, on the same (literal) field—especially me.
Drunk or sober, stoned or straight, the bulk of the audience roared (then shushed) for every number the Oxford quintet unveiled. “How To Disappear Completely” so completely entranced me that, mid-song, I ceased to look at anything at all: not the band, not the bizarre vertical light installation that hung around them on stage nor the color-filtered, security camera–style images relaying claustrophobically close shots of Jonny Greenwood’s slender finger operating the Ondes Martinot or a zoom in on his bassist Colin Greenwood’s “No Age” tee as eerily displayed on giant monitors.
Between rarities (the title track from Kid A) and crowd pleasers (the band played “Paranoid Android” only on the first night, giving us better OK Computer fare like “Exit Music” on Saturday), the Radiohead crowd was as appreciatively engaged as anyone cramped in a crowded cage on the Jersey side of the Hudson could possibly be.
Necessary statutes were obeyed, long lines were waited in; rights, perhaps, were stripped away for an arguably greater good.
Somalian rapper K’naan, who surely knows better than us the chaos that ensues when everyone tries to get theirs all at once, told a decidedly un-hip-hop, anti–rock ‘n’ roll story about another festival he played where his set got cut short. “If I can’t play the song, then I can’t play the song,” he told the audience about the closing number he had to omit. “There’s rules,” he added.
