December 2022

How Nostalgia Filled the Music Festival Void in 2022

What’s the easiest way to make a buck? To cash in on people’s nostalgia of course. The live music industry was decimated from 2020 to 2021. So much so that, when festivals made their return this year, if it seemed like prices were multiplied 1.5 times, well, it’s because they were. The live music industry took such a hit in the last two years that it’s trying to quickly re-find its footing and push its finances back into the green. But doing so won’t come with originality or innovation.

The “nostalgia” festival circuit is nothing new to the industry, or at least not to Southern California, with a sleuth of revival festivals popping up just before the pandemic (see Cruel World Festival or Just Like Heaven). And given LA’s dearth of alternative music festivals, the city proved to be fertile breeding ground for Goldenvoice and Live Nation to recoup their finances from the past two years.

The first round of nostalgia festivals seemed to be spearheaded by This Ain’t No Picnic, Goldenvoice’s new alternative crown jewel based in Pasadena. With a lack of indie/alternative festivals in Southern California, after the fall of FYF Fest, a void for perhaps LA’s biggest genre scene was gapingly left open, leaving Goldenvoice (the predominant presence in SoCal, and owners of FYF) to craft a weekend festival that would perfectly fit the previous FYF audience. With a lineup featuring headliners Strokes and LCD Soundsystem, and a reunion from Le Tigre, they quickly picked up where they left off by curating a festival with the cornerstones of the genre.

But perhaps the biggest and most recent nostalgia fest to take place isn’t in Southern California, but Las Vegas. The brand new When You Were Young festival boasted a lineup of bands that hit their peak in 2007: My Chemical Romance, All American Rejects, Paramore, Avril Lavigne, and AFI too name a few. What at first looked like a deliberate cash grab, turned out to be not just that, but a very lucrative cash grab. After selling out in mere hours, a second day was soon added. Then after that sold out, a THIRD day with the same lineup was added. It became so popular that, even before the first installment took place, When You Were Young already announced NEXT year’s lineup and dates (goes to show you how readily available all these acts were).

Other fests have basked in the nostalgia haze as well. Some examples include Smokin Grooves in downtown Los Angeles for classic soul/RnB, Palomino festival in Pasadena for old school country, and of course the hip-hop throwback showcase Rock the Bells. But it’s not just festivals, entire tours with nostalgia acts have been in the works. Summerland Festival reps itself as the “90s alternative rock tour,” featuring bands like Everclear (who founded the festival), Marcy Playground, and other semi-notable acts from the 90s alt-rock, one-hit-wonder craze.

When You Were Young – *Courtesy of Jenn Five/Kerrang*

The success of these festivals and tours goes to prove that, just like how there’s a sub-reddit for everything, there’s also a festival for every genre of music, and then sub-genre. Live entertainment groups are now cashing in on already built-in audiences: why take the risk in creating something new and fresh when you know what will already sell and be successful?

But it also prompts the question, do people care if they come off as old? Out of place? Outdated? How far can age actually go? How far back into the past does one have to reach before they’re treading into an audience that won’t even show up and represent? Identity crises are nothing new, but don’t even those nostalgic fests and audiences have an expiration date? One can keep bringing back what used to be in fashion, but how much of the old is too much?

And it goes without saying, that even just relying on nostalgia acts isn’t a guarantee for success. 2022 has had a sleuth of mishaps and unfortunate events as festivals and tours tried to make their comeback this year. Live events are not just raising ticket prices, but are cutting corners in hiring inexperienced staff for cheap, resulting in logistical nightmares in running a festival: long queues, angry festival goers, and a desperate need for strong attendance have tainted many events. Spain’s Primavera is one of the main examples that succumbed to these mishaps this year. In bringing back the festival after a three year hiatus, Primavera not only hiked up ticket prices, but also oversold tickets in an attempt to make their money back from the previous two years, resulting in extreme bottlenecking with large crowds in tight spaces with low-paying staff.

But event logistics aren’t the only things making tours and festivals unreliable this year. In addition to artists still contracting COVID, one just simply can’t predict the laws of nature. Las Vegas’ When You Were Young festival had to cancel its first day due to extreme winds, while the long-awaited Rage Against the Machine reunion had to be cancelled after vocalist Zach de la Rocha tore his ACL just a few shows in.

Needless to say, this business model of banking on nostalgia is only a phase. People will only be able to take so much of the past that it’ll eventually dilute itself, until the point where audiences need something fresh. Festivals are now in a tug of war with themselves between banking on what is reliably successful, and what is new, cool and innovative. It’s one thing to be “cool,” but to be cool AND successful? That’s nearly impossible.

But are nostalgia festivals here to stay? As long as audiences like to remain in their comfort zones, absolutely. Nostalgia will always have an audience. But will that take away incentive to fund new, innovative festivals for growing audiences? Absolutely not. Perhaps the next generation of festival goers will be ones that actively challenge themselves, that go against habits like leaning on nostalgia as a crutch, and learn to embrace the constantly changing live music landscape.

Featured photos courtesy of Jenn Five/Kerrang

Cinema in 2022 was the Year of the Donkey

Note: This article contains donkey spoilers

In 2015, the German newspaper Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung published an article on why humans are fascinated with what they called “animal films,” or, films focusing on animals as their subjects rather than humans. It came to the conclusion that the phenomenon was attributed to the fact that, for the first time in history, a species (humans) has the ability to not only study and reflect on themselves, but to also document and research other species.

The cinema of 2022 seems to have brought that phenomenon to a heightened experience, albeit centered around an animal not so commonly focused on or documented. The donkey (Equus Asinus) seems to have taken the animal spotlight this year, particularly in films pushing for awards attention. Films such as Triangle of Sadness, Banshees of Inisherin, and EO have not just casted donkeys into the limelight, but gave them actual narrative-centric, stakes-heavy roles, even going so far as to make them protagonists in their own right.

But why now? Why this particular animal in this particular year? Well, the first thing one thinks of when they hear the word “donkey” is humor. On top of that, what donkeys also offer, or at least in these particular films, is companionship, thus making the animal great for sidekick roles that add a levity of humor (Shrek, etc.) 2021 and 2022 have had their fair share of ironic humor and wit. Comedy has become so “real” now, that what we used to joke about has now become commonplace. That’s not to say that the humor has gone, but our jokes have now become more of a reality than we previously thought.

With that in mind, no other animal embodies the levity of ironic humor quite like the donkey. Think of a donkey’s purpose: it’s indifferent, lazy, and doesn’t have much of a role on a farm aside from scaring off predators and pulling carts. Its only thought is to survive to the next day. Throughout pop culture, even stretching as far back as fairy tales and fables, the donkey has been the laughing stock of farm animals, which sadly gives it its gloomy reputation (Town Musicians of Bremen, Winnie the Pooh). But it also makes the perfect representation of ironic humor in 2022.

A donkey doesn’t make an appearance in Triangle of Sadness until about two-thirds through the film. But when it does, it’s used as a plot device in perhaps the most ruthless casting of the animal this year. When the upper echelon yacht cruise full of the rich and wealthy is shipwrecked, the affluent passengers are placed on an equal playing field with the yacht’s crew when they don’t know how to care for themselves, flipping the film’s theme of inequality upside down. Starving for food, they come across a donkey, and, well, you could guess what happens next….

The animal is definitely used in a darker comedic sense here, but why not any other animal? Would it have had the same effect had another animal been spared? The donkey tends to be the lowest on the totem pole. They’re a species that always gets the short end of the stick. And when it’s slaughtered, it’s merely a representation of irony dying, the cascading caste system that has descended upon the yacht-goers after being marooned.

But pity humor isn’t the only trait the donkey inherited this year in cinema. The animal also took on the role of companionship, with Banshees of Inisherin going so far as to cast the animal in a supporting role as Pádraic Súilleabháin’s (Colin Farrell’s) sidekick. As everyone starts to leave Padraic’s life due to his toxic trait of being stagnant with his future he begins to become more and more attached to his donkey, the only familiar face that stays behind. Where Triangle sees the donkey as pity-less humor, Banshees breathes life into the animal by casting it through the lens of loyalty. However, as Padraic pushes the ones closest to him away, he also puts the last shred of his donkey’s loyalty at risk, which ultimately dies in the end as well.

But aside from Donkeys perishing in the spotlight, the year in film has also casted them as main characters. The Jury Prize winner at this year’s Cannes film festival, EO follows a donkey that goes astray as it makes its way across Europe. It starts at a circus, where we see our donkey set free by an animal rights group and drift from one owner to the next, oblivious as to what’s carrying him each way. Along the way, he influences the outcome of a soccer match, becomes the mascot for a small town’s celebration, and is even brought into the company of Isabelle Huppert. But the most important element of this film is the stark contrast to our other two previous examples. What this film does that the other two don’t is give our donkey agency, an attempt to overcome the limitations placed upon itself, much like the preconceived notions humans already have when they hear the word “donkey.” Whereas Triangle and Banshees showed the fate of a donkey through a human lens, EO takes the POV of the animal, with the result being a surrealist, stylistic vision showing ultimately how humans interact with the animal kingdom.

Donkeys don’t tend to hold a soft spot for many people. Humans have put them to many uses over the years, including entertainment purposes. And these films go to show that they truly are at the mercy of the humans around them. People tend to argue what the most dangerous animal in the world is, when they’re blind to the fact that humans who are the most dangerous. To return to the article in Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, in our fascination with animal films, in our ability to record and document other creatures, we in turn often forget the implications and consequences of such actions, unaware of the interruptions we cause in their ecosystems. The cinema of 2022 seems to have flipped this perspective through empathy. In showing these consequences from the POV of the animal kingdom, the year gave us a necessary view of how, in studying other species, we also inadvertently record their demise.