Fun Fun Fun Fest in review →

At a time when trend-chasing (or even, if you want to be generous, attempts at trend-setting) is the only way anyone can think of to try to keep up with a music landscape that is ever-changing, uncertain and laden with an extremely short attention span, Slayer is a singular, iconic artist. It’s more appealing now than ever, to more people than ever, to hear a band that just does what they do without any of those other concerns. They like to play fast songs about death, destruction and Satan. They’ve been doing it for three decades. If you don’t like it, go watch Odd Future.

We live in uncertain times, but some things do not change. All hail Slayer.

I spent most of the weekend at Fun Fun Fun Fest, which lived up to its name. I was there, officially, to scout out some neat bits of music-culture weirdness for MTV Hive, which will start rolling out shortly, and did some moonlighting for my pals at CultureMap while I was there.

The above paragraphs come from the write-up I did for Slayer (duh), and there is more to be found in the links below.

I had a good time trying to contextualize all of the things I saw, because I think small festivals like Fun Fun Fun offer some interesting opportunities to get at the pulse of what people are into culturally in an increasingly fractured culture. The festival was huge, and absolutely packed with people, but it’s not an all-things-to-all-people event like Austin City Limits or Coachella — there’s a definite aesthetic here, and it’s designed to appeal to a few different types of people, finding what they have in common. How do Odd Future and Slayer and Major Lazer and Danzig and Passion Pit and Blonde Redhead and Public Enemy and Spoon all fit together? They all appeal to the nebulous beast known as the American Hipster, but there are people who feel passionate toward all of those artists who don’t fit that descriptor, if it means anything at all, in the slightest. What does the opportunity to see them all together offer?

I don’t know for sure that I found any answers, but I enjoyed very much trying to piece it together. Here are the CultureMap stories:

6 months ago | 1 note | Reblog | | Comments
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