Osheaga: First impressions and Ideal Lovers

Ok, I’m gonna warn you, I hate festivals. Here I am blogging Osheaga, and I hate festivals.

I’m really trying to not be jaded. I like the outdoors. I like music. I like people enjoying themselves. Seriously. I can like Osheaga. I can certainly respect the large scale organization that goes into pulling a festival off.

I think it will help to start by stating my reasons for disliking Osheaga so I can attempt to move past them and provide you with some coverage of this darned thing.

The first thing is obvious: a park has been turned into a little town with new objectives. Upon entering the parc from the metro, it’s clear, in a disheartening way, that all the tents, the promotional materials, the food vendors are displayed for each person to walk by and notice them, to comment on them like the person before us, but in our own witty way, to take a photo, and to write home about them, whether or not we’re actually blogging for a website. Even the art has this quality as it’s arranged along the paths through the park with the look of being hidden in the woods. Oh look, a stage! I was just walking along a dirt road past this Dentyne Ice display and then the path opened into a clearing and there were all these people gathered to listen to music together. Of course it’s fake; but is it evil?

Can a band play in a festival like Osheaga and provide a genuine performance that connects them with their audience? i don’t think it’s impossible, but perhaps just beside the point.

After coming back from SXSW this past spring, I had the strong feeling that festivals of that scale take every element that I dislike about musicmaking and then build a city using these elements as their raw material. It’s all the industry stuff, which isn’t evil by nature. Festivals just make it seem as though this is what a musician works toward, which is really depressing. They remove the rewards of intimate creative communities and replace them with a collection of what are ordinarily the outlying steps in creative pursuits: advertising, promotion, show reviews, A+R…There are no scenes and no setting dynamics; music takes place incidentally while everyone is running around. Where is the culture?

It would be truly radical to find creativity within this setting and I can definitely hear the argument for progressive situations and groups in a prefab town….I think I’m missing the point. We’re here to listen to the bands we love in a beautiful outdoor park, along with thousands of other music-lovers. The prefab city is necessary to make this all feasible and safe. And here I am griping about it on a blog, while I miss out on the actual shows going on behind me.

Ok I feel better already. I’m lathered in sunscreen, armed with a water bottle, and ready to have an open-minded good time. I’ll obviously return to this debate, but for now, I’m confused about how I feel.

Hey look! Verdun’s awesome vegan restaurant, Blue Monday, has a tent!

The first band I went to watch was Ideal Lovers. They weren’t what I had imagined them sounding like, after hearing about them from a few friends. They were bluesier. Older. There’s something about perfectly capable musicians going through their parts, but lacking new sounds or ideas that just doesn’t work for me. I don’t consider myself a novelty lover, where I can only appreciate the new and the eccentric, but certain things resonate musically, and for me it’s usually either freshness or nostalgia: Wow, I’ve really never heard that before, or Wow that’s something that I know that is wonderful. Ideal lovers were neither for me.

While watching them, I fantasized about a band playing in a packed wooden barn where everyone is open and warm with enjoyment. The band is good and the people are lost in movement. Energy is what is created. Ideal Lovers are good enough to make this happen. But I’m too bitter, and I would argue, the setting is too difficult to let this unfold.

People liked them; the crowd was dancing, though it simply wasn’t my thing. I wonder if what I like in music is overly specific and just not to be found at a festival?