Society of the Spectacle, or, Feeling Groovy, 2019 style.

In societies where modern conditions of production prevail, all of life presents itself as an immense accumulation of spectacles. Everything that was directly lived has moved away into a representation. -- Guy Debord, Society of the Spectacle, 1967

In the midst of all the talk about the Oscar nominations, someone I know on twitter recently commented that the two Fyre Festival documentaries were the feel-good movies of the year.  The documentaries (“Fyre: The Greatest Party That Never Happened,” on Netflix, and “Fyre Fraud,” on Hulu) depict the events leading up to, during, and after, an extraordinarily inept music festival that was supposed to occur on Great Exuma, in the Bahamas, in the spring of 2017.

Both documentaries gleefully expose the huge amount of hubris required to stage such a big failure, so the viewing pleasure the tweeter referred to was either the fact that they showed lots of rich people having a very bad time and also, perhaps, that the promoter, Billy McFarland, was sentenced to 6 years in jail. In fact, my own ability to take pleasure in thes documentaries referred to something else entirely: the fact that, as co-promoter Ja Rule says at one point, “at least no one died.”

Although that sounds ridiculously cynical, it’s actually a good point. Altamont, 1969: one man killed in full view of the audience by a Hell’s Angel, who was later acquitted. Roskilde, 2000: 9 people dead. Love Parade 2010: 19 deaths. Route 91, Las Vegas: 851 injured, 51 dead. At the  Fyre Festival, concert goers were merely inconvenienced by having to spend a night at the airport. Oh, plus, they lost their money, but what else is new?  Anyway, given the comparative gentleness of the punishment, it’s easy to mock the whole fiasco – if you don’t care to take into account what happened to the Bahamanians who were involved.

The Fyre Festival documentaries were of especial interest to me, because music festivals are my scholarly area. In fact, I just published a book about them, in which I trace the seeds of the kind of dystopia that the Fyre Festival made real. Much like the people who made these films, I started my book with a core research question. I wanted to understand why music festival goers see festivals as being spaces of freedom, when in fact they are the opposite: jails, almost, where basic amenities are costly and privacy is non-existent.

If you have attended even a small outdoor music festival, you are probably aware that they are the direct opposite of every one of these promises. A photograph of Bonnaroo by air, for example, depicts  an urban nightmare of overcrowding transposed on a once-pristine meadow. Yet year after year, concert goers fall for this disjunction and my goal, in taking on this project, was to understand the roots of this riddle.

In my book, I looked at a number of historical festivals to identified four appeals that I claimed underpin festival rhetoric. These were geographical remoteness, idylls of nature and ecology, the availability of sex and drugs, and racialized narratives about unity that obscure the way that race is usually coopted at festivals and used as a form of spectacle. The Fyre Festival organizers definitely took advantage of some of these false narratives – certainly the availability of sex and drugs is heavily implied, as was the appeal of being at an obscure location on a ‘private Caribbean island’ (a natural feature that would soon be wrecked by the advent of 10,000 concert goers). But to those, it added a few new twists, such as the use of the name Pablo Escobar, a video ad using a lot of super famous models cavorting on yachts, and a lot of ad-copy touting access to the most obvious types of vulgar luxury – private jets, beaches, backstage passes, and so forth.

These appeals don’t really conform to any of my ideas about typical music festival appeals, which skew more towards concepts of community-building, utopian ideals, and Bohemian hipness. True, those narratives aren’t any more real than the ones of Fyre, but the Fyre festival ones are so far off the usual ones that it’s like looking at them in a funhouse mirror. For example, the romanticization of Escobar – who, as the Hulu doc pointed out, was not so much a role model as a brutal murderer — is more in line with the way young people today worship businessmen like Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk without assigning a judgment to their foibles. Billy McFarland’s inane insistence on using the name “Pablo Escobar” in his promotional materials at the risk of losing access to the island in question – which he did — shows that he had absolutely gauged the appeal of that narrative at it’s worth. The concert sold out in hours.

The distortion of reality – even just the distortion of the illusions that  underpin festival going -- extends way beyond the rhetorical appeals of the original ad for Fyre and the whole idiotic concept of it, all the way through to its denouement. For me, one of the most telling moments in the documentary was when Andy King – the infamous ‘give a blow job for the team’ guy – says that at the height of the madness, he kept thinking about Woodstock, and how what was really a disaster on the ground has been remembered throughout the ages as this fabulous success. In once sense, he’s right, and it makes sense to invoke that image. But Woodstock had one thing that the Fyre Festival lacked: legendary performances by contemporary musical giants. The aesthetic excellence of the Fyre Festival’s musical content  was nil. It was all just an excuse to cavort on the beach with imaginary models.

All of this is just to say that to my mind, the Fyre Festival simply wasn’t a typical musical festival at all. There may be some lessons to learn from it, but they are not the ones that the documentaries say they are. Both of them blame three things for the debacle: McFarland, social media (specifically, Instagram), and, most prominently, Millennials, and what are said to be their values and practices. But I don’t buy it. Sure, McFarland was a huckster, abetted by a number of other hucksters, most prominently Ja Rule. Nothing new about that, it’s the American condition, and why someone once said,  there’s a sucker born every minute. But social media and Millenials come in for a very bad rap here – so bad, that one can’t help but think that the makers of these documentaries are trying to avert our eyes from something far worse.

Instagram, for example, surely doesn’t deserve to bear the brunt of this debacle. Certainly the Fyre Festival’s use of Instagram exploited a particular area of it – that space where ‘influencers’ hawk their lifestyles. But there are millions of users of Instagram, myself, for instance, who have never gone near an influencer’s page, who had no idea about the Festival, and who wouldn’t be induced to by a ticket to it if they did. I never once saw one of those Fyre-colored profile pages, and I’m on Instagram constantly. Surely the Fyre Festival certainly maxed out the number of people who’d buy into its false promises – and remember, many of those we see in the documentary were being comped in, so they didn’t spend any money on it.

To put the onus on millennials is even more specious, because not all millennials are obsessed with glamour. Example: Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is a millennial, and one who spends a lot of time on social media, too. She isn’t a Fyre-faller, nor are simply millions and millions of others, even ones who go to music festivals. To taint them all as being shallow and obsessed with their image is to willfully ignore the fact that the Fyre Festival appealed only to a relatively small number of people who had bad judgment about this one thing. Hopefully, they learned a lesson from it.

Besides, one should always distrust blanket assessments of generations like the ones that the Hulu documentary was laden with: “millennials do this, millennials do that.” Millennials come in all shapes and sizes, and one thing often not noted about them is that many of them are incredibly hard workers. This was evident in the documentary, as we saw many millenials continue to work for McFarland well beyond the point when it became clear that the concert was going down. True, judging from the interviews in both, many employees weren’t even remotely concerned about the fact that they worked for someone they fully recognized as a scam artist, to build an app (or a festival) that was clearly sleazy, and this is curious – but I wouldn’t attribute it to their generation alone: this lack of moral grounding is a question that haunts not just the Fyre Festival, but our entire economy right now. Indeed, the same question could and should be asked about the people involved in the Trump administration. Both sets of employees exhibit complete disinterest in ethics of their employers: they’re obviously smart and well educated, or they couldn’t do their jobs, but don’t seem to make any value judgment about what they’re involved in supporting. From the seemingly sensible woman in the Netflix doc who was working on the Fyre app to the young guy who booked the festival by paying the artists way more than their typical fees, their focus is not on the content of what they’re doing, but on how well they themselves can do it.

If you’re going to lay a guilt trip on the people involved in Fyre, that might be the place to lay it – except that there is a word for that kind of detachment: Marx called it ‘alienation,” and it’s a core feature of capitalism. So, much as I’d like to indulge in some schadenfreude, I personally don’t think it’s something any of us should feel superior to, especially not the producers of the Hulu documentary, who paid Mr. McFarland an undisclosed sum just so he could appear on camera and say “No comment” or “I don’t know” over and over again. Isn’t that exactly the kind of cynicism and bad faith that they spend the whole documentary accusing other people of indulging in?

Neither of those realizations made this a “feel good,” movie for me exactly, but not everything about it sucked. In fact, after it aired, some people started a Go Fund Me page for the Bahamian woman, Maryann Rolle, who’d lost $50,000 feeding all the workers at the festival site, and within days they’d surpassed that goal. In short, the Fyre Festival documentary may have exhibited some of the worst impulses of a few people who live amongst us right now. But it also prompted some of the best – and that fact alone kind of shows that the documentaries had a flawed thesis.

 If you're interested in my book on rock festivals, it's called Half a Million Strong: Crowds and Power at Festivals from Woodstock To Coachella (New American Canon).

Apocalypse Again

Last Thursday the smoke from the California fires in Butte county seemed to have settled permanently atop the Bay Area. The AQI was over 300, visibility was so poor that you couldn’t see Sutro Tower from middle of Haight Street, and almost every work place, my own included, had sent everyone home to shelter in place. By 6 pm the thin brown veil of ash that was covering everything in sight had been covered by darkness, leaving only the grey blurry sensation that comes when you forget to put on your contact lenses. Most people who were out had on face masks, like Freddy Krueger, which added to the sense of dystopia. But life has to go on, even in the apocalypse, so I parked my car on Cole Street, left my daughter sleeping in the back seat, and went to Amoeba Records to see the Ace of Cups play their first performance in San Francisco in, oh, something like 40 years.

 The Ace of Cups were an all-female band that played around the Haight in the mid to late 1960s. As my brother puts it in his excellent blog (please click through here), “throughout the 20th Century, the Ace of Cups band was a mystery bordering on myth: an all-female "psychedelic" band playing many of the legendary places with all manner of legendary headliners, but with no released recordings, no known history and hardly even a photograph.” As Corry notes, they weren’t the first all-female band by any means, but they were the first to write their own music, not wearing uniforms or playing covers, at least in that scene. The fact that so little is known about them – that they didn’t get a recording contract and so on – is beyond unsurprising given that even today such a thing is considered weird, inappropriate and noncommercial. 

 Despite their obscurity, I had heard of the Ace of Cups of course – my brother being their unofficial historian – but I had no idea what their music sounded until I saw them at Amoeba, and guess what? They were great. It was a little unsettling to watch them though. There was such a casual, fun grace to them; a vibe and an aura (for lack of a better word) that was wholly unique. We’ve become used to the sight of 70 plus year old men playing guitar and rocking out in ways that look much like younger men doing it, but the sight of women in that age bracket doing the same is…dare I say it? Better. It’s better, because first of all, they both sing better and look better. It’s a gender thing, I think. Men fall apart in their old age, they just do. It’s also better because, not having burned out touring for all those years, they don’t seem jaded or cliché’d. And finally, it’s better because it’s new. If it’s something you’ve never seen before, it’s probably well worth seeing. 

 I hope the Ace of Cups go on tour, so you can see them too. I hope they get to open for a band of their era. How about for the Grateful Dead, or whatever they’re called now? How about The Zombies, or the Eagles, or Fleetwood Mac? How about Patti Smith or Ringo Starr or Roger Waters? People in those audiences would probably really love them, because of their music and their back story and their courage, and because it’s just neat to see women do fun things at that age, it gives one hope for oneself.
 I’ll be honest though. Given the weird night, I probably wouldn’t have gone to see them if it wasn’t that I had my first book launch, at the Bindery on Haight, practically right next door. It was such an apocalyptic night, I’m surprised anyone came at all, and since I knew everyone personally in the audience, I didn’t prepare anything to read. Instead, I asked people to vote on which chapter they’d like to hear from, and the surprising consensus was that they wished to hear my thoughts about raves. So this is what I read:

Chapter 7. A Peculiar Euphoria: Rave Crowds and Freedom*

A comfortable, smooth, reasonable, democratic unfreedom prevails in advanced industrial civilization, a token of technical progress. --Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man

One evening in 1994, a friend of mine who worked for Rolling Stone called me up in a dither. She had arrived in San Francisco that afternoon on assignment to cover a Full Moon Rave in Santa Cruz, and she couldn’t for the life of her find out where it was to be held.

The rave was of the kind that gave clues, rather than a map, to its location. For example, a typical invitation – perhaps a flyer, given out at a bar – would ask you to call a number that would then direct you to the name of a store in Hunter’s Point, where you then had to buy something – perhaps a carton of eggs, indicated by an image on the original flyer -- and written on a single egg inside the carton would be the longitude and latitude of the location in Golden Gate Park.

Today, such devices seem laughably simplistic. If you were told to find a store in Hunter’s Point called Quikmart, you’d google its address, and if you were then given a location written in longitude and latitude, you’d use an app on your smart phone to find it. In 1994, this was not the case. You could spend hours driving around Hunter’s Point looking for the right shop, and you’d be especially hampered if you were from out of town. This is why my friend was flummoxed. I was, too, but as it turned out, my downstairs neighbor was d-jaying it, so I just asked him where he was going. 

"May Day" by Andreas Gursky

In other words, we found out the old fashioned way, through word of mouth.

As this story indicates, the clues to these dance parties ranged from obvious to obscure, but they were part of a larger project that elevated the experience of attending a rave to one of ideology rather than function. Just as grunge recouped ideas about punk rock and class status and inserted them into a more modern musical landscape, the intention of techno music was to meld the sonic output of electronic technologies with bodily pleasure; intellect with emotion. The ‘search’ was part of this project, and it had other advantages as well, eliminating casual comers and creating imagined communities of like-minded individuals. 

What’s interesting about this is that the concept of search, combined with the concept of the crowd, is integral to what is possibly the 1990s most entrenched-technology and cultural shifter, the search engine. The search engine, which was developed throughout that decade, has changed the way that most people think and even act. If, as Trevor Pinch and other SCOT theorists would have it, technology is socially constructed by users and not the other way around, then searching for raves is the perfect metaphor for its time. To do so, at least in San Francisco, was to participate in the zeitgeist; to experience the cutting edge of post-industrial age and its byproduct, the new media economy.

But to search is different than to seek. Ravers, like hippies, were more likely to describe themselves as seekers after enlightenment and a form of mental freedom. To search for something is a more prosaic activity. A seeker is on a personal journey. A searcher – like John Wayne in the movie of the same title – sets out on a more public quest. A search engine (rather than a seek engine) looks through public information, and this act, like Wayne’s hunt for his kidnapped niece, may have broad consequences. 

My name in lights

 Searching for music festivals, then, is different than seeking enlightenment, and it has a different outcome. As early as 2000, researchers were suggesting that the codes used to rank search results were (or perhaps one should say “are”) inherently political, based on invisible rankings built into the system. As we have seen, music festivals have been used as spaces for political statements and gestures and ideologies, but as with the politics of search, the biases and ideologies at festivals aren’t always entirely apparent: instead, the power hierarchies they inscribe are invisible. On the internet, search crawlers (“spiders”) crawl the web, displaying the ‘best’ – i.e. most popular, useful, or frequently asked for – results to users. This is a good allegory for music festivals. They too are spiders, crawling through culture, displaying results, popular acts, popular technologies, and advertisements, to attendees, who then spread them to culture at large. 

Of the many technologies that are on display at raves (turntables, sound systems, MDMA, portable toilets), the most obvious display is that of the attendants: ravers, scantily clad in glittery costumes with wings, face paint, spangles, backpacks and pacifiers, dancing ecstatically into the night. On the surface, raves seem to be advertisements not for people, or for music, but for a state of mind. Ravers would have it that this state of mind is the same as that of hippies – peace, love, freedom, and oneness; the merging of society with the self. But it may be more complicated than that. The rise of techno, through the medium of the rave, is a giant endorsement for the post-industrial economy and all its affordances. If, as Marx once said, history repeats itself, the second time as farce, then ravers are reproducing the gestures of the counterculture, without a hint of irony – or of lessons learned.

If you’d like to read more from my book Half a Million Strong: Crowds and Power from Woodstock to Coachella, you can order it here.

In addition you can order the Ace of Cups album here:

Also, if you are in the San Jose Area the weekend of December 1^st, I will be doing another reading and discussion with my friend film critic Richard Von Busack, at the Santa Clara Valley Brewing Company at 7 pm. Come on down!