Twenty years after The Strokes released Is This It, which may well be the very last compact disc you ever purchased, the quintet once hailed as the saviors of rock ’n’ roll closed out Day One of Outside Lands by starting 15 minutes late and sounding utterly winded and completely deflating the crowd that showed up for what would prove to be a lackluster set.
Truly, alternative rock is a moribund genre. Frontman Julian Casablancas tried to engage the listless main-stage crowd with some feeble banter, only to mutter and then walk-back some halfhearted critiques of mask mandates.
While not as desperate as, say, Madonna at Coachella 2006 — “I’m not feeling the love,” Madge bemoaned to a hostile desert audience — it could have fallen apart completely until Casablancas wisely chose to shut his yap and stick to the music.
Still, the Strokes gave in to their worst impulse and played at least four songs off their mediocre latest record, 2020’s atrociously titled The New Abnormal, including the shameless Billy Idol ripoff “Bad Decisions.” But if all you know of the Strokes is their soundtrack-to-NYC-on-the-cusp-of-9/11 debut record, you probably had some fun. Halfway through, right around its title track, things picked up considerably.
Maybe the haters had already jetted for Tyler the Creator, or maybe everyone just thought, “Fuck it, we’re at Outside Lands” and started dancing with abandon, the way you never could in New York bars until 2017 because of a bizarre, Prohibition-era cabaret-license law. Just ask the band, which wrapped up its encore with “New York City Cops,” a song that sounded more daring before Boogaloo Bois started lighting police stations ablaze to discredit Black Lives Matter activists.
In other words, the return of San Francisco’s most enduring outdoor music festival was a little ambiguous, cathartically speaking.
Since the pandemic isn’t over and probably never will be — and maybe more importantly, will never really feel like it’s over — you have to pick your milestones. The return of Outside Lands after a 26-month hiatus is definitely a strong life-is-back contender. But it’s probably easier for the subspecies of extraverts who feel comfy cutting laterally across a sea of drunk, maskless people shuffling in the same direction across gnarled tree roots that tripped up more than one person in a banana costume.
Outside Lands is almost always foggy, and it’s almost always cold. Friday wasn’t especially chilly, but the fog was so low that you couldn’t even see Sharon Van Etten’s let’s-all-chill-on-a-blanket performance from the media tent. But taking place 11 weeks later in the year than its typical mid-August meant we got more darkness, more decadence, and more gorgeously lit trees. While this writer will miss Rich Table’s porcini doughnuts with raclette until their last breath, 2021’s food offerings feel fresh and exciting, a snapshot of a dining scene that has been walloped by two years of existential crises. The delightfully numbing “ma-poutine,” or mapo tofu fries, from Brandon Jew’s Cantonese gem Mamahuhu were particularly excellent.
The Sutro Stage benefits acoustically from Lindley Meadow being a natural amphitheater. (Were you at Jamie xx in 2017? Because that was probably the loudest, most incredible set in OSL history, even if the Outside Lands app push-notified users that Tyler the Creator would be loud, loud, loud as well.) If you want to feel like you’re inside Coachella’s Sahara Tent — sort of, anyway — go to Sutro. It was there that British phenom SG Lewis opened what was undoubtedly the most danceable set of the day with a goofy, 40-second video tribute to Full House, then roped in the ultra-sexy rapper Channel Tres for a song before closing with the infectious “Chemicals.” It’s a party weekend, and we deserve a party!
Outside Lands will never be Dirtybird Campout, that mecca for professional party animals whose origins are also in Golden Gate Park. OSL’s 10 p.m. curfew — still a point of contention for crabby residents of the Richmond and the Sunset — means early to bed, or at least early to The Midway to see Kyle Watson.
That’s changing a little: Organizers put together an impressive list of late-night shows this year. And mounting a three-day festival that crescendos on Halloween is turning out to be a very good idea, even if it’s gonna be pretty muddy by Sunday, even if every other group costume trots out Mario and Luigi, and even if alt-rock may have suffered a mild stroke.
