Ten years ago, Outside Lands’ agnosticism towards pop and rap in favor of classic rock was a running joke. This seems almost unbelievable now. It’s not so much that the festival is focusing more on contemporary tastes: it’s that it seems to have swung entirely the other way, intent on capturing the zeitgeist, by largely booking artists who’ve risen to fame within the last five years.
Perhaps no genre is as associated with 2000s babies than hyper pop, an irreverent and often earsplitting exaggeration of contemporary pop music. It’s absolutely wonderful that a generation of music fans is emerging with a higher tolerance for challenging and discordant music than ever, and Sunday saw appearances from both 100 gecs — the genre’s elder states-gremlins at ages 27 and 28 — and the promising young star Glaive, only 17.
Gecs’ schtick seems a bit tame at this point, and though their self-proclaimed “silly songs” still rock, they’ve still been doing the same thing for about three years, while the hyperpop genre’s split up and transmogrified into more interesting things. Representing this new wave was Glaive, who dressed like a Motown star despite confessing he’d just learned how to put on a tie. He was one of the most magnetic performers I saw all festival, and it helped that he was playing the Panhandle, a small stage where it’s easy to see the artist in the flesh. His music wasn’t dissimilar in lineage and intent to the awful mall-pop I heard from Kenny Hoopla on Saturday, but unlike Hoopla, Glaive could sing and write — and dance.
It was fun to see something so close to the vanguard of pop music at Outside Lands, but the best performances came from two artists whose calling card was their hard-earned maturity. Pusha T, the only major rapper at the festival to have had any presence in the 1990s and 2000s, embodies a purism so spartan that he flat-out refused to sing the hook of his classic Kanye collab “Runaway.” The rap-as-rock iconoclasm of Uzi or Post Malone has nothing to do with Push’s music, which carries itself like elegant crime fiction, and though his sound lost a bit from his use of a higher-pitched “festival voice” than his distinctive, calm sneer, it’s still incredible how almost every word out of his mouth sounds badass. (His claim that It’s Almost Dry was the “album of the fucking year” has legs, though the audience reacted tepidly to its songs compared to those of 2018’s Daytona.)
My other fave was Cassandra Jenkins, who fits nicely with the latter-day confessional indie-rock movement except in her confident and mature stance. Her voice is so calming and robust she could narrate audiobooks, and though she’s as confused as anyone living in the hell of the 21st century, she puts on a sophisticated guise that’s much more interesting to me than the bummy relatability that dominates DIY songwriting. She’d played earlier in the day at Sutro, but having experienced the wonders of the wooded and intimate Toyota Music Den yesterday, I resolved to catch her there. She was wonderful, even if her brilliant spoken-word self-help deconstruction “Hard Drive” is so good it makes her other songs seem a little slight by comparison.
Then there was Weezer, for whom maturity is irrelevant. Rivers Cuomo’s geek-rock project has been failing upwards for four straight decades now, and I bailed after about four songs to go see Kim Petras, a German pop star whose music is as crass and dumb as Weezer’s, except she can sing and dance and seems to care about her craft rather than coasting on meme status.
Look: Outside Lands objectively kind of sucks. If your frattiest friend says the crowd is fratty, the crowd is probably pretty damn fratty. It’s expensive, you have to pay outlandish prices for food and beer on top of that, and the performers probably won’t blow your mind. Against all odds, I had a good time, but the amount of fun I had on one given day at Outside Lands versus your typical local DIY show at the Knockout or Bottom of the Hill was hardly enough for me to recommend enduring the steep ticket prices, long lines, and inability to move in and out of the premises.
Big festivals just aren’t for me. I went to one in 2017 that had Missy Elliott and Björk and Frank Ocean and still didn’t have that great of a time, which means I’ll probably never experience the kind of rapturous bliss I imagine my high school classmates were all feeling at Coachella. Maybe the crowd was so young because, at a certain age, you learn that festivals don’t actually make you feel that way: they just make you sweaty, tired, and short half a paycheck.
