Oliver Tree was pissed about the sun. He was pissed about a lot of things, in fact, which made his antagonistic schtick perfect for absorbing the negative energy hurled at him by impatient Lil Uzi Vert fans waiting for their hero’s Outside Lands set. But as a one-time SF State student, Tree understood that during a San Francisco summer, the park wasn’t supposed to be sunny but shrouded in mist and fog. I imagine those packed like sardines at the front of the Lands End stage, who were visibly sweating and passing out with alarming regularity, wished for the same.
The festival started out calmly enough with Oakland’s Spelling at the Sutro Stage, but as I left to wander the grounds, I noted people spilling in at an alarming rate. Outside Lands bills itself as a “music and arts festival,” and as I came across a wall of eccentric murals I noted the subtle wonderland effect they created.
This is a place where your eyes are likely to lock eyes with a picture of a gorilla hand-cranking a gramophone that spits out birds as you hear “One More Time” or “September” in the distance. (The between-set playlists were inspired, though the organizers apparently forgot about the f-slur in “In Da Club” and faded it out into Beyoncé’s “Break My Soul” as if to clear the air.)
After catching earnest Cudi-type Odie at the Lands End stage, I returned to a substantially more crowded Sutro for Faye Webster. Her music is a generally soporific mix of R&B and country, but even on the Faye frontlines, the crowd was getting tightly packed, sweaty, and woozy. At one point she interrupted a lengthy spoken-word spiel about some guy named “Johnny” to make sure an attendee got out of the crowd safely — then forgot where she was and decided: “Fuck Johnny.”
It was around then that I decided to get as close as I could for Lil Uzi Vert at Lands End. Uzi is one of the biggest rappers in America, and I decided that at least once in my music journalism career, I needed to experience a massive rage-rap festival set from the front regardless of the possibility of getting crushed to death. The scent of danger appealed to the crowd; “I want my dick against the wall for Uzi,” one said.
After Hiatus Kaiyote — an Aussie jazz fusion band that I’ve always felt could be using their chops… to much more interesting ends — I was subjected to the verbal torments of Oliver Tree, a pop-rap provocateur with a goatee and blond wig that made him look (deliberately, I don’t doubt) like a cut-rate Billy Ray Cyrus. “Uzi, Uzi,” chanted the mass of sweaty bros, and Tree only used their dismissal as ammunition for his anti-social antics. He threatened to make each song his last, a schtick that was funny at first and then got annoying — again, probably the point, which is what made his set so exciting.
After Tree left for good, a throng of concerned-looking organizers sauntered to the edge of the stage, and it quickly became clear they were discussing how to prevent a crowd crush. Every now and again someone would pass out and send terrifying ripples of balance loss through the crowd. Finally, one of the organizers told everyone to take a step back — then another, and another. Uzi followed suit upon taking the stage, and the mosh ended up being rather comfortable by standards.
The wonderful soul singer SZA didn’t benefit from being seen in a tightly packed crowd, as the audience drowned out her voice in close quarters by singing along voraciously. But it’s refreshing to see that, even as she’s been touring them for half a decade in the absence of new music, the songs from her first and so-far-only album CTRL have lost none of their power.
Her spectacular stage setup included a prop lighthouse and a rear projection of an idyllic seaside town, its seawalls under attack from ocean swells that shot up like geysers. By that time, the fog was coming in, and the way it sprayed against my face made for a neat unintentional multimedia experience.
