The Festival Industrial Complex

The Portuguese festival, Waking Life, wrote an assay about what they call "The Festival Industrial Complex". It is full of great, inspirational and thought provoking points, making me reconsider how and when to participate in festivals and concerts.

I'm bringing a few quotes here, but it's all very good.

The betrayal of the values of the underground is both crude and sophisticated, a symbiosis of blatant brandolonisation and a sinister financial architecture. The landscape is no longer populated by independent promoters but by a Russian doll of corporate ownership: from your ticket, to the festival, to Superstruct, to private equity firms like KKR, designed to obscure origins. The capital funding your “carefree” weekend is often invested in the very industries that perpetuate the crises that festival culture ostensibly opposes.

(...)

This necessitates a radical redefinition of artistic “quality”, divorcing it from the slick, commodifiable sheen of the Industrial Complex and re-anchoring it in the depth of participatory, transformative experience. The question shifts from ‘How impressive is the spectacle?’ to ‘How profound is the participation?’

(...)

The trajectory of counterculture usually follows a predictable arc from insurrection to brand: a grim procession where every authentic gesture is inevitably processed into a product. The contemporary festival landscape is a graveyard of these sold-out revolutions, a corporate simulacrum where the original rave’s radical potential has been systematically financialized into a ghost of itself.

(...)

The Festival Industrial Complex is the enemy of music’s historical mission. It depoliticizes where music radicalizes. To reclaim the rave is to recognize that the dancefloor was always a rehearsal for the revolution. There is no neutral vibe; there is only solidarity or sliding further into complicity.

Via @rasmusfleischer