🎤 Who is Lollapalooza really for?

Grant Park is booked for 73 days this summer. [View this email in your browser]( [READER Logo]( Daily Reader | March 20, 2024 I can’t count how many times I thought, “This is the worst Lollapalooza lineup ever” when organizers announced it for this summer’s four-day bash. “Worst” might not be correct; it’s not outrageously awful, just mostly bland and mediocre. Who is the person who really demands to see Hozier headline Lollapalooza in 2024? [Grant Park will be partially gated off for 73 days this summer](. I lay a lot of the blame on Lollapalooza, the beachhead event for corporations claiming Grant Park for high-priced gated events. (These events have ties to Lolla, festival promoter C3 Presents, and its parent company, Live Nation. [Lolla copresented]( the inaugural Sueños Music Festival, which returns to Grant Park for the third year Memorial Day weekend; [NASCAR partnered with Four Leaf Productions]( the event promotion company helmed by C3 cofounder Charlie Jones, to book music for last summer’s ill-fated inaugural Chicago Street Race.) Is losing this much access to Grant Park worth it so the park can once again host Blink-182 and the Killers like it's the 2017 version of Lolla all over again? (SZA is great, but I’d rather see her . . . anywhere else.) I can find legitimately great acts on the Lolla lineup; I would be worried if a festival that features nearly 200 acts didn’t book a single great band, especially considering the kind of Rolodex and finances that C3 and Live Nation command. I don’t think that makes a festival worthy of praise. If you’re willing to spend at least $400 and nearly a week at a music festival, it should show you something you are excited about, ideally in a way you can’t experience anywhere else. In 2024, as in so many years before it, Lolla’s lineup feels interchangeable with so many other festivals, at best. Why spend my time there when I could travel to another festival that isn’t in a public park to see one of the handful of acts I really like? I rag on Lollapalooza a lot. I understand the criticism I receive that this festival is “not for me.” I’m 38, I have no interest in spending four straight days avoiding direct sunlight in Grant Park all for the benefit of watching a band called Post Sex Nachos play music that makes me want to claw my eyes out. Which begs the question: who is this festival for anymore? And does this lineup give them everything they could want out of a festival? Or could there be a better festival in its stead? This is part of what I consider whenever Lollapalooza announces a new lineup. Is this, the biggest festival in Chicago, actually serving the people who clamor for it? Do they, after spending as much on a ticket as I once spent on a month’s rent, really feel like they got everything they could out of the experience? Is it something they couldn’t live without, a memory that will burn as brightly as those of other summer weekends spent with friends and loved ones? Or, like me, will they feel a little resentment at the way, say, [politicians have used Lollapalooza’s veneer of cool for their own gain]( Will they wonder why they spent a precious summer weekend shuffling between stages named after tech companies and alcohol brands in search of a sound they might actually enjoy? Will they wonder if this says something about the status of music festival lineups throughout the country, or if this one fest is just not as good as they remember? ◈ [“Upward Years Are Here: Inside Nothing’s Multi-Generational Shoegaze Fest Slide Away,”]( by Eli Enis (Stereogum) ◈ [“Fire. Dog. Life. 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