NASCAR's big draw is clearly the music

A look at Chicago's festival ecosystem. [View this email in your browser]( [READER Logo]( Daily Reader | July 10, 2024 This past weekend the Chicago Sun-Times ran reviews of every musical act that performed on the main stage during NASCAR’s Chicago Street Race. Most of the year, the Sun-Times music news is a curious hodgepodge of wire copy, obituaries, hard-news reports tangentially related to music, stories ported over from WBEZ’s arts desk, and the occasional live review or profile written by a staffer or freelancer. When it comes to arts coverage, I generally want more from the dailies than their teams can often manage. Resources and space for music stories, particularly for local phenomenas that are under the radar of coastal tastemakers—i.e. the kinds of stories I believe local news outlets should pay greater attention to—are not as big a priority as I would like them to be. So I always find myself curious when another local news outlet goes whole hog covering a music event. I’m used to only seeing wall-to-wall coverage during Lollapalooza, an event of unrivaled bloat and sprawl whose size commands intensive coverage from news outlets that measure cultural import by financial impact. Lollapalooza is four days long, hosts roughly 200 acts across eight stages, and has a capacity of 100,000 people a day; about a decade ago, when the fest took up just three days, tickets would sell out before the lineup was even announced, a phenomenon that [ended by 2019](. (You can still purchase every conceivable kind of ticket for this year’s Lollapalooza with less than a month before it's set to begin.) In 2018, [I wrote a feature on the health of Chicago’s music festival ecosystem](. The scene, if you can call it that, felt ungainly huge at the time, and impossible to cover in a meaningfully comprehensive way; it also began to show signs of instability with the cancelation of a couple of notable fests, Reggae Fest and Chicago Open Air Fest. Since then, more big fests have abruptly canceled ([Ruido Fest in 2023]( or disappeared without a trace ([Mas Flow]( which debuted in 2022 and hasn’t come back) or ended after historic runs (earlier this week, [Block Club published a report on the end]( of the [Silver Room Block Party]( and [Hyde Park Summer Fest](. Chicagoans still have an embarrassment of riches when it comes to big-league music festivals and street fests with lineups that rival traditional music fests. As I noted in [my new preview of the Chosen Few Picnic]( there are five big outdoor music events Chicagoans can go to this weekend. I do not envy anyone attempting to introduce a new festival of any size in this environment. Locals have more options than they can reasonably experience. The escalating costs of attending these events—tickets, ticketing surcharges, transit, food—limit the number of events anyone who lives here can actually attend. The price of attending any of these events is so much greater for folks traveling to Chicago from out of state. The tourist contingent—always a big X factor for boosters of tentpole events that block off access to local parks—has to plan out exactly what they want to see. The draw for NASCAR’s Street Race has always been just that—fast cars driving around the Loop. The musical portion received less promotion than the race itself, and included only a handful of musical sets; it was ancillary to the main event. I found it curious that the Sun-Times [published an entire article]( about NASCAR’s musical portion drawing a “fraction of the Lollapalooza audience.” To which I ask: who expected the side entertainment to rival the largest private music event in this city? The Sun-Times’s framing is akin to ordering a steak and focusing on the parsley. Lolla has spent nearly 20 years building its Grant Park empire. NASCAR’s Street Race is in year two. [A Crain’s story from May]( pointed out the difference between these two events. “NASCAR knows it's no Lollapalooza—not from an economic impact standpoint nor from a music festival perspective,” Jack Grieve wrote. “The Chicago Street Race remains a racing-forward event, and the musical element of the weekend is closer to that of concerts accompanying Taste of Chicago than those drawing some 400,000 people to Grant Park the first weekend of August.” The comment about the Taste of Chicago torments me. The Taste drew [155,000 people in 2022]( the last year it remained in its long-standing position in Grant Park the week around July 4. The Taste is, of course, free, which means the barrier for entry is so much lower than, you know, the racing event that booted the Taste from its position. And, unlike a sporting event, which commands attendees’ attention above anything else nearby, the musical portion at Taste did feel like its own distinct draw—something you could witness without fear of missing out on the main event. A part of me suspects the musical acts that performed at NASCAR’s Street Race would’ve played to bigger crowds if they’d performed at a July 4 edition of the Taste of Chicago. They certainly deserved to play for larger crowds. (Well, maybe not the Chainsmokers.) I suspect one reason the Sun-Times asked such a question about attendance for the musical portion of NASCAR is the natural result of the newspaper treating the side event like it’s Lollapalooza. Of course, I want to see this volume of coverage of local music events on the regular. I also think the Street Race—a disruptive event that locals and institutions have criticized and lionized—demands critical coverage. And I hope, as the NASCAR Street Race fades further away from view, we’ll have a better sense of what the event actually meant and accomplished. ◈ [“There’s a Small Problem with the AI Industry: It’s Making Absolutely No Money,”]( by Sharon Adarlo (Futurism) ◈ [“Sections are killing the vibes in Chicago parties,”]( by Jihad Kheperu (The Triibe) ◈ [“Music Twitter has its own version of the Zynternet — and it sucks,”]( by Eli Enis (Chasing Sundays) ◈ polaroptics, [polaroptics]( ◈ Asher White, [Home Constellation Study]( ◈ D Jean-Baptiste, [halve]( ◈ Tek lintowe, [Kill You]( [Grails’ adventurous rock is for the people]( Wed 7/10 at Empty Bottle by [Micco Caporale]( | [Read more]( → [The Chosen Few Picnic is still one of the best ways to spend a Chicago summer day]( Sat 7/13 at Jackson Park by [Leor Galil]( | [Read more]( → [Guitarist Julie Byrne taps into love, grief, and human connection]( Fri 7/12 at Thalia Hall by [Jamie Ludwig]( | [Read more]( → [Chicago’s Pocketboy Solid just want to have fun]( Mon 7/15 at Schubas by [Leor Galil]( | [Read more]( → [ADVERTISE IN THE FOOD & DRINK ISSUE!]( Get the latest issue of the Chicago Reader Thursday, July 4, 2024 [READ ONLINE: VOL. 53, NO. 22]( [VIEW/DOWNLOAD ISSUE (PDF)]( [Donate to the Chicago Reader.]( [Facebook icon]( [Instagram icon]( [Twitter icon]( [LinkedIn icon]( [YouTube icon]( [Website icon]( [Logo] You received this email because you signed up for newsletters from the Chicago Reader. 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