Kendrick Lamar was slated to headline on Saturday night up against the festival-ready Black Keys. For some inconceivable reason, Lamar didn't end up performing on the Lands End Main Stage, but rather, the second-biggest Twin Peaks stage which was positioned in a valley-like meadow and of course was so packed with bodies in the 30 minutes before Lamar started that no one could move and the atmosphere was tense. Outside Lands was an overall tame affair, but pack tens of thousands of people into a basin-like field at the end of a long day, and everyone's going to feel a bit too close for comfort. I made it to a mercifully vacant area in time for the astral intro of Good Kid, M.A.A.D. City's "Money Trees." Lamar mostly played songs off of that seminal album, and fans of To Pimp A Butterfly might've felt slighted by the setlist, but so many of those tracks are erratic and near-impossible to sing along to, and Lamar really wanted his show to feel like a sing-along. He busted out A$AP Rocky's "Fuckin' Problems" and performed his inspiration-on-high 2Pac's "Hail Mary" midway through the show. He could undoubtedly hear every single word of "Swimming Pools (Drank)" screamed back at him, and the same happened when he dropped into lesser-known, non-singles like "The Art Of Peer Pressure" and "ADHD" off of Section.80.
There were two perfect moments during Lamar's set. The first arrived when he asked everyone in the crowd to turn on their cellphone lights during the hook of "Sing About Me, I'm Dying Of Thirst." The crowd was completely illuminated, and Lamar said some cheesy shit like, "See these lights? Each of these lights represents one of you," as that opening line played on loop: "When the lights shut off/ And it's my turn to settle down/ My main concern/ Promise that you will sing about me." It was saccharine and earnest and so, so cool to see a packed, once-restless audience "settle down" and just listen to Lamar talk about how important it is to look out at a collection of strangers at a show and see it as a community, rather than a bunch of adversaries trying their best to shove to the front. The second perfect moment arrived during the closing song, "Alright," which is the battle cry of TPAB, a defiant and optimistic song about having absolutely nothing left to lose. As Lamar performed the song, he looked out at the audience and shouted out a dude in a wheelchair who was crowd surfing toward the stage. Lamar asked the audience to make sure the guy made it up to the stage by the end of the song, and they did, because Lamar stalled the outro as long as possible to make sure that it happened. Everyone in that audience on Saturday night was eager to prove to Lamar that we're as spirited and good-hearted as he wants us to be. I left starry-eyed; resigning to his positivity was all anyone should've needed after a long day.
The last time I saw Sky Ferreira perform was back in 2013, when she released Night Time, My Time and was enduring a grating media shitstorm. Ferreira was getting picked apart, every bit of her past unearthed and written about, her legal drama and label drama ballooned out to the point that it was impossible to listen to that album without hearing its subtext. Back then, Ferreira looked anxious on-stage, unsure of whether or not she deserved to be on it. There were few smiles, sunglasses and smirks, and a lot of looking down. That was her schtick back then, and it worked, but seeing her look happy and stoked to be performing on a festival stage for the first time in a long time was a highlight of the weekend for me. Ferreira was straight-up grinning, and I don't mean to make a big deal of that in a smirking, "smile, baby" cat-call kind of way. It's just nice to see someone who made an unmistakably kick-ass pop record actually behave like a kick-ass pop-star. She performed her newest song "Guardian" (which is fucking great), and tossed a broken drumstick out into the audience during "Omanko." In his top-to-toe Adidas tracksuit, Johnny Danger was straight-up dancing behind the keyboards, giving encouraging nods to Ferreira and the rest of the band, and generally making it look like everyone was having a really fucking good time performing. The last song they played was "Everything Is Embarrassing," the Dev Hynes-produced single that drew so many people to Ferreira back in 2013. She looked out at the front row and asked a girl what her name was. Ferreira strained forward but couldn't hear a response, so she just pointed at her and said, "This one's for you."
Despite sound problems early on in the set (rectified by the band's team, who all wear funny white lab coats in the wings), Tame Impala carried out the rest of the set like the meticulous perfectionists that they are. Kevin Parker called for a sing-along during "Feels Like We Only Go Backwards," and played a significant number of tracks off of their recent release, Currents ("The Less I Know The Better" was a high moment). Stereogum contributor Ryan Leas and I have spoken before about how unusual it is that Tame Impala -- a jammy, psychedelic, straight-up rock band -- have become one of the biggest in the world. They're immensely talented, sure, but their songs aren't hook-heavy bits of pop. They're unconventional stars who packed the Polo Fields with more bodies than the certifiable pop-star Sam Smith was able to the next day. Back when I lived in San Francisco, I had a group of friends who I guess could be classified as trippy-stoner-types; they hung around the Haight, they loved psychedelics, and they listened almost exclusively to Summer Of Love-type bands and Tame Impala. This was years before Lonerism, when Innerspeaker had just been released on Modular and not a lot of people knew what an "impala" even was, let alone a "tame" one. I was introduced to the band by way of this crew, who once went to a Tame Impala show at San Francisco's revered Fillmore Auditorium, and then hung out afterward in the hopes of meeting Kevin Parker. Supposedly, their dream came true, and these friends ended up doing just that -- it was a scrapbook moment that would collect significance like dust in the years to follow. Just seeing how many people showed up to the band's set on Saturday makes that easy meet-and-greet seem like an impossibility now, and the memory of hearing that story made watching the Australian band command a crowd of tens of thousands of people in the late afternoon really special, because it made me feel kind of old (and I'm not). I have a band that I get to tell "before they were famous" stories about, which is pretty fucking cool, and I wonder if any of those people who worshipped them so early on were buried someplace in the massive crowd, thinking the same thing.
This is the second time I've seen St. Vincent play a festival on the heels of last year's self-titled release, which makes this the second time I've seen Annie Clark's hyper-choreographed dance routine. I remember seeing St. Vincent around the time that Strange Mercy came out, when Clark was up on a stage wearing a nice but "normal" ensemble and moving to the rhythm of her strange and acerbic brand of pop. This current St. Vincent is a different incarnation, one that springs for costume and pageantry, and she's just as enjoyable to watch, especially on such a grand stage. Clark has an angular dance move to accompany every song off of St. Vincent, but my favorite moment arrived when she covered part of Depeche Mode's "Personal Jesus," which has been done dozens of times, but this version made the interlude sound like it was written for that record.
I hung out with Speedy Ortiz in the morning before their set to talk to them about the GOP debate, #penisgate, Drake vs. Meek, and a variety of other topics, and felt almost silly watching a band I've seen dozens of times in New York perform at a festival on the opposite side of the country. But I went, because somehow it felt important to watch the Boston-based band play after finding out their opinions on Lenny Kravitz's dick. During the early moments of the set, some drunken asshole wearing an American flag bandana around his head, stunner shades, and a half-unbuttoned Hawaiian shirt (you can't make this shit up) made a point to aggressively dance into me more than once, despite the abundance of empty space in his vicinity. Maybe he thought that it would be "fun" to "dance," but I don't fuck with that kind of behavior, whether I'm at a venue in New York or a massive festival in my hometown, so I called the dude a "fucking asshole," and walked away, but not before he pushed me. Right after that, Sadie Dupuis launched into "Raising The Skate," which if you're unfamiliar with it, is basically a song about putting horrible, domineering men in their place. "I'm not bossy, I'm the boss/ Shooter, not the shot/ On the tip and fit to execute/ I'm chief, not the overthrown/ Captain, not a crony/ So if you wanna row, you better have an awfully big boat." That moment was cosmically ironic, and seeing women like Dupuis front a band and talk shit right back at her oppressors while standing up straight is something that I'd like to see more of on festival stages.
I couldn't really see Elton John during his headlining set. It was crowded, I was tired, and the jumbo screen was good enough for me. Of course, the best part about seeing Elton John has nothing to do with being able to see exactly what color his sequined suit is, or whether or not his glasses frames match it (he was wearing blue, and yes, the glasses absolutely matched). The best part is standing around with a bunch of strangers screaming along to the hits. "Benny And The Jets," "Tiny Dancer," Rocket Man," "Candle In The Wind," "Goodbye Yellow Brick Road," etc. We knew them all. It was like that scene in Almost Famous, but with 70,000 people and no tour bus.
Natalie Prass' set was the first I caught at Outside Lands, and it's also the first I've seen of hers since SXSW. Prass is a lovable presence, both on-stage and off, and she made the most of her very early (we're talking noon on a Friday) set by chatting away at the crowd and answering questions on the whereabouts of her beloved Godzilla action figure, which she's performed with in the past. Prass played a new song called "Jess," which is a rapid-fire, R&B-influenced collection of measured verses. She performed it without a guitar, stooping down low to the ground as a torrent of syllables spilled out of her mouth. That was a highlight, as was Prass' hiccuping ballad "My Baby Don't Understand Me," but the best moment by far arrived when Prass performed Janet Jackson's "Any Time, Any Place," with the unforgettable tagline: "In the thundering rain," which we heard again the next night when the sample inaugurated Kendrick Lamar's "Poetic Justice." Jackson's song has the same doe-eyed, romantic sentiment as Prass' excellent self-titled debut, and its inclusion in the set was seamless.
Bold is the band that chooses to play "the new stuff" in a festival setting, but Wilco is Wilco. They don't have to do what people expect of them, so of course they started their Outside Lands set with material off of their new surprise album, Star Wars. I'm sure that there were a lot of disappointed audience members itching to hear every single song off of Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, but as a very casual Wilco fan, I was just kind of happy to be in their presence and soak up whatever the band happened to offer. Star Wars isn't everyone's favorite album, but on a rare sunny day in the Richmond district, you'd have to be kind of an asshole to be bummed about it. Star Wars sounds fucking great in the sunshine. Halfway through the set, Jeff Tweedy switched up the vibe and just played the hits. "Heavy Metal Drummer," "I'm The Man Who Loves You," and "Impossible Germany" in succession ended the show as the western fog started to creep into the park through the trees.
I've seen Benjamin Booker play festivals before, and it's always really heartening to look out at the diverse crowd he draws. I guess that Booker has what people would call an "old soul," which is why the age range at his shows falls somewhere between 7 and 75. There were families dancing in circles during the band's early rendition of "Old Hearts," and those circles got bigger and more inclusive as the show went on. At a festival that's made up of something like 80% people between the ages of 17 and 35 (my wild, though probably not wholly inaccurate, guess), it's noteworthy when you happen upon the one set that draws everyone in.
Laura Marling is my favorite kind of performer -- she doesn't talk much, she just stands up there and plays as many songs as she can fit into 40 minutes, stopping only to switch guitars. She's not cold, just focused and unrelenting, arresting you with her lyricism. The songs on Marling's most recent two albums, this year's Short Movie and 2013's Once I Was An Eagle, are sharp-witted and sometimes angry, burdened with stories about ailing relationships and falling for all of the wrong people. These are albums that speak louder when you can directly relate to them, but Marling's technical skill is so undeniable that watching her perform is paralyzing, even if you don't listen to the vitriol she spews. My favorite moment in a Marling song appears in the single "Master Hunter," when she re-appropriates Dylan to transform a personal trauma into an age-old tale: "Well if you want a woman who can call your name, it ain't me babe/ No, no, no, it ain't me babe." That moment finally shut up the dumbass who continuously shouted "She's a babe!" and "Marry me!" in the early parts of Marling's set. At least, I like to think that's what did it.
