Only five days out of the year is it socially acceptable to wear a bandana around the bottom half of one’s face. Well, more days out of the year if you are a serial bank robber. For the rest of us in Southern California, three days during Coachella and two during FYF are all we get, and we need to make them count. To be honest, it is entirely about necessity, as I think I inhaled more dust during FYF weekend than I would have during the entirety of the dust bowl. Regardless, the absolutely killer bands that took over Exposition Park a few weeks ago made the dust completely irrelevant.
WHY IT WORKS WELL
FYF is one of those festivals that manages to make perfect sense even when it seems like it totally should not. Death Grips’ mosh pits sprung up before the infamously neurotic hip-hop trio even took the stage and metaphorically burned The Tree’s stage to the ground. In contrast, I recently succeed in championing unity among the generations by introducing my grandma to Belle & Sebastian. One band softly sings orchestrated pop-rock, and the other is arguably the most viscerally punk thing to happen to hip-hop in a decade. The fact that these bands played at the same time, and that nearly everyone who bought a ticket has both bands on their iPod’s, is a testament to why FYF works so well as a festival.
BACK AND FORTH
FYF manages to book the bands that make sprinting across the festival entirely alright, so I felt no shame hauling to Hop Along’s set on Sunday afternoon. After racing back and forth between Neon Indian and Title Fight, how much of D’Angelo & The Vanguard’s set I could catch became the only real challenge. I had to race back to see Morrissey open up his Sunday night headlining set, which began with “The Queen is Dead.” It was all too perfect, starting with one of the best tracks in The Smith’s entire catalog and arguably the best of Morrissey’s set, which was mainly weighed down with picks from the last solo record.
A COMFORTABLE DEMOGRAPHIC
The demographic of FYF is vastly more comfortable than Coachella, at least if you are as terrified of EDM subcultures as I am. The crowd feels wholly familiar, which makes sense considering it is most likely the same people you see at the Echo and the Roxy throughout the year. With pretty much any gathering of like-minded people comes an undefinable energy, but even that cannot describe what the crowd put out during Kanye West’s epic set on Saturday night. It is also hard to consider a world where Kanye West is a festival’s backup plan. Everyone I know was ecstatic to hear Frank Ocean dropped out of headlining. Inevitably, some haters demanded refunds online, but West’s career spanning set, including guest appearances by Rihanna and Travis Scott, made everyone else in the entire crowd forget who Frank Ocean even was.
