This past weekend we sent 15 year-old photographer Dorothy Dark to cover Bonnaroo, in tandem with her dad, Pitchfork contributor David Dark. This is their report of the experience.
David: "People have died there," my mother intoned over the phone. Even in the company of her safe and sensible father, the thought of her 15-year-old granddaughter Dorothy braving Bonnaroo for a Pitchfork assignment was a very hard sell. Why even entertain such a thing? What good could come of it?
My push-back: What we have here is an opportunity to seize a rare and beautiful moment. Dorothy and I could chronicle the madness together. There will be sadness and dysfunction and people possibly embarrassing themselves as far as the eye can see, but there’s also a hardcore hope afoot, a true believer around every corner, and intelligence gatherers of live performance. We’ll bond among those who believe the music and for whom laying money and personal comfort down to be in the midst of it is no sacrifice at all. What could be sweeter?
As of Day 2, I knew feelingly how a human being could meet their demise at this event. More than once, upon beholding one more horribly sunburned soul or another slumbering body in the dust, I felt something akin to the moral outrage expressed by Jeff Goldblum on the subject of extracting Dinosaur DNA from the belly of a mosquito trapped in amber to make the creatures our contemporaries. Just because you can persuade people to camp on a farm in Manchester, TN to listen to live music in the sun for four days doesn’t mean you should.
And yet, there was a tangible ethic in the air that I couldn’t deny. Because Dorothy couldn’t be made to spend every moment in my presence, I was often found wandering aimless and alone. But to the extent that I was willing to make eye contact with people, I found that most passersby were eager to connect. It was as if many of them believed they’d somehow arrived home and wanted as many people as possible to feel that way too.
"How you doing?" I was asked by a young man surely twenty years my junior.
"I believe I’m doing well," I offered with a tired smile.
"Good news. Good news," he replied. And he addressed me with the same verve and an I know you when we beheld one another again while waiting on Tears for Fears to appear on stage. I have words on TFF, but it’s time to hand Dorothy the metaphorical mic.
Dorothy: On my first day at The Farm, I promised myself I’d be present to it all and not get wrapped up in the safe confines of my iPhone. What worried me far more than the urban-myth-grade horror stories I’d heard from friends about things like getting sprayed by a stranger with a bottle of liquid LSD, was the idea of letting myself be at Bonnaroo for the sake of saying I was at Bonnaroo. It would make things less sincere, make the experience dishonest. And Bonnaroo is no place for the insincere. From the moment I set foot in the heart of the layout—Centeroo, they call it—I was overwhelmed by the mass of people. The fear of my surroundings that I had expected was nowhere to be found amidst the swarms of people I was so certain I’d feel alienated from.
In fact, there was a graciousness I found among Bonnaroovians that was unlike anywhere else. There were those I would walk by in a line and would later see under a tree in the middle of their own wedding. Then there were those who walked by me in underwear and glitter pasties, who I would initially try and avoid. But to our good fortune, there’s no way to avoid the people around you on The Farm, and those who I wanted to cower from often proved to be the most kindhearted people I encountered. The kind of people who would react to someone cutting in front of them in the Bearclaw Coffee line by merely shrugging and saying "It’s Roo."
In conversation with Jack Antonoff of Bleachers, he mentioned that Bonnaroo is not your average festival. "The reason this festival is vital in a way that no other festival can ever be is because it’s a fucking pain in the ass to get to and there are no casual fans… No one is here casually."
The flavor of devotion that is required for any participant of this social experiment is unlike any other that currently exists. You won’t find people who, as Antonoff put it, had a buddy from the office who had some extra tickets and wanted to pop in to see what the scene was like. You don’t pop in to Bonnaroo. You drive however many miles you need to, you sleep in a tent, you go days in the sweltering heat, and you not only tolerate but befriend the strangers around you all in the name of your love for what this festival is made up of: positivity, music, and a kind of freedom you don’t find at home.
David: I’ll step in to note that Dorothy procured those words from Jack Antonoff by asking him a question she put to a number of artists and attendees. I thought it an amazing question to place before the humans on hand: What is Bonnaroo for? One response that occurred to me during our sojourn is that it’s a space in which to pay particular heed to the miracle of other people and a time to consider again—once more with feeling—a number of otherwise misperceived pop culture assets. A big one for me was realizing anew that Tears for Fears are no joke.
Any audience they appear before will likely know all the words to "Everybody Wants to Rule the World". But it’s a Bonnaroo reception—the level of expectation, the context; Tears for Fears have never stopped making it plain. You feel it at Bonnaroo. It’s as if its resident pilgrims know you shouldn’t have to sell your soul.
When Dorothy placed the question of Bonnaroo’s role before Benjamin Booker, he mentioned that he’d passed much of the day before in an ancient Nashville dive bar on Music Row frequented for decades by seasoned local songwriters. It’s Bobby’s Idle Hour we’re talking about: "There’s guys [there] who sit and drink at the bar for seven hours a day and we talked to them and they were just like, 'You’re going to the Bonnaroo?...That’s a good festival…That’s the closest thing to the Woodstock today.'" It’s credited as a culture in which the hope of popular song as a social force is being kept in circulation. I remembered such hopes as I spoke to my wife, Sarah, on a cellphone while immersed in an exiting crowd colliding with an entering crowd intent on seeing Deadmau5. Trying to take my mind off the fact of being shoulder-to-shoulder in a mass of people finding it increasingly difficult to move, I rambled on about the struggle to keep envisioning and experiencing song as a gift despite its seemingly pervasive commercialization. Quoting Lewis Hyde, I had to shout to be heard, "Where there is no gift there is no art." And at that point an unseen co-celebrant patted me on the shoulder approvingly before disappearing.
If the occurrence of art requires the spirit of the gift, Bonnaroo, we might say, stands or falls on the possibility of living exchange, of artist and audience being genuinely addressed by one another. This was especially evident when Kendrick Lamar, our Elvis of Reality, conducted a carefully calibrated journey. Before he would offer us a single song off To Pimp a Butterfly, there was work to be done. Painstakingly, he led an audience of thousands through a second sing-along of "m.A.A.d city" to compensate for what he saw as a missing-something in the first go-around ("If Pirus and Crips all got along…"). Having established to his satisfaction that we were picking up what he was laying down, he exclaimed, "Bonnaroo! That shit's gonna last forever, meaning I will forever sing about you…as long as you forever sing about me." With "Sing About Me, I’m Dying of Thirst" thereby introduced and then performed, a path was cleared for the call to self-love ("i") and hardwon affirmation/consolation ("Alright"). An equilibrium? A mystical unity? Am I making too much of it, Dorothy?
Dorothy: I’m reminded of my discussion with Betty Who. I asked her to describe a time in which she’s heard her voice in the voices of others. She gave examples like Joni Mitchell and Bob Dylan, but also elaborated on the reason for their impact on her: "The human connection runs so deep that we all feel the same things." And Kendrick, along with countless other artists on the Bonnaroo lineup, proved it in his performance. He took the diehard fans, the observers, the passersby that made up his Bonnaroo audience and gave them an experience that runs so true that it wasn’t possible to ignore. He made it so we couldn’t, by repeating his words until they meant something to each person, by following what may be one of his most emotionally intense songs with the demand that we love ourselves, and by wrapping it all up with the reminder that "We gon’ be alright."
David: Oh man, yes. And with that line that could so easily be the title of an Earth, Wind & Fire song, I shall begin to speak of them. The communal consciousness that Bonnaroo, like many music festivals, has to communicate to survive has been the standard operating procedure for Earth, Wind & Fire for more than 40 years. In their relationship to one another, the creative process, and the artists for whom their music is essential, they keep it loose and non-possessive and constantly informed by profound intent.
When I spoke to them, I wondered aloud if their relentless commitment to lifting people up in all that they do might have proven costly when it comes to reaching a certain demographic. "That it’s taken away some of our 'coolness?'" Philip Bailey asked smiling.
Ralph Johnson weighed in with the understatement of the weekend: "Sometimes you’ll take some heat when you’re trying to raise the consciousness of the people. And at the end of the day, you can’t be all things to all people. So, you know, cool is relative."
Witness, they implied, knows no division. And it’s the witness of music who overcomes division. As Bailey explained: "Our experience has always been about just being true to what we do and who we are...wanting to make a positive influence." It was especially sweet to observe Kendrick Lamar and Chance the Rapper joining them onstage to free-style before the assembled. An unbroken circle of righteous witness is worth camping on a sweltering farm for. I think of Paulo Freire who teaches us that all truth is relational: "No one can say a true word alone." Which is why Dorothy will have the final word.
Dorothy: Bonnaroo, in a way that most other festivals are less likely to deliver, embraces the setting aside from your own cool and opens its community up to all manner of personal transcendence. It welcomes grown men who work in offices and probably wish they could constantly discuss music with their co-workers. Upon arriving at Bonnaroo, they can shed all sad formality, turn off their phones, and change into a rainbow bodysuit. It demands a surrender of ego and personal space. And upon complying with that demand, you put yourself in what could be, spiritually, the healthiest situation you’ll experience all year. In passing conversation with a girl who sat next to me at Bearclaw Coffee, she mentioned that "Bonnaroo takes you out of your comfort zone in the best way possible." It expands what can often be closed off and limited social horizons and it’s something that, at its best, leaves you with those horizons still expanded. It’s your job as an attendee to not fight this demand, but to take it with you when you leave.