WEEK OF 9/13/2019

Slayer / 📷 : Mick Reed

Riot Fest Sucks. That’s what I want to say, but it’s not true. At least not entirely. But this year, the 15th anniversary of the Festival, did make me feel some stuff that I would really rather have not.  

I’m holding the tattered paper schedule from this past weekend in my hands right now. At one point or another, I would have placed a number of the artists listed there in my top five of all time. Blake Schwarzenbach of Jawbreaker helped me process my emotions ever since I caught “Fireman” on 89.3 the Current. Slayer got me into metal. Which is a big deal. Trust me. And former anarcho-punks Against Me! helped anchor the development of my political consciousness. Speaking of politics, Bikini Kill played their first set in Chicago since 1997, with the original line-up. (Kind of) Holy crap, right?!? For starters, Kathleen Hanna taught me how to listen. Her music taught many of us to seek out and understand other’s experiences of society that were not our own. Bikini Kill is why I am a feminist, and I’m sure many of you would say the same thing. But it was their set on Sunday that cemented my impressions of the Festival overall and dug up the aforementioned feels. So let’s get into it, shall we… 

As literally everyone has noted, Riot Fest is an event that plants its flag firmly in the dirt of yesteryear. The draws are always the reunions and the full album revues. The big names doing full albums retrospective this year included, Blink-182 performing Enema of the State, The Flaming Lips brought back Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots, Bloc Party returned to Silent Alarm, Wu-Tang gave a surprise rendition of 36 Chambers, and Against Me! played both Reinventing Axl Rose and Transgender Dysphoria Blues, a kind of worm tunnel-like bookending of Laura Jane Grace’s career and development as an artist. These sets where by and large great. Wu-Tang in particular really rolled out their A-Game, at one point even bringing out Old Dirty Bastard’s son to sing his pop’s lines from the album. It was a bit like watching a family reunion.   

A Reader article following this year’s Lollapalooza asked, “Who is Lollapalooza for?” No such existential crisis has ever struck Riot Fest. It has a clear identity, a targeted demographic it caters to, and a special hook to its mass market appeal. That hook? The cultural milieu of skate-punks of the late ‘90s to the mid-00s. The Festival centers this experience as the relevant, unquestioned musical experience of the American middle class in its youth. It’s Walt Disney in Vans and a Bad Religion t-shirt. Whoever the guy in the Glassjaw shirt in your highschool art class was jamming to back in 2002 will be on the Radical/Roots/Rise stage in 2020. It’s how you can get a Hot Water Music revival, an Andrew W.K. dance party, and a full performance of The Mollusk by Ween throughout the course of a single weekend. At one point, they were all on the same barely cohesive CD-R burn mix of which Riot Fest still has the track list.

I may sound cynical, but I enjoyed this hyperreal adult playground as much as anyone over the course of the three-day Fest. It was awesome to wallow in the wounded poetry of Hot Water Music and see the veins pop out of Chuck Regan’s forehead as he re-lived his teenage angst in front of us. Friday also allotted the opportunity to feel some hardcore pride while clamoring over a pile of other knuckleheads to high five to Toby Moris during H2O’s set, an experience followed in short succession by the throaty croon of Mr. Schwarzenbach and company performing under a full moon and ripping through their catalog with a practiced anger that highlighted the extent of both their passion and dedication to their craft.

 Saturday began with an admirable performance by throat-singing folk-metalers The HU and the highly orchestrated shtick of Madison pop-punk bad-boys on parole, Masked Intruder. The antics continued that day with the tasteless, but somehow endearing, cartoonish battle royal of Gwar. The proceeding daylight hours walked a straighter line, beginning with the sober sentimentality of folk-punkers Cursive and picking back up with the heavy metal thunder of motorcycle thrash legends, Testament. Throwing down with a bunch of biker dudes covered in anarchy tattoos that appeared to have been drawn with a modified BIC pen that doubles as a shiv, was easily the highlight of the afternoon and a devilishly good warm up for the cacophony of Slayer in the evening. As great as Slayer sounded, the crowd for their set was… how to put this delicately- not f*cking safe. It was too tightly packed and there was a lot of movement. And I mean a lot of movement. It felt like being in a crowded theater after a fire had broken out. An analogy made all-the-more appropriate by the presence of Slayer’s pyrotechnics, which were f*cking HUGE! I was twenty feet from the stage, and every time they went off, it was like I had entered a kiln. It felt like I was literally in hell, which upon reflection, is something I may brag about one day… once I get over the fact that I spent 90% of Slayer's set in constant fear for my life. In all seriousness, Slayer put on a phenomenal final Chicago show, and they will be sincerely missed (at least until the next reunion tour). 

 Sunday was significantly more placid, kicking off with the absorbing dynamics and complicated sonic gestures of local imagest post-punkers Ganser, and later winding down with a shout-along with The Ergs that felt like being at a DIY backyard barbeque you wish your friends still had the wherewithal to throw. Slotted in between was the gift of the B-52’s assuring us that we could “roam where we want to”- that we had their permission to follow our dreams, a magnificent set that shared the day with the bright-eyed guitar blasts of White Reaper, the homey heartstring plucking of emo-revivalists American Football, and the wholesome pogo-pop of Teenage Bottlerocket. 

 Looking through my Facebook feed periodically, I saw my friends sharing numerous intense moments of joy, furiously tagging their own friends to preserve the memories of the people they shared these moments with. I even made some new friends while milling around the festival grounds. For instance, I met a guy in Jawbreaker’s crowd who recalled how he helped Shai Hulud sneak their merch into Japan to get around some weird import restrictions. I also talked to the guys in American Football before their set and learned that we know quite a few of the same people. At one point I even had a chat with Taking Back Sunday, and their drummer Mark complimented me on my Power Trip shirt. This is not what I would expect to happen at a festival of this size. The relaxed and amiable atmosphere was almost off-putting at times, and it was astounding how easy it was to approach people and start up a conversation. It was like a parallel universe version of Mayberry where everyone had a nuanced opinion on who was the best front-person of Black Flag, and which NOFX album represents their “classic” era. It was the kind of community that I always hoped punk could create a space for. So why did I leave feeling so empty? The answer is rather obvious, even if it requires some unpacking.

As has been deliberated by the Reader in their coverage of the Fest, the choice of Douglas Park for Riot Fest’s host grounds is problematic in a number of ways. The broadest criticism is that it restricts access to a public area for the private enjoyment of a small number of people, the vast majority of whom don’t live in the surrounding neighborhood. Annoying for sure, but made all the more insidious by Chicago’s long history of segregation and racial oppression. North Lawndale (where Douglas Park is located) is a primarily black and Hispanic neighborhood, and like much of the west and south side, goes largely underdeveloped, under-served, and unacknowledged by city officials and the local business community. 

 It’s frustrating that the music and the community Riot Fest engages, and the city politics that make it possible, and the community it excludes, are treated as two separate topics. The sectioning-off of public space for private enterprise, the exclusion of the many for the benefit of a few, is a proven method of producing scarcity, driving demand, and generating profit. A Festival that trades in the counterculture arts of men and women who set themselves against systems of oppression should be a subject of conversation when it (inadvertently or by design) reproduces those same systems in the pursuit of profit. This forces us to carry forward a burden created by the contradictions of value and reality and requires a confrontation with the resulting dilemma. 

Ultimately, the choice between appreciation and apprehension is a false one. You can appreciate something while recognizing its flaws. These are not exclusive states of mind. You can love something despite its flaws, and hope that it can become better with time. By way of example, while I was watching the Village People’s performance, I realized that I could distinctly hear the sound bleed from Bob Mould’s set more than a football field’s distance away. I was able to make out the chords to a cut off of Copper Blue and could clearly delineate between the set I was watching and the set I was overhearing, while appreciating both. It was really gay and it really made me happy. But I also realized that this was as gay as the Festival might ever be, and the fact that there appears to be a clear limit to how inclusive the Fest can become is regrettable, but not immutable. There is always room for more queer, inclusive, and audacious voices in punk rock. There were other moments that felt powerful and hinted at something more radical as well. Against Me!’s double album set comes to mind. As does the earnest quake of Patti Smith’s bohemian rhapsodies, the passionate political cognizance and humble affect of Rise Against, the flag of class struggle raised alongside ear-wormy hooks by Cock Sparrer, and the mindfulness Turnstile embody through their raucous translation of Killing Time and Madball style hardcore. More bands like these could help raise meaningful questions about what we can expect from a music festival and its impact on a community. The worst thing we can do it gloss over the contradictions that lay just below the surface and succumb to the inertia of the situation. That having been said, let's talk about Bikini Kill’s headlining set on Sunday night.

Bikini Kill’s shows are famously uneven, but their performance on the final eve of the festivities felt disturbingly unpolished. I’m not persuaded that we saw them at their best that night, and they didn't seem like they came prepared. There is also the issue of time that has passed in their ensuing hiatus. There is a shocking juxtaposition that exists between the way feminism has evolved since the band retired and the world it has had to evolve in. That is to say, things haven’t changed much for the better since Bikini Kill hung up their long knives back in the ‘90s. In fact, in many ways it’s much worse. 

With the backdrop of systemic segregation and the perpetual displacement of marginalized people, what was missing from Bikini Kill’s set was a call to action, a case for empathy and understanding, and a message of solidarity. What we got instead were cultural capital cashing platitudes. A “Lean In” style presentation of “us vs them” gender politics. A few thank yous to all the women and “non-binaries, or whatever” in attendance. Meager afterthought dedications of songs to hourly employees and sex workers, and halfhearted acknowledgments of the current brutalizing states of affairs (“Oh boy, the news, right? Exhausting!”) There was one point where Hanna acknowledged our imbalance of priorities, where a feminist band can headline a music fest, but we as a country can’t get an Equal Right Amendment passed, but this was only after she had solicited a round of applause for herself in being a feminist headlining a music fest. 

Witnessing this victory lap was a little alienating. It resembled a version of punk fury that has been absorbed and reconfigured by the market to validate you in the moment, while contributing little else of value. In the words of one Consequence of Sound writer, the set made her feel “motivated to tell some Cisgender white male to ‘Shove it!’” Ok. But what about after that? What is the next step for liberation in that line of thinking? Is there one? 

There is a burden placed on us by the price others pay for the things that we enjoy. This is something I wish could have been acknowledged on Sunday night, and throughout the course of the weekend. The first step in changing a thing is acknowledging that it is a thing that needs changing and recognizing the role you can play in that change. I like to think that punk rock can inspire the transformation of the world that many of its adherents sing about. I know that there will be a Riot Fest in 2020, and that it may have all the same problems as the one this year. But what if it didn’t? This prospect gives me hope. Hope that a discussion sparked this year can translate into meaningful change for the next, and produce something more than a Disney Land for punks that requires them to check their conscience at the gate. 

- Mick Reed