More significant, perhaps, is the fact that much of the communal activity of rock-music consumption has been driven underground. Given the copyright maximalism of legislation like the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act and the hyperactive enforcement regime of the Recording Industry Association of America—whose prosecutorial zeal against college students since January 2003 has been [...]
The biggest strike against summer music festivals is that festival music sounds awful. The logistics of the Lollapalooza staging requires one-hour breaks between acts performing on the same stage; after one act has cleared out, the next has perhaps 40 minutes to set up, so there’s no time for a decent sound check. And projecting [...]
Of course all of those festivals, whether explicitly or implicitly, hark back to Woodstock, but the more-recent summer festivals serve a different function for this generation of rock fans than did their near-mythical progenitor. A familiar reaction to the current festivals is to complain that they are commercialized and commodified corporate productions, unlike the original [...]
Those headphones on our students bother teachers because they seem to symbolize a voluntary deafness and a concomitant isolation. Allan Bloom put it most memorably, if artlessly, when he complained in The Closing of the American Mind that “as long as they [our students] have the Walkman on, they cannot hear what the great tradition [...]
Friends & neighbors: Music festival season is officially upon us, and I thought I’d regale you, over the next few days, with a piece about my experience at Lollapalooza a few years ago. A couple words of explanation are in order. First, it was written three years ago, and much has changed: to read these [...]