Great live performances reveal things in music that hide within the recorded version: You aren’t washing dishes at a concert. In those reality-stopping moments when the art being created in front of you is compelling enough, you’ll forget you even possess a smartphone. Now that it’s music festival season, as a resident of Brooklyn , the center of the allegedly most culturally gravitational megalopolis in the Western world, I might be expected to have local access to top-notch offerings from the corporate concerns that bring artists together in the summers.
Yet where I live, the putative center of the world, the pickings are slim. New York City music fans had the option of spending $359 to attend this past weekend’s Governors Ball Music Festival, where a thin bill of retreads, mediocrities, and TikTok ephemera awaited them. The top of the bill was decent enough if you were willing to pay exorbitant prices to see short and flat-sounding sets from The Killers and SZA, but the city’s biggest show of the year is nevertheless over by midnight and beer is a $12 luxury.
Armies of police and paramedics await the consequences of the next tainted cocaine batch, and the authorities have a justified fear of what might happen when addled young revelers wander into the middle of Queens late at night. Multiday music festivals have become so fundamentally unmanageable in New York that Rolling Loud, the taste-setting hip-hop spectacle, hasn’t mounted an event in the city since 2022.
