CHICAGO — Over the past several years, the Pitchfork Music Festival in Chicago’s Union Park has valiantly worked to separate itself from the usual crop of summer festivals, attracting attendees with an ear for interesting bands and a yearning for more comfortable, personal concert experiences.
The festival doesn’t bombard their fans with constant corporate propaganda, as do their cross-city competitors, Lollapalooza (though Pitchfork attendees shouldn’t fool themselves into believing that Whole Foods and Greyhound Bus are more legitimate sponsors than AT&T and Sony simply because they’re slightly more obscure) and they don’t attract the same dreadlocked hippies as more rural festivals, such as Bonnaroo.
Pitchfork has always operated under a strange stretch of the music industry, where bands that would play before lunchtime at larger festivals are championed as innovators and creators of genres (see the oft-mocked “chillwave”). In that respect, Pitchfork hasn’t changed. What has changed is the genre around it: “indie” no longer implies shows in dingy lofts and basements (there are still plenty of these, though). The scene has expanded, to the point that Coachella and Pitchfork can share two headliners without the latter being dubbed “sell-outs.”
This year’s Pitchfork was about energy, and despite the sweltering heat, the crowd rose to this new ethos. Highlights included the always exciting Major Lazer and their mohawked hype man, Skerrit Bwoy, who jumped off a ladder into the open legs of a ballerina, somehow without injuring himself or the dancer. Liars turned moody dirges into a cause for drunken moshing and New Jersey’s Titus Andronicus unrelentingly pummeled the crowd with a vicious punk energy that managed to override the midday heat.
The headliners — the newly-reunited Pavement, the soon-to-be-broken up LCD Soundsystem and the we’ve-existed-forever Modest Mouse — brought a similar energy level. With LCD Soundsystem and Modest Mouse, this energy made sense. LCD Soundsystem is a dance band after all, and Modest Mouse have a wide enough audience to attract fans who like to shake it a little bit. Pavement commanded the crowd well, turning the lo-fi grime of their records into powerful rock n’ roll anthems onstage.
Still, Pitchfork’s charms weren’t all about the too-cool crowd. Most bands played tight sets, the only major detractor being the sound, which was often too bass heavy and would sometimes project a wall of unintentional feedback onto the audience. Still these were fairly minor qualms. Canada’s Wolf Parade jammed admirably through a poor sound mix, bringing their sweeping songs to life with a lushness that superseded their records.
Buzz band Surfer Blood’s set was filled with terse, cool rock riffs that exploded into larger notions as their songs progressed. Here We Go Magic, who followed Surfer Blood, proved to be a surprise highlight of Sunday, as their folk jams were given more room to breathe and transform.
So, all in all, Pitchfork 2010 was a massive success, despite boiling temperatures. The festival organizers even lowered the price of water to one dollar in response to the heat.
However, one has to wonder about the future of a festival that has already begun to overgrow its original mission. Pitchfork is no longer the awkward outcast to Lollapalooza’s football jock. Though it has conserved its basic quirkiness, it certainly lost some of the alternative charm that made it an attractive festival in the first place. In its current state, this loss isn’t disastrous, and Pitchfork is still a remarkable and original festival. In the future, Pitchfork organizers need to think of the festival’s identity and how it will change in response in order to increasing popularity.
