What separates rock stars and rock fans? Is it a real barrier? Surely one can be both, or neither. So is it an illusion? What brings them together? How much is the same from the stagefront to back stage? Why does one pay money to the other and, since they do, how much is different in the divide in between? As MGMT’s satirical song about stardom says, we’re fated to pretend.
Bonnaroo is billed as a good time, sure. Still, it becomes something more essential to many attendees. As days unfold, something deeper, a perspective becoming more mystical and meaningful forms by the time band members lay down their instruments and attendees load their tents and coolers into cars.
To question what is Bonnaroo and why it’s successful is to question rock music and its own success. It is enticing, hypnotic, identity forming — both collectively and individually. Its lyrics speak sums about our concerns and desires, our sexuality and our politics, our lives and our deaths.
Rock ‘n Roll, for decades, has been the underpinning of what is hip among youth culture. The best of the best songs become the underpinning of American culture. American culture becomes the underpinning of global culture. Global culture permeates human culture, generating what is and what is to come of our beautiful-but-fatally-flawed species. Rock is the language spoken by our souls. But to some it’s just devil music.
Bonnaroo becomes its own planet for half a week, one where lasers shoot across the sky among a city of tents, and tunes written in all modes and meters blast from campsites. The planet’s core, made of stages, spray-paint-tagged walls and overpriced everythings, legal and illegal, buzzes constantly. And the sun, rain and fog seem to revolve around us.
Despite the digital age, only sparsely does news trickle inward from the outside world. Who won the Stanley Cup? No one knows. What is happening in Iran? Huh? I can’t hear you over the Yeasayers.
Many show up in Manchester, party for a weekend, and return to their homes, their jobs, their lives. Some of the Bonnarooskies, when they leave, never really leave. They scatter their identity on that familiar planet in central Tennessee like ashes from an urn. For others, the true aliens of the bunch, they hitchhike to the next town for the next festival, post-modern nomads riding the rails of the S&D R x R — that’s sex, drugs and rock ‘n roll.
Spotted at Bonnaroo: cardboard signs asking for money, looking for a lift to Florida, offering to sell a Ford Taurus. Not spotted: a copy of The Wall Street Journal stock report, a necktie or a fistfight.
Bonnaroo is both deep and shallow: Acres of art, tribes of diverse geography, background and perspective, attitudes challenged and redefined — yet also — trivially expensive trinkets, corporate-sponsored booths, drug-induced heat seizures. If it were to serve as a litmus test for American zeitgeist, the Bonnaroo tea leaves would tell us we still have road to travel before we reach the high ground. As one spray-painted sentence on the yellow wall near the orange arch leading to the main stage said, “nothing here is sacred.”
It’s said that anything goes at Bonnaroo. This is not entirely true. A man from some nearby Southern church stood near the main entrance of the massive campground Saturday afternoon, in tow with Bible and picket sign.
Later, walking down the same road in the campground, I asked a handful of deputies sitting around on ATVs how the weekend had went compared to prior years, in terms of arrests or possible deaths. Afterall, no news is Planet Bonnaroo news.
Sgt. Robert Andrews of the Coffee County Sheriff’s Department hammed it up, insisting his name be added to my report, and offered the most cliche of cop quotes. We’ll let this gem of a line end my blogging in the flattest, most derivative model possible. It’s quotes like these that made me leave my day job in journalism in the first place.
“It was a great Bonnaroo,” he said smiling, leaving me wondering if someone had slipped him some Molly. “And we hope it comes back next year — of course we know it will.”
And I might too.
Just let me get a look at the lineup and weather forecast first. I don’t know if I left a part of myself on that farm, but it certainly left a part of itself with me.
Photos by Alisha Eli / Words by Joshua Coffman