Introduction

I would like to start out by saying there is absolutely no way I could do this justice. Not to the people who were there, the people who didn’t go and not the people who had no idea it was even happening. The closest thing I can do is relay my personal experience with this analogous vague phantom of an experience. There are no photos to do it justice.

There is no video that will put an experience like that into some sort of neat and tidy label or box. There are no recordings that will capture the gentle caress and pounding rhythm of the bass, nor the tear-jerking crooning melodies that brought you to your knees. Mere words on a page and a few static photos are all I have to relay something so moving that at 4:30 in the morning I still can’t manage to sleep because I am still thinking about this thing, this single stretched moment of clairvoyance. So I merely ask that you turn off your mind for a little bit like I did, as I try to figure some things out.

Thursday

I pick up my friends at 4 p.m. Thursday. I have spent my morning eating Ramen in my favorite torn jean shorts and an American flag T-shirt I got for $1 at a thrift store (because I’m f——— hipster). It will be the shirt I spend the next four days in. I didn’t have class so I had been pacing through my room racking my brain for things I might’ve forgotten. After some trouble pulling out of my friend’s driveway, we were on the road with only a slightly damaged left taillight. We follow the iPhone directions like idiots and somehow manage to get to the festival. The line for the cars to enter the festival is long, so we turn off the car and watch the sun go down.

This is where things start to get a bit different. As we wait in line, people slowly begin to open themselves up. After the people of the painted station wagon and the blinged-out Hummer began to toss a Frisbee back and forth, people weren’t hesitating to walk to a group of strangers to help them push their car forward in line. Giggles about this helping out the environment are said ironically and half-heartedly. Everyone knows that we will all shortly be dead when nuclear bombs explode into our country and the ice caps melt and drown us all. Some sort of Armageddon shenanigans will destroy the planet shortly, or at least that’s what we’re supposed to think will happen.

We get into the festival and the first night was a strange one. There was a certain feeling of claustrophobia as the night fell. Although we met our neighbors and carried on quite a bit, there was a process of sizing up, of scouting for threats. Everyone kept an eye out for sketchy people who looked like they would want to steal things, for people who looked like serial killers, for posers who were “just here for Kanye,” and other undesirables. But it was getting dark, so after some hard partying, people rested for the long day ahead of them.

I have to lump this next part into a chunk. I’m not going to go through all the bands I saw because I don’t have the space, and frankly you really don’t care. You are looking for any mention of your favorite bands but I tell your story even worse than I tell my own. I am however obligated to tell you who my personal favorite bands were. I’ve limited myself to three bands as I feel they encapsulate the spirit of each of the days and I find myself most excited to talk about them.

Friday

The first one is a small band from New Jersey called Titus Andronicus. Occurring relatively early in the day, I arrived at the show hungry but substantiated. The sun beat down mercilessly with a glimmer of the gaudy morning sun that hadn’t transitioned yet into the afternoon. I had my Converse on that still had bloodstains on them from when I hopped on Aztec Corner’s and got my hand stuck in pigeon wire; I thought that was fitting. Titus, or “teetus” as my friend calls it (because “hey, you get to use the term ‘teet’”), took the stage and proceeded to bash my teeth in for the next 50 minutes with some of the most incendiary, folk-tinged and honest punk rock I have ever heard.

With a beard that would make Chuck Norris jealous, Patrick Stickles thrashed his bleeding and torn vocal chords and violently destroyed the eardrums of the snarling and swirling mob before him. Every word I knew flew from my mouth as I beat my feet into the ground, my fists against my chest and into the mosh pit before me. My vision swam as my head got heavy on a much less stable, seizing chest yet I kept screaming until I was gasping for breath. Tears came to my eyes as “Is there a human alive ain’t looked themself in the face without winking / or saying what they mean without drinking / without leaving something without thinking what if somebody doesn’t approve?” was chanted by the crowd as I swayed with my arms draped over the shoulders of two sweaty strangers. Suffice it to say I was sweetly singing “You will always be a loser” for the rest of the day as I wore my American flag T-shirt like a matador cape and pretended to fly.

There is a strange thing that happens at a music festival. Because of the amount of drugs circulating, the spotty cell phone connection and the ugliness of sunglass tans, people look each other in the eye as they pass, and smile. No matter the age, creed, sex, race or large Pac-Man suit one happened to be wearing, there was a sense of camaraderie. Here were people who came for the music, who didn’t care about the money. These are people who left civilization behind to crap in Porto-potties and bathe in their own dirt and grime in the 90-degree blistering sun that was cradled in the middle of the desert. There’s something very inspiring about that.

Saturday

More great music than my brain could handle and another sweltering day that began when the belligerent sun barely poked its head over the mountains brought me to Saturday night. I was excited for Mumford & Sons.

My sister and I did a cute cover during winter break of that one song that goes “OAHHH OAHHHH OAHHHHHH” that you may have heard on the radio so I was amped to do a bit more of that. But I was taken to the Do Lab instead. For those who don’t know, the Do Lab is the place you go to during the day to be sprayed down by misters and listen to some pretty wild electro music from various acts. I was perplexed, but I followed my friends to the very front of the stage, and proceeded to cease existing, fully and completely, as a person.

Emancipator. I had never heard of the myth, the man, the legend yet when the first touch of the first note ruffled the hair on my bare chest. I was gone. As a critic, I am completely at a loss for how to describe the music because at my core I believe there are two types of music in this world: good music and bad music. And as frustrating as it must be to read that, it’s true. The music that touches the very essence of your being is different for each person, but that feeling is universal. Emancipator is dance music if by dance music you are thinking of varying beats, jazz, dubstep, electronica, rock ‘n’ roll, hip-hop, blues and pure unfiltered sex.

My bare feet slapped against the soft, muddy clay as my body turned and twisted between the clefs and rests of each note. Sweat poured from my body as my spine was snapped and arched, my eyes closed. When I opened them, the once empty floor was now packed with people with their mouths hung open, their bodies quivering and grinding in ecstasy. It was primal and beastly. People felt themselves dying at the same number of beats per second that their heart pulsed to, and when the song ended they shouted and cried as they were reborn into the harsh light of reality.

Sunday

Sunday morning I was tired. My calves bitched like elephants in high heels — I don’t think that is an idiom but that’s what it felt like. My entire body ached and felt like it had been filled with lead but because of the type of things I had done I mentally felt fantastic and more ready than ever.

I saw The National as the sun burst into long red and orange flowers over the mountains. It took me right back to spring break where I stood atop a mountain barefoot and in boxers as the sun set and I sounded my barbaric yawp over and across the valleys below. Matt Berninger kept himself firmly planted and leaning over the black microphone as he pleaded his confession of “I made a mistake in my life today / everything I love gets lost in drawers / I want to start over,I want to be winning / way out of sync from the beginning.”

The deep pitch and timbre of his voice kept the audience in harmony above him as the sparkling melodies cascaded into the twilight. Every word is softly spoken and all you can see is the golden hair and the broken blue eyes that have been etched into your eyes. You see the smile of the best friend, hear a laugh that only echoes distantly on the fringes of your consciousness because you have stopped caring.

Grown men wept. I couldn’t, I was past it. It was so beautiful that to be sad would have been profane. I softly held the pretty girl in front of me not because I wanted sex or even to kiss her. It was because I needed it and she needed it. Because the longing is universal and when it is put on display so prominently and honestly, there is nothing you can do but cling to someone who feels the same way. When the dust cleared and the band walked off the stage, I was done. I half-heartedly danced at the back of the Bloody Beetroots and Ratatat, shouted out the words of The Strokes, but soon I went to the campsite and we left.

Conclusion

I often get rolled eyes and a groan when I say this to my co-workers here at The Daily Aztec, but I truly believe deep within the core of my being that Entertainment is the only section that matters. Art and music bring beauty to a calloused and rigid world because it is honest. Bad art is only bad if it is done for the wrong reasons or if you don’t believe in it, and that is instantly noticeable. Politics, money, tourist traps, nice cars, meaningless sex, fixed student council elections, alcohol, clothes, possessions, life; it’s all fleeting and not nearly as important as we might think.

To step away from these trivialities, even for three or four days, is liberating. The mere realization that there are thousands of other people out there who feel exactly as you do is incredible. People who afraid like you, who are in love like you, who are worried like you, who are angry like you. They are pissed that they are forced to live their lives in hamster cages, in office chairs, in a perpetual state of uncomfortable self-awareness. And you feel that aggression, that passion, that life that seeps into you from every direction. It is inescapable and all-encompassing. It is this feeling that would push me to spend the ridiculously overpriced amount of a ticket, again and again.

So if you are like me, go. Don’t think. Just go. If you don’t have money for Coachella go to Outside Lands, go to Bonarroo, go to Reading, go to Bamboozle. Spend three days barefoot in the grass, with dirt covering your face and a thick layer of sweat and grime coating your entire body. Don’t worry when your feet bleed, don’t fret when your voice blows out, don’t regret anything, get out there and live for a few days. Go with friends who listen to different music than you; don’t judge the music, listen to the music, feel the music. Figure out why the music makes you feel uncomfortable and then appreciate it for what it is. Figure out why you have been settling in your life. Figure out why you have not introduced yourself to that beautiful girl in your English class. Figure out what really matters in this crazy mixed-up world we are a part of.

I forgot who was performing, but I was watching this band and I noticed a woman on the side of the stage signing frantically. This made me realize two things. Number one, I am incredibly blessed and lucky to be able to hear this beautiful music and incredible sorrow for those who were unable to do so. And number two, I realized that other than the people who were born or became deaf, hearing loss is a choice for our generation. Certain people will turn down the music when it gets to “the screamy part,” some people will opt for tiny plastic ear buds that do little else but rattle, and then there are the people who will willingly stick their faces directly in front of a stack of 6-foot speakers to feel the waves of the music gently wash over them.

They will stand in the quivering baptism and step from it a new and changed individual. Although they may still return home and go back to work, make small talk with people who are endlessly boring, and sit through lecture after droning lecture. But there will be something different, a life, a hope that was not there before. It is the beating of the blood that has changed, your heart has been shaken, the rhythms informed you of a different way of living, a better and cleaner way. The melodies showed you love and the lyrics dusted away the memories of the past for safe yet stored keeping. Music, art and love are the only things that will ever save this world. It is only once we stand up to raise our voices in opposition, to question convention, to question conformity, to wonder if everything couldn’t be made just that little bit better.

And with that I leave you, steadfast reader. Go set the world on fire. Live today like there is no tomorrow because, hey — maybe there isn’t.

Yours sincerely and completely,
Andrew Scoggins