I Taught My Dad How to Turn Up at a Waka Flocka Flame Concert in Wisconsin

“You know, I really like this. How could you not? There’s a bunch of neuroscience behind why this works and why this connects with people. It’s the same reason meditation works,” my 58-year-old father, Wayne, tells me. “All the stuff like this that they play on Vh1, like Zedd, I really like it.”

We’re standing on a campus street in the middle of three thousand college kids, and, yes, we’re talking about Zedd. Yeah. That Zedd. The “Why are you my clarity” Zedd. Here at the University of Wisconsin’s annual spring music festival Revelry, our night is finishing with a conversation about EDM as we vibe to Dillon Francis. At that same moment, a thirsty promoter sees him nodding his head and swaying, and comes up to us to tell us about an event at Soldier Field that will have “all the best names in EDM” and that he should check it out.

He gives my dad a flyer and just nods at me. I am left with the realization that I am 28 years old and my dad is more in touch with the number one music among the youths of college campuses than I am. And even concert promoters know it.

But let’s back up. Two weeks ago, when I realized that my dad would be visiting the same day as Revelry, I thought it would be a hilarious thing to go to if only just to see how my ol’ Wayne would react. Revelry, now in its second year, was created in part as a way to give UW students an alternative to the Mifflin Street Block Party, a bacchanal that the city effectively shutdown two years ago after literally hundreds of arrests, (totally valid) concerns over sexual assaults and violence, and after Chicago Blackhawk Patrick Kane crashed the festivities. This year’s lineup expanded over last year’s smaller affair (Hoodie Allen, Toro y Moi and Chance the Rapper headlined), to include a stage of semi-local talent (highlighted by Minneapolis’s Caroline Smith and UW rapper CRASHPrez) and a main stage featuring Angel Olsen, Sky Ferreira, G-Eazy, Waka Flocka Flame, and headliner Dillon Francis. I figured with a lineup like that—and the added spectacle of thousands of rolling and drunk college kids going nuts at a festival invented to be a safe space for them to turn up—all I had to do was get my dad to Revelry, he’d turn into a one-liner machine, and I could watch the “old man interacts with his environment” jokes pileup. It. Was. Perfect.

But then my dad and I had a conversation about all the EDM he hears on VH1, and I learned an important lesson: never underestimate the ability of music television to expose your parents to bands you assume they have no reason to know. Just because your dad takes next to no interest in the music you are interested in—and has even been nearly enraged by your continued conviction that Kanye West is the artist of this generation—doesn’t mean that he isn’t at home, in his underwear on a Saturday morning, getting loose to Zedd and Avicii. Parents might turn down at 9 PM on weeknights, but they still know the right music to party to.

We rolled into the festival at 5 PM—it started at noon—in time to catch local producer/DJ *hitmayng spin records at the Silent Disco. If you’re not familiar with the concept, you wear wireless headphones and dance around to whatever the DJ is mixing, while onlookers glance at you like you’re a lunatic. My dad didn’t like it at first—and I had to explain to him how modern laptop DJing works—but when *hitmayng dropped Prince’s “When the Doves Cry,” I watched my dad go from a skeptic to a total Silent Disco convert before my eyes.

“You could totally do this anywhere. There are a lot of applications for this,” he said between French Montana and Future tracks. If you are looking to start a Silent Disco company, holler at my boy Wayne.

We then went to the main stage to see Sky Ferreira. She was the artist I had pegged as my dad’s potential favorite pre-festival. He had never heard her, but I figured her vaguely New Wave and synth pop would resonate with him. Her set was way more polished than I thought it would be—the stage anxiety and meltdowns she had last year seem to be a thing of the past—and “You’re Not the One” totally slayed.

“She’s good, except for the songs that are really boring,” my dad said during “Omanko,” one of the boring songs. “Mostly I’m worried that it seems like her band isn’t being properly nourished. I hope they get a good meal tonight.”

Sky was booked for the fest mostly to try to draw in at least part of UW’s aspirational “I’m not a hipster, I’m a unique flower” community, which worked pretty well.

“I like looking at what “costumes” everyone is wearing here,” my dad said, looking over at a guy dressed like he just got off a shift being a longshoreman in the 1940’s. “It’s like they’re going, ‘What’s my genre? That’s my costume for going out in public tonight.’ Apparently the look everyone is going for is Justin Timberlake look alike.”

After a break sitting at a picnic table for a while—sitting breaks are crucial for older concert goers—we set up near the suddenly swelling crowd of Frat Boys in tanktops and Sperrys getting wet for Oakland MC G-Eazy. I knew next to nothing about G-Eazy pre-Revelry, except that he seemed to be a Hoodie Allen clone, which makes him maybe a fourth rate Macklemore.

“The live drummer is really great,” my clearly rockist dad yelled into my ear as we dodged undergrads. “And the recorded music isn’t bad. But get this guy off the stage. He’s totally replaceable; his only talent seems to be being white and athletic. Your cousin Colin could do this. So why him?”

We bailed after three odious songs, and then my dad and I had a conversation about live hip-hop and the shelf life for frat rappers. My dad had a question.

“So, basically, this guy is getting paid to do live karaoke. Right?”

“Well, no.”

“But he’s just rapping along to his own song. How is that performing? It’s just karaoke.”

“Well, live hip-hop is basically all charisma. You’re going to see rappers to hear their songs really fucking loud in a big space with other people who like their songs. It’s up to the rapper to make you not care that they’re just yelling their songs into a mike over their songs off a laptop.”

“Whoever that just was did not do that, even with a live drummer. I don’t understand why he’s a big deal. What happens when his fans graduate and don’t care about him anymore?”

Next up was Waka Flocka Flame, who in the last 18 months has undergone a conscious EDM-ification of his music and performances, realizing that there’s better money to be made performing for rowdy college kids high on molly than the traditional rap fans who still view him skeptically. Waka more or less slaughtered G-Eazy, even though he rapped maybe every third line, and mostly survived on going mental onstage for an hour. The crowd, like at every college event since time immemorial, was at that point a loosely contained riot, and my dad and I saw streams of people flee the pit as we leaned behind the sound and light booth (leaning spaces are very crucial for older concert goers too), watching the bedlam.

Being that Waka sounds like how all rap sounds to old people, I expected my dad to repeat his “live hip-hop is just karaoke” party line. But my father is damn good at playing against type.

“He really knows how to connect with a crowd. He knows how to get people on the floor and keep them there,” my dad said. “He doesn’t waste time with between song conversation; he just keeps it going. He’s great.” (It should be noted he said this during “O Let’s Do It.”)

Shortly thereafter, we witnessed two kids hit a G-Pen, and I have to explain to my dad the concept of a vaporizer. Needless to say, weed delivery devices have improved since he went to school at UW in the ‘70s.

The crowd at this point has at least quadrupled in size from Sky Ferreira’s set, and I think the adults realized we had dramatically underestimated Dillon Francis’ appeal. I was again unaware of him pre-festival—and I remained so, to be on an even playing field with my dad—but he emerged to screams before setting up behind a computer on a gigantic light cube that confirmed the need for the “lights might cause seizure” signs at the festival’s entrance.

“This just reminds me of being in college here in like 1976. There used to be disco contests at bars, and this music is basically just the disco of 2014,” my dad said, as we decamped to a spot far out of the throbbing and Molly-whopped crowd. “The lights are quite the upgrade from the disco ball they had in every bar, though.”

Dillon Francis hits his first drop, and my dad looked over at me, his eyes the size of cue balls.

“You can really feel that bass right in your bones,” he said. “Electronic music really can make some pleasant sounds.”

My dad becomes a drop aficionado, nodding at me a couple times when the beat drops on stuff like “Get Low” and “Drunk in Love.”

“So, that’s like a recurring feature of this?,” he asked. I nodded. “It takes a lot of talent to make this work without a singer. This is the best thing we’ve seen all day.”

And with that, a weird generation gap happens, wherein my dad is explaining to me why he likes music that college kids go crazy for and I defend myself for being entirely indifferent towards it. He’s 58, trying to make his 28-year-old son appreciate music he likes. After staying much longer into his set than I thought we would—my dad had said he wanted to go earlier, but he was too into it to leave—we walk back to the car, passing a security guard in his 70s, himself bopping and weaving to the sounds of Dillon Francis half a block away.

“See!” my dad yelled at me. “Even he likes it! Neuroscience!”

Andrew Winistorfer will never stop turning up. He's on Twitter — @thestorfer

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