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Music

Can A Hip-Hop Music Festival Ever Work?

Croatia's Fresh Island has done something that the festival scene has needed for a long time.

When Jay Z headlined Glastonbury, it felt like a win for our team. A changing of the guard where hip-hop would come to replace rock as the de jure music of festival culture, just as it had become the de jure music of youth culture. There was a sense when that crowd of 80,000 odd thousand walked back to the tents humming the hook from “H to the Izzo” that Britain’s festival scene would be revitalised, no longer reliant on third division indie bands to make up spaces on the bill.

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Yet it never quite worked out that way. Festivals started to book more hip-hop, but often mid-level rap acts found themselves playing to tiny crowds; there seemed to be a lack of overlap between people who want to see Jamie XX and The Vaccines and those that want to see Pusha T. Besides, hip-hop doesn’t celebrate slumming it the way other genres of music do. Fans aren’t necessarily that up for sleeping in a £20 pop-up tent for three days so they can drink themselves into oblivion and spend the next week having a breakdown.

Certainly, there were more rap acts on festival bills in the years that followed Jay Z. Reading and Leeds added an urban stage. Kanye, Eminem, and Drake all ended up headlining major UK festivals. But there remained an awkward distance between hip-hop fans and festivals. Does it make sense to have a thoughtful, at times introverted, artist like Kendrick Lamar, challenging conventions of race and capital from a giant stage covered in brand sponsors over a soundsystem where you can’t hear what he’s saying?

Perhaps that's why there’s never really been a hip-hop festival in the UK. I guess you could call Wireless one, but although it manages to book the biggest acts in the world it's constantly criticised for its shitty atmosphere, crap security and high incidences of violence. Plus, this year it was headlined by David Guetta so clearly it has aspirations beyond rap. There’s also Boom Bap - which is awesome, but with a capacity of 2000 and a line-up mostly made up from unsigned UK acts it's hardly a major concern.

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Big Narstie having a time.

Ten years ago, dance music went through a similar rough period, as big clubs started to close and people moved to a festival set up. The first round of dance festivals, which pretty much copied and pasted the rock model of having lots of stages and acts playing all day, were huge expensive events like Homelands, Rockness and a reincarnated Big Chill festival. But none of those festivals were quite right for a genre that was all about late nights and club atmosphere. So it evolved and now, from the beaches of Croatia to the forests of Norfolk, in smaller and more beautiful settings with nicher line-ups, dance festivals are incredibly successful, perhaps more than nightclubs are.

Which is why we were excited when we heard about Fresh Island, a new approach to a hip-hop festival taking place in Croatia. Instead of daytime stages and loads of acts, the festival takes place across a string of beach-side nightclubs in Zrce, a resort in Croatia that already hosts Hideout and Croatia Rocks. The line-up eschews huge name acts for pretty much everyone we’ve loved in hip-hop over the past five years or so: Action Bronson, Migos, Danny Brown, Joey Badass, JME and Pusha T. So we got on board, not only sampling the festival for ourselves but bringing Noisey’s Grime Karaoke and programming our own stage, to see if a hip-hop festival could ever work. Here’s what we saw.

Migos. Photo by Goxmag.

Joey Badass and Danny Brown kicked off the festival, immediately proving the appetite for an event like this in Europe. I’ve seen both these acts struggle at festival bookings that didn’t really suit them, but here the connection was electric, and distinctly different from a traditional crowd. When Joey launched into “Christ Consciousness” you could feel the whole beach bob it’s head up and down in appreciation rather than naive adoration.

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The other huge difference was to be at a festival where people actually dance, not the gentle jaw-led sway of a pilled up pasty at 3 hour Coldcut set, but actual raised eyebrow and aloof bums winding, not with "feel the love" pacifism but "don't touch what you can't afford" swagger. When Tim Westwood does his set there are circle pits you wouldn't enter without travel insurance, girls bent over chugging like vintage carburetors, guys dancing elbows aloft like they're in grasping distance of the heavens.

Action Bronson. Photo by Dino Ninkovic.

It is true that Westwood's pervy and problematic shtick, which has been given a free pass for decades because of his instrumental role in bringing hip-hop culture to the UK, needs to be wound down. I'm not against giving him some leeway. I'd even forget him interrupting his own set every two minutes to take another Snapchat. But you have to draw the line somewhere and I feel like a 60-year-old white guy asking if “any dark skin girls who don't bleach wanna try a white guy tonight” is a good place to draw it.

Later, Migos are the perfect encapsulation of hip-hop that actually makes more sense live. On record, saying "Hannah Montana" over and over sounds like a funny sample, but in the flesh it just seems like actual derangement. Their whole show maintains that just broke out the asylum feel. Screaming along to their own vocal led tracks realising the only way to improve on Migos is to add another layer of Migos.

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Action Bronson, ever the student of old school hip-hop, finds a way to make the slightly gaudy Aquarius intimate, performing songs on enclaves and balconies. He lapped the venue three times over, eventually setting up camp on the roof of a bar. If you looked underneath you could see the optics jiggle with each of Bronson’s bounces.

Big Narstie. Photo by Dino Ninkovic.

But the highlight of the weekend (even if we say so ourselves) came on Sunday. Earlier this year, Noisey turned one if its pipe dreams into reality, by launching Big Narstie’s Grime Karaoke. It was a roaring success in Dalston, but we didn’t know how it would fare on the beach, on the final day of a festival where most people don’t go home until the sun starts to rise. We should have had more faith. With Sian Anderson DJing and Narstie as the consummate MC, people poured in from across the festival to jump on the mic on grime classics. When a couple of lads performed “Where Do You Know Me From”, Stormzy wondered by and did the last verse. One girl did such a solid performance of “Shutdown”, while sitting in the pool, she got four rewinds. It was the sort of thing that couldn’t have happened anywhere else.

Later that night JME and Stormzy, who came after a change of clothes and possibly a short nap, played the Noisey stage. JME hasn’t done that many long solo sets of late and it felt special to hear, not just the latest tracks from his new album, Integrity, but the songs that got him here, stuff like “CD is Dead” and “P”. The huge crowd knew verses from five years ago word-for-word, again proving the benefits of a crowd who care about hip-hop.

JME. Photo by Dino Ninkovic.

Fresh Island took the hip-hop festival out of the format of a rock festival. It tried to give space to let the genre dictate the party - that meant bottle service, pool parties, and a focused line-up of acts without any of the daytime filler. It’s still working out a few kinks, and could probably do with a few more niche DJs so you don’t end up hearing Drake 20,000 times in a weekend, but it’s done something that the festival scene has needed for a long time, created the template for a proper hip-hop event for proper hip-hop fans.

Follow Sam Wolfson on Twitter.