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Music

I'm Terrified of Teenagers: A Festival Report

A recycling can was crowdsurfing. Crowdsurfing!

Look at these fuckers. Photo by Petya Shalamanova.

I’ve spent eight weekends of my life planning trips to Pitchfork Music Festival, and seven weekends attending (thanks for having “emergency surgery,” mom. Whatever.). In the days leading up to that always-sweltering mid-July weekend in Union Park, I'd coordinate things like where to rendezvous with friends, what kind of intoxicants to obtain, and how to house out-of-towners. It was always the highlight of my summer, and accordingly I'd strategize everything so that I could have the most fun humanly possible. Although becoming of legal drinking age and having gainful employment opened up a lot of new possibilities, not a lot has changed since I began going nearly a decade ago—now friends “crash” instead of “sleep over with parental consent,” it's way, waaaay easier to drink, and Chicago's vast offering of post-festival party venues has widened considerably. "Working" in music has also opened a lot of doors, and now instead of silently praying that a security guard won't find the flask in my crotch before I enter the grounds, I spend my time doing calculations as to how many beers I can drink before iLoveMakonnen takes the stage first (the answer is four as long as I don't stop or talk to anyone). Ultimately, you try and get a little drunk, see some music and friends, and think of clever ways to improve your social media capital. It's the same dance every year and I love it.

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Seriously. This is disgusting. Photo by Petya Shalamanova.

While I haven't felt any real changes in the overall tenor of the weekend's festivities, there is something about Pitchfork that, despite my best efforts to ignore it, nags at me like the assurance that I will inevitably someday die alone. No, not the increased branding, nor the sometimes-questionable booking or set orders, or the ubiquity of weed paraphernalia manufacturers. I'm sure everyone and their grandma has a take on how Pitchfork's Really Changed, but most of those gripes are just normal symptoms of any music festival's increasing popularity. Now that it's grown to cover the entirety of Union Park with stages, vendors, and kiosks handing out meaningless free trinkets that will end up in a landfill, you might think that Pitchfork's vibrant indie spirit is being compromised. In reality, that's just the warm, soothing acid bubble bath of money doing what it does best, so don't worry about it. The threat I'm talking about is external, something altogether removed from the festival's (relatively) pristine integrity.

Continued below.

I'm talking about the scourge of hardworking, music-loving Americans everywhere: teenagers. The one weekend I hold most dear, that embodies so much of what I love about Chicago in the summertime, is under siege from these pre-adult tyrants. They run around the festival in their neon underpants and their vintage construction hats, assaulting everyone in sight by screaming “what are thoooooooooose?” They carry a lot of dark liquor in clear water bottles and expect no one to notice. The gall! I should have seen the warning signs in 2011, the year of Odd Future's breakout performance following critical acclaim. Now, I've seen a lot of volatile crowds at concerts in my day, let me tell you. In fact, this was my second OF show, the first being the infamous Detroit performance from their first tour that got shut down due to people throwing empty malt liquor bottles on stage. I was prepared, or so I thought. I was wrong. During their performance of 'French' (no coincidence that this was the same song playing when the Detroit show was shut down), Tyler, the Creator stage dived in a full leg cast and caused a section of the crowd to collapse on itself (you can watch here at 1:28). I was on the bottom of that. On top of me were five to six teens. Later visits to a doctor revealed a chest contusion and cracked rib; he advised me to wear body armor and a helmet the next time I went to an OF concert. Did I think teens were to blame at the time? Not at all. I chalked it up to an unavoidable consequence of rambunctious youth culture! Everyone was just trying to turn up! In retrospect, I blame this on being 23 and desperately trying to hold on to the last vestiges of my pubescent years. The fact of the matter is that Pitchfork 2011 was Teen Normandy, the year that legions of menacing 13-19 year olds made it clear that they too would partake in my sacred ritual, but as despoilers and not acolytes. I felt caught in the crossfire, slightly shocked that The Youth didn't hold the same reverence for music performance like me.

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The guy on the left is definitely a teen and a monster and a failure. Photo by Petya Shalamanova.

Why the hell are you laying on the ground? Fuck this. Photo by Petya Shalamanova.

Fast forward to 2015, where I'm now sitting in the VIP bleachers opposite the Blue Stage. A$AP Ferg is running through his set at a frenetic pace and inciting the crowd to near riot when I notice how similar they look to the tempest of flesh that surrounded me that fateful day at OF four years ago. Suddenly, a blue recycling can slowly rises out of the crowd. From my vantage point, it looks like it's floating on its own, until it turns onto its side and begins to travel towards the front. The recycling can is crowdsurfing. A sudden shift in footing causes the can to shift onto its side. The lid opens and empty beer cans and bottles start to rain down on everyone. A few long seconds later the security at the front of the crowd will reach in and pull the trash can out of the fray, but at this moment I am literally watching teenagers pour piles of garbage onto themselves. It's at this point that I realize how truly horrible young people are. It's one thing to want to have a rip-roaring good time, sometimes at the expense of others, with little regard for your surroundings—that's what I would attribute the OF experience to, and generally speaking that's the Teen Mentality to begin with, what with the youthful exuberance and antagonism towards authority and all that. But these teens were actively fucking up everything in sight, themselves included. The really chilling part, however, was that in spite of that, they still seemed to be having fun. The same way I just told you about the totally sick time when watching Odd Future gave me internal injuries, these teens will likely look back on being covered in garbage as the highlight of their weekend.

I’m not going to sit here and regale you with some contrived lesson about how being jaded about youth culture made me discover the transcendent power of live music and helped me reconnect with some part of myself that I’d thought had disappeared years ago. Teens are a menace. They make concerts less fun for slow-moving people like me. I don’t just mean that they make it to the front of the crowd faster because it takes me longer to cross a baseball diamond drenched in my own sweat while dry-heaving; they do everything faster. They absorb culture at an alarming rate and imitate good style with lightning speed. I guess that the period of your life where you don’t have a full-time job and you spend all your time thinking about yourself is probably very conducive to that. Add constant, unfettered internet access to that equation, and it’s really no surprise that those bastards figure out cool shit that took me forever to do at the drop of a pin. I come to Pitchfork because spending three days drinking and listening to music reminds me that I am still sort of like those teens, which is cool. But that won’t last; with every passing second, I drift further away from the possibility of doing something like pouring garbage on myself and enjoying it or breaking bones to music for fun. So while teens remind me of what it’s like to be a teen, they also remind me of what it’s like not to be a teen, and that in turn reminds me of how I’m constantly dying. Get off my lawn because you remind me of death (God, I wish someone was still yelling at me to get off their lawn).

If you can't tell, Gabriel Herrera wishes he was younger. Follow him on Twitter.