Our Coverage Of Lollapalooza 2008 Coverage
This year there are a ton of music fests across the US, and unfortunately I can’t get to them all. But, there are still more music bloggers than festivals, so I can at least give you the scoop on the scoop. Lollapalooza is the fest I-most-wanted-to-go-to-but-couldn’t-make-it-to of the year. I think they had the best line-up of the major fests and on top of that, it is probably the only yearly festival on this continent to remain relevant for such a long span of time. The essentials from the weekend:
The biggest story seems to be the riotous crowd at Saturday night’s Rage Against The Machine show getting so crazy that RATM had to cut their set short. You can read a very long, but excellent and detailed account of the entire ordeal here from Chicago Sun-Times reporter Jim DeRogatis.
Grizzly Bear performed 4 new songs, two of which were debuted there. Stereogum had audio they recorded up of the new songs, but were asked to take it down. They still got good Griz coverage.
The biggest band at Lollapalooza, and in the world pretty much right now, was Radiohead and you can see the setlist and photos here. Friday marked the first time the festival has ever sold out a day (75,000) since adopting the Bonnaroo/Coachella model and basing the fest in Chicago in 2005. In fact the festival went on to sellout every day. With new national fests popping up weekly now, it seems music festival over-saturation hasn’t been a factor for Lolla. Of course having Radiohead on the bill doesn’t hurt, but I’m guessing the secret to their success was being the only fest in this country that didn’t have Jack Johnson come stink things up.
Atlanta’s Black Lips were there. They have tour dates. They were named by NME as one of the “Top 25 bands making America cool again”.
Former Uncle Tupelo member Bill Belzer played with Jeff Tweedy. Wilco played a new song that you should go listen to here. See Bloc Party vids and pics here. Kanye West‘s set went over better than his at Bonnaroo but he still said some douchey stuff. Yeasayer got interviewed. The widely circulated rumours of Barack Obama being there turned out to be false.
Largehearted Boy is keeping up with all of the live Lollapalooza downloadables here.
Next year hopefully I’ll bring you my own coverage. Below are some vids from Earfarm’s best of Lollapalooza video collection:
Radiohead:
Wilco:
Chromeo:
- Posted by Davy Minor on August 5, 2008 at 10:32 pm
