A Simple Question

Friday night at the Voodoo Music Experience in New Orleans, hip-hop group the Knux played on one of the side stages. Unfortunately, the rains earlier in the day created a 10-foot-wide mud mote around the stage that fans had to brave to see the band. That and the rapidly cooling night kept the crowd down, but it didn't stop the hype man for the Knux from trying desperately to get a "KNUX! KNUX! KNUX!" chant going. When it didn't work, he badgered the crowd and tried again, then repeated the process until I walked away, tired of being yelled at. I feel for the group because Krispy and Al are from here, but because they got their act together out of town, they have little following here. Still, what's more likely to move a crowd - a hype man yelling at the audience, or playing something funky?

One Big Festival

I'm being a little alarmist worrying that the major New Orleans festivals will eventually become one big festival, but it's worth noticing that Sharon Jones and the Dap-Kings played Voodoo, Jazz Fest and are scheduled to play Essence Music Festival on the July 4 weekend. Overlap between any two of the festivals is very common, but the announcement today that Widespread Panic will be one of Voodoo's headliners adds a serious Jazz Fest-y jam band vibe to a festival that has rarely had that, even with a Jazz Fest-y stage.

The announced headliners so far - Kiss and Widespread Panic - only further underline the challenge of booking headliners for festivals. Last year's headliners - Stone Temple Pilots, Nine Inch Nails and R.E.M. - dated back to the '80s and '90s, and now Kiss takes us back to the '70s and Panic, aesthetically, further than that. The consensus among promoters is evidently that there are few artists from the 2000s who can draw festival-sized crowds, which is sad and interesting. There's so much interesting music being made today, but the implication is that it's being made for increasingly subdivided genres, so much so that few recent bands have the necessary mass appeal. It's possible that future nostalgia will change that - was STP really that big that they cut across genres/audiences in their heyday? Really? - but if not, there's something sad in the notion that there are fewer and fewer experiences in our culture that are shared. I'm not quite ready to yearn for the monoculture, but I understand the impulse.

Voodoo 2008: the Election Edition

Here's my round-up of New Orleans' Voodoo Music Experience for Rolling Stone.com.

A few post-Voodoo observations that didn't fit:

The Bingo! Parlour was the coolest venue at Voodoo - enclosed enough to feel like an environment, but open enough that you didn't have to be inside it to hear. It was also a coherent space, where the theatrical set up framed bands such as the New Orleans Bingo! Show, the Tin Men with the Valparaiso Men's Chorus, and Quintron and Miss Pussycat perfectly. You were cued as to how to appreciate the music in the process, and the setting seemed to bring out the best in the performers. That sort of intelligence also highlights that many of the bands that played there aren't just music creators but art concepts, where the music and the theater are only parts of the whole package.

It was clear by the lack of applause of recognition and singing along that TV on the Radio has yet to penetrate the Gulf Coast consciousness.

The coolest set that 100 or so people saw was DJ King Britt's tribute to Sister Gertrude Morgan. It felt like a contemporary notion of rock 'n' roll with Britt manipulating her voice and other recordings - including Barack Obama's at one point - while a live band accompanied him. "Power" had dub's boinging echo chamber at its heart, while the next piece was a tech-savvy second line. The DJ wasn't just a guy to scratch along to band compositions or spin samples; he was a part of the band and a part of the collective music-making process, and it sounded more modern than a lot of contemporary rock bands on the main stages.

Erykah Badu's set sounded like a perfect merger of music and personality. It was never clear that there was a place where the person left off and the performer began, or that the person left off and the song began. As such, it was an uneven musical experience, but another two hours of expression that personal would have been fine by me.