According to Ye, I’m right and you’re wrong.

I will say Kanye fucked up by not just briefly apologizing to the crowd before he started his set, maybe explaining himself. But man, how much more did Bonnaroo fuck this up, and not even bother to mention that it was their fault, not Kanye’s. Very classy.

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Metallica is an incredible band. Before I saw them at Bonnaroo, I had never really listened to Metallica. I didn’t understand why they were so incredibly successful (one of the top selling groups ever, still consistently in the top of weekly listening charts on Last.fm, etc.). Seeing them live made me realize why they do so well: they are amazing at what they do.

Everyone in Metallica can play their instruments really well. They have coordinated stage moves, and they seamlessly transition from song to song. Their pacing and song ordering is perfect for putting people into a frenzy, calming them down, and working them up over and over again. And they have explosions and fire. Seriously, it was sweet.

Beyond that, like any successful band, Metallica is a strong cultural force. Metallica is a band with a very strong personality that would never pretend to be anything its not or change into anything other than what it has always been. They have a very well-defined cultural niche.

Because of that, liking Metallica automatically gives you an identity to assimilate—clothes to wear, political views to hold, a worldview to consider. You also become part of a group, and you get like-minded friends. People like music that can do all of that for them. See: every other incredibly successful pop group.

I’m not going to start listening to Metallica or anything, but it was still cool to see them. They’re really talented and they deserve all the success in the world. It’s still funny how mad Lars Ulrich got about Napster, though.

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Over the next couple of days, I’m going to review a few bands’ performances at Bonnaroo. Today I’m covering Vampire Weekend and The Raconteurs.

Vampire Weekend is a really young band. People seem to forget that a little over a year ago, pretty much no one had heard of them. They’re a big deal now in the indie world, and to an extent they deserve it: they made a really good album. But the fact of the matter is that their songwriting skills are mediocre, their ideas are unoriginal, and they aren’t good at their instruments. They get away with it because they have a lot of personality and they fit neatly into the indie world. Plus, the influences they blatantly steal (African music in particular) are different from the influences that most mediocre indie rock bands blatantly steal (The Velvet Underground, etc.). Their sound is not really their own.

I’m not trying to hate on Vampire Weekend, I like them. I’m just saying that they’re still young artists who still have to grow a lot if they want to be really good. I think it’s too bad that they got so successful so early on, because they must think they’re hot shit now that everyone has been saying they are. They’re going to become complacent, because they won’t realize that they need to get better if they want to survive as musicians. They’ll suffer from indie rock’s recent Second Album Syndrome (see: Clap Your Hands Say Yeah, Beirut, etc.), and I don’t think anyone will care about them in three years.

For these reasons, my expectations were low going into Vampire Weekend’s performance. And they were met. They played the songs from the album like they sound on the album. The lead singer, Ezra Koenig, made some reasonably funny banter with the audience, and he was gracious. It was really fun to hear their songs live (especially “A-Punk”, “Cape Cod Kwassa Kwassa,” and “Boston” a.k.a. “Ladies of Cambridge.”). I hope they develop their live act into something really cool and personal, but I don’t think they will. Oh well.

The Raconteurs were awesome because Jack White is awesome. Jack White is my pick for greatest rock star of the 2000s. I was convinced when I saw a live concert DVD of the White Stripes. The man will scream into the microphone, make ridiculous facial expressions and gestures, jerk around like crazy, everything. He’s one of a small, elite group of people who just exude that rock star personality, who were born to be rock stars and live every day like rock stars. Honestly, I put his on-stage persona right up there with David Bowie, and Bowie is probably my favorite rock star ever. The only other musician right now who has as good a personality for his genre as Jack White is Lil’ Wayne for hip hop.

Like Lil’ Wayne, Jack White is completely crazy. You have to be enveloped in your own weird sense of reality to be a great celebrity and pop artist. My friend Felix’s sister did landscaping at his house in Nashville, and she talks about how Jack White would walk around the yard with his wife dressed in old southern aristocratic clothes (Mr. White in a suit and top hat, Mrs. White in a hoop dress).

Jack White’s presence on stage was huge. It helped that he was dressed in all black and had white makeup on his face to make him look really pale. He wailed his lyrics, he slammed the piano, he shredded his guitar. If you ever get the chance to see him live, do it.

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Now that Bonnaroo is over, I’m still going to write about it, but I’m going to write about what I’m interested in rather than whatever just happened. There’s a lot to talk about, and at some point I’ll put up an overall retrospective. Right now I want to talk about Kanye West’s performance.

For those of you who don’t know, basically what happened was that Kanye was supposed to go on at 2:45 in the morning on the main stage.

(This was a big deal for a couple reasons: it was the first late night show on the main stage at Bonnaroo, and it was also the first main stage performances by a rapper at Bonnaroo. Bonnaroo doesn’t have a lot of hip hop.)

But Kanye didn’t get on stage until about 4:30.

Here is how it happened: there were tons of Bonnaroo workers (at least 50) milling on stage up until about 2:30. Most of them were doing nothing in particular; I would estimate that at any given time, literally about 12 people were actually getting the stage ready.

Around 2:45, people started lugging out these huge wooden frames. It eventually became clear that about 20 of these needed to be put together the main setup, which we eventually found out would represent the surface of a distant planet.

I cannot emphasize enough how slowly these people worked, especially in comparison to how much faster they could have been. The average amount of people working at any given time at this point was probably 3, with at least a dozen people still on stage usually doing absolutely nothing. Even the people who were working were working really slowly. If you just watched the people working and you didn’t know when the show was going to start, you would guess the show was starting in about 8 hours. You would also guess that these people were getting paid by the hour, and they weren’t being supervised.

There was one especially ridiculous incident: at one point, about a dozen people were setting up part of the stage, and they could not figure out where which part went. But it was really obvious, because the surface of each piece of wood was curved differently, and the curves had to match up.

Still, twelve of these people could not figure it out for like three minutes. So eventually people from the crowd starting yelling up at the stage, sarcastically telling them how to put the stage together.

Have you ever seen video footage of apes (like in nature documentaries or something) where an ape is just standing there, and then it hears something in the distance, and it slowly turns its head and pauses to see what caused the noise?

That is how all of these people reacted. I am not kidding, each and every one of them stopped what they were doing and committed at least 20 seconds to look out at the crowd instead of setting up the stage.

The phrase I used when I told the story to my friends the next morning was “trained monkeys with ADD.”

Anyway.

There were signs on the side of the stage that said Kanye was going to be on at 2:45. As it became clear that that wouldn’t happen they changed it to 3:00, then 3:15, then 3:30, even though these times were ridiculous because the stage was clearly nowhere near done. Eventually the signs just stopped showing anything.

People started throwing glow sticks at the stage. No explanation was given for the delay. People started booing and yelling “Kanye sucks.”

Finally, at about 4:10, the stage was completely set up. Kanye came on at about 4:30.

Kanye didn’t give an explanation for the late start to his show, nor did he say anything to the crowd besides rapping and saying the dialogue for his show. (The show had a storyline about Kanye being stranded on a distant planet.)

Throughout the show, people continued to throw glow sticks on stage at Kanye. They never hit him, even though he never appeared to be dodging them. He never acknowledged the glow sticks that stayed on the stage near him, and he rapped and spoke in his normal tone of voice.

Here was the craziest part: an hour into his show he finished a song. After the applause died down, he signalled to somone off stage to lower the platform he was on, and he left without saying anything and without applause from the audience (since we didn’t know what was going on). The show clearly was not over, because he was in the middle of his story that drove the show.

The consensus after the show was that Kanye sucks for getting on so late. But Kanye couldn’t have possibly gone on before 4:10. Granted, the wait from 4:10 to 4:30 seemed really long at that time in the morning, after we had already been waiting for hours. But 20 minutes is a really short amount of time for an artist to actually get on stage after the stage is set up.

Then there’s the question of why the stage wasn’t ready until 4:10. Pearl Jam was the last show on the main stage before Kanye West, and they finished 45 minutes late. So they have to accept some blame.

Mostly, though, I blame whatever Bonnaroo guy was responsible for setting up the stage. Jesus Christ those people were inefficient. That stage definitely could have been ready by 3:30 if they had worked at an acceptable pace. (Then if Pearl Jam had ended on time, the stage would have been ready at 2:45).

I’ve heard rumors that Kanye didn’t want to get on stage until after the other late night shows were done. That would require that Kanye West told dozens of Bonnaroo workers to delay setting up the stage until the other late night shows were done. Wow, what a dumb and unlikely idea.

I am also blaming Bonnaroo for not doing enough during the delay to keep people happy. They gave us no explanation for the delay before, during, or after (they still haven’t said anything about the incident), choosing instead to let rumors develop. During the delay, the only information they gave us was obviously wrong (the updated concert start times).

They also didn’t entertain us at all. During other shows on the main stage when there was a delay, they would do stuff like have cameras aiming at the crowd that showed on the big screens. They didn’t do anything like that, and there’s no reason they couldn’t have.

Also, they (apparently) cut Kanye off. What the fuck? It was already 5:30 in the morning, there’s no reason it couldn’t have kept going.

I fault Kanye West only for not giving out more information, apologizing for the delay, or talking to the crowd. But I would have been upset too if people were throwing shit at my onstage during my entire one hour show. That’s incredibly disrespectful.

On the other hand, I admire Kanye for not caving in to the criticism and letting it affect his show. That attitude is exactly what made him become arguably the best pop artist in the world right now.

The thing about all of this is that because there is no official story on what happened, to an extent I’m forced to speculate here. I don’t actually know why it took so long to set up the stage, I just happen to believe that people are well-intentioned but sometimes lazy and incompetent (rather than choosing to believe that Kanye West is conspiratorial and endleslly selfish). I don’t actually know that Kanye was cut off, I just assume that he wouldn’t end his show early on purpose. In fact, I don’t even know that his show ended early, but I assume that he wouldn’t have ended the show so suddenly, with so little fanfare.

Anyway, he rapped really well, and the beats sounded really good. In a way it was really cool. But the bullshit with the delay took a lot away from the performance, which was too bad.

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Sorry about the lack of posting over the last couple days. It turns out that my sweet internet access hookup was anything but. Although I have to admit, I also realized that the last thing I want to be doing at Bonnaroo is sitting in front of a computer inside. So the new plan is to write more extensively about Bonnaroo after I get back.

For now, I can give you a brief summary. After a long wait to get in, we decided to see MGMT, Battles, and Vampire Weekend, who were all playing on the same stage in a row. I enjoyed MGMT a lot more than I did the first time I saw them, when they opened for Of Montreal in St. Louis last fall.

They have a really full sound, and they have that My Bloody Valentine effect of making you just stand there and be amazed by the sounds you’re hearing.

They also remind me of Spinal Tap, though. More on that in my later Bonnaroo coverage.

Battles was really awesome. Basically the drummer plays constantly, and everyone else in the band records loops and plays them back, sometimes adding effects. It’s really amazing, and you should really see them live even if you aren’t really into their album (like me).

Vampire Weekend was better than I expected, but not great. I really like their music, but they’re such a young band and they don’t really know how to put on a good live show. Some videos I’ve seen on YouTube were just bad. This performance was basically fine, just unexceptional.

Yesterday I saw an endless number of bands, namely: cornmeal, The Fiery Furnaces, Tegan & Sarah, Minus the Bear, Bluegrass Allstars (I’ll explain that one later), The Raconteurs, MIA, Chris Rock, Metallica, My Morning Jacket, and Tiesto.

Man, no wonder I was so tired at the end of the day.

MIA and The Raconteurs definitely were my favorite shows, with MIA easily at the top. The show was really energetic and loud. MIA is a great entertainer, and it helped that I knew every song. She even came out for an encore, where she finally left by doing “Paper Planes.” Of course, seeing ”Paper Planes” live was ridiculous.

The Raconteurs were mostly awesome because I got to see Jack White. He is an amazing musician, and he’s easily the best rock star around right now.

Chris Rock was also a lot funnier than I expected. And Metallica put on an amazing show. It’s not the kind of thing I would sit down and listen to, but fuck Metallica haters. Because they’re the best in the world at what they do, for sure.

Today I saw the Soul Rebels Brass Band, The Wood Brothers (as in, the guy from Medeski, Martin & Wood, and his brother. Also John Medeski was there.), Little Feat, Gogol Bordello, BB King, and Levon Helm (from The Band).

BB King was amazing, definitely the best of the day so far. What an amazing musician. He’s also a funny guy, he told several funny stories while he was up there.

But what I’m really looking forward today is Kanye West. Literally my only goal for the day is to be energetic and near the front for the Kanye West show at 2:45 in the morning tonight. Everything else is just a bonus.

The reason why it’s so late is that they moved him to the main stage at the last minute so that he could do his full Glow in the Dark show.

To say that I’m excited about this show would be a huge understatement.

In summary: Bonnaroo has so far been awesome, and only promises to get better tonight when I’m in like the third row for the Louis Vuitton Don. I’ll write more when I get back, and I’ll hopefully get a chance to write tomorrow.

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