Rachel Dugan
Music festivals aren’t for the middle-aged and middle-of-the-road
THE recent announcement of the first wave of acts for this year’s Longitude music festival left a lot of middle-aged, middle-of-the-road music fans scratching their heads.
In their collective state of shock they immediately took to Twitter, demanding to know why they didn’t recognise any of the acts. (Well, some seemed to know Solange, though I suspect many were surprised to learn she has a career outside of being Beyonce’s sister and starting fights in lifts.)
The Longitude backlash was echoed in the UK this week when a similar row erupted over the Leeds/Reading Festival’s grime and hip-hop-heavy line-up. Disappointed fans were quick to bemoan the fact that they weren’t going to be seeing the Foo Fighters/Killers/ insert other generic guitar band here for the fifth or sixth time.
Don’t get me wrong, I have a degree of sympathy. The Longitude line-up is wall-to-wall hip-hop, not an indie fourpiece or dad-rock heritage act in sight, meaning that those of us of a certain age (and a certain guitar-based persuasion) most likely won’t be heading to Marlay Park this July.
But I can see something to celebrate, too.
Over the last few years, it has started to feel like the main festivals have decided that pandering to the middle-aged and middle-of-the-road is much more lucrative than offering a line-up that actually reflects what’s current in music.
Forty-something hipsters and people who stopped listening to new music around the time they left college really shouldn’t be dictating the bands who grace the stage. By all means go, but don’t expect that the acts booked will always cater to your non-evolving tastes.
The cynic in me finds it hard to not to see greed as the reason festivals have been stuck in a musical time loop, producing line-ups that wouldn’t look out of place in the noughties. Why fill a field with underpaid twenty-somethings when a few guitar bands and a recently reformed dad-rock quartet will bring you the cash-rich 35-andovers who are willing to spend three times the ticket price on a boutique yurt and part with vast sums of cash each mealtime to get a gourmet experience.
So if you are one of those people slamming the Longitude lineup, maybe think of the cash you’ll save. Better still, why not go and open yourself up to something new? open to allow his slightly larger robot pal Big-Dog to walk through.
So hysterical was the reaction of some, you’d have thought the clip showed Spot-Mini and Dog-Robot piloting a nuclear sub unaided out of a Russian base somewhere in the Baltic Sea. But no, it’s just machine opening a door for another machine.
I’ve been struggling to think what kind of nefarious plot this new skill might serve, how exactly it fits into the machines-are-goingto-first-make-us-obsolete-thenkill-our-young narrative.
Perhaps that guy in the top hat who opens the door for you in Brown Thomas should be thinking of upskilling? And if I was a nightclub bouncer, I might think about branching out into private security. Other than that, I fail to see what threat the robotic twosome pose.
There’s lots to be wary of when it comes to technology and the most sinister aspects are probably operating right under our noses. But I’m pretty confident robots that can open doors is not one of them.