Splendor In The Grass in LOL

Maybe I’m just getting old, or have been old for a long time, but I really don’t see the appeal of music festivals.

I kind of put them in the same category as marathons.

Why pay an exuberant amount of moolah to get up as the ass-crack of dawn, among tens of thousands of other sweaty, unhygienic people, dance around in the mud in the middle of nowhere and go sleep in a tent on the hard ground for three nights straight?

And yet people seem to LOVE this. Lap it right up! I’ve seen at least three of my Facebook friends check in there, claiming they are “Having the time of their lives.”

I shouldn’t be such a bitter old cynical man :P

I guess I can just think of better things to do. I think your priorities change as you get older.

Having said that, I really have only been to one music festival, and that was Parklife back in ‘09, I think? It was on the day that huge dust-storm swept through from the desert in the west and blanket the city in this red haze. I remember having to walk to work in it straight from the music festival because that was when I did night shifts and had to work 9pm til 5am. Woo that was a rough day.

I mean, it was pretty fun I guess, the festival that is. If you didn’t mind standing in a foot of sewerage whilst waiting to use the restrooms.
That’s what the girls had to do anyway. Those poor darlin’s waiting patiently in shit whilst the boys just rushed on through theirs, whipping it out, tucking it back in and going back to the music.

So yeah, that wasn’t exactly appealing either. The alcohol on sale was over-priced and under-contented (like 2.5% or some shit) but the music was great. And my problem probably is that I don’t do drugs.
I figure the main reason people love festivals like Spendour is because they are off their fucking rockers and it doesn’t matter that they travelled for over 4 hours each way to stand in a muddy paddock for three days and no showers, because, hey, ‘This is livin’, Barry!’

I do however go to parties like the Mardi Gras After Party, and that isn’t too bad. I can actually have fun there, but once again, everyone is on drugs except me.

I guess the only festival where people weren’t on drugs was when I used to go to AGMF (Australian Gospel Music Festival) back in the day LOL. Those people don’t even need drugs to believe in a mystical being in the sky :P

Satire articles like this pop up every time another music festival comes around, but they still never fail to make me laugh. Here are some exerts from it:

*“It’s awful,” said one festival goer, who wished to be known simply as Schmitty, “once I started coming down from the molly I’d popped in the van on the way here it became quite clear just how garbage these things are.”

“One moment I’m having the time of my life with my best friends listening to the best music I’ve ever heard, the next I’m knee deep in mud next to a shirtless man with tribal tattoos while some European DJ I’ve never heard of is on stage flipping through Tinder to fill in time until his set’s over.”
“I mean if I’m not going to be pinging on a mixed cocktail of whatever I bought from some guy in a tie dye shirt, while some bland electronic music makes me feel like I’m being swallowed by a neon whale who wishes me nothing but love, then I’d much rather not be here,” an anonymous man in a morphsuit told The Backburner.

“I could be at home reading a book, I could sleep in a bed, I could use my own toilet. Right now all of those things sound like actual heaven. Instead I get to spend the next few days trying to barter for a goon sack with the 200 glow bracelets I brought with me.”*

Last updated July 27, 2015