HONK! and Other Music Festivals: The Early Utopia
For the past three months, our "Music 25: Music Festivals" class has tried to answer the simple question: “What is a music festival?” I thought that this would be a no-brainer meant to shape conversations about other issues, but to my surprise it ended up being one of the most incredibly difficult terms to define. And, why? Because music festivals comprise such a wide range of events with differing functions that people often fail to consider the full range of factors that serve as integral contributors to the actual experience of each festival. Through Music 25's active engagement with the HONK! Festival--a street band movement focused on reclaiming spaces for expression, activism, and community--I came to agree with the authenticity of its purpose as listed on their website: “At full power, these bands create an irresistible spectacle of creative movement and sonic self-expression directed at making the world a better place.” Contrasting the intent (and outcomes) of the HONK! Festival with that of other current music festivals has helped me define what a music festival is, as well as shaped my ideas about prescriptive measures to reorganize festivals that fall short of providing the same authentic experience as HONK!
Music festivals have long been cultural hubs where ideas, love, empathy, and expression are championed. In this conjunction of feeling, visceral emotion, and dialogue in the moment of performance, we see the inspiration and uplift of all both performers and audience. In the most basic sense, music festivals have the power to be the arena for activism, for the unification of communities, and for the creation of--dare I say it--utopias. We see, for example, that HONK! actively facilitates an incredibly diverse environment where people of all colors come together in a day of unity. However, many contemporaneous popular music festivals makes similar claims for atavistic intentions, but are quickly exposed for the profit hungry, commercialized institutions that they truly are. In the Guardian article, “The Kids Are All White: Can US Festivals Live Up to Their “Post-racial’ Promise?,” author Jemayel Khawaja gives the reader insight into the organizational structure of massive popular music festivals. Though the trope of US music festivals as multicultural utopias facilitating equality is ubiquitous in media and advertising, the data suggests that white people can comprise up to roughly 70% of the festival audience, as it did in 2016 at Coachella.
With contradictory historical precedent vs, emerging capitalist agendas of many popular music festivals, I write this commentary to remind readers of the power of the music festival. I offer a new definition of "music festival" that is predicated upon the belief that these events should enact a few main tenants. 1) Music festivals should take some kind of activist approach to bring about either political or social change. 2) Festivals and their organizers should make an effort to bridge the gaps in their representative community. 3) That community should consist of a diverse set of people through ideology, culture, race, or identity. 4) Music must either be the instrument or main facilitator through which these tenants are carried out. I give this definition, not out of a need for technicalities, but in order to raise the expectations that the broad category of "music festivals" should draw on the power of artistry and performance to create visceral and empathetic connections between music, performers, and listeners. In my experience, the most popular music festivals exist simply as spectacles where tickets get sold to the highest bidder, and “fans” fail to recognize the lessons, the teachings, and consequently the importance and power of the music presented to them. I argue that music festivals have not simply the power, but the responsibility to shape these events into performances that have a message, that stand for something. I believe that this message is best encapsulated by the following image of a banner present at HONK! 2019.
Rude Mechanical Orchestra performs in Kenney Park during the HONK! Festival on Saturday, October 12th 2019 at 3pm.
So why might this be? Why aren’t the claims of the popular music festivals "authentic"? Jemayel, in my opinion, perfectly sums up the issue when he claims: “Therein lies the reason for the glaring dissonance between the intent and effect of the festival industry’s push for diversity: those in executive position, from the record label to the management to the promoters to the corporate sponsors, are usually caucasian.” While having caucasian promoters and management isn't inherently wrong, the main critique I am trying to highlight is a lack of the diversity in festival leadership. The mismatch between so-called mission statements and the facilitators who enact them is one reason the intended objective of so many music festivals to be an oasis of equality never comes to pass. I argue that it is necessary for the leadership of these festivals to actively ensure that the correct structural factors are in place to allow for activism and community building. HONK! has risen to the challenge. In my interview with Kevin Leppmann, one of the original founders of the HONK! Festival, puts it like this:
“So, the festival, as I say, if it's just to the extent to which it's a success, it has provided as a space and a forum where individually and collectively people can realize all kinds of creative possibilities and particularly surprising, spontaneous possibilities. And that in turn, as it turns out, and this is kind of the flip side of what I learned. What I think a lot of us learned organizing the festival, that it isn't so much that you need to orchestrate new ideas or intuitions. You need to remove a lot of other obstacles that modern society puts in the way of having this kind of collective imagination and expression that in fact. Given the opportunity and once you remove those other barriers, there is a natural inclination for people to sing and dance and laugh and play and love one another.”
When leaders such as Kevin Leppmann actually do challenge the societal boundaries that exist between communities, the entire structure of the festival then revolves around breaking them down. The creation of a communal environment cannot be passive, though it will often take a back seat to spectacle if allowed to do so.
In conclusion, I hope that this commentary opens the reader’s eyes to the potential of what music festivals--across genre, across audiences, across spaces and places--could stand for. I hope that it aptly recognizes the HONK! Festival for the community, activism, and structural change that it and its organizers strive to create. I hope that it implores the reader to ask more from other festivals and their creators, and to demand an authentic music festival experience rather than this hollow shell of a festival we currently see today.
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