Results tagged “bonnaroo”

                            

"Hey, bro, take my photo! I'm addicted to adrenaline and I burst all the blood vessels in my eye doing back flips!" Such are the strange, close encounters that happen every few steps while one wanders the 700-acres of Tennessee farmland crawling with 75,000 people during this weekend's Bonnaroo music festival. Time and space don't permit a full accounting of all the bizarre sights, sounds, and smells observed during our three days here (there's still one last afternoon of Snoop Dogg, Andrew Bird, Erykah Badu, and Phish ahead), but click through on the photos here for a glimpse at the recession-defying bacchanal. (The adrenaline addict is in there somewhere.)

       

Some 75,000 people from around the world are currently swarming the 8th annual Bonnaroo festival in Tennessee, but from the way they all sang along with the Beastie Boys' classic "No Sleep 'Til Brooklyn," you'd think they were all just on vacation from the county of Kings. Last night the Beastie Boys brought their signature New York flavor to the 700-acre farm, throwing down with a well-balanced mix of crowd-pleasers, including "Paul Revere," "Pass the Mic," and "Shake Your Rump." The big surprise of the set—besides the comically butchered encore of "Sabotage," which completely fell apart both at the beginning and at the climax—was the appearance of Nas, "a special guest from Queensbridge," who isn't even on the Bonnaroo lineup.

Outspoken Nigerian dissident and afrobeat trailblazer Fela Kuti was beaten and arrested hundreds of times during his turbulent life, which came to an end in 1997 due to AIDS-related complications. Several years after his death, Femi and Yeni Kuti, his eldest son and daughter, opened a performance venue and cultural center in Lagos called the New Afrika Shrine, a living tribute to their father and his famous commune-nightclub-recording studio, which was burned down by the Nigerian army. Femi, who has since taken up the afrobeat torch, performs with his band Positive Force often at the New Afrika Shrine, which has become a refuge for politically active youths and a source for information in defense against the AIDS.

Gnarls Barkley is perhaps the most notable one-hit wonder of the internet era, so it's fitting that they played a couple free geek showcases at the tail end of NYC's poorly defined "internet week." On Sunday they were at the Fillmore/Irving to play the 150th Free MySpace show to a group of fans who started lining up a good 7 hours before showtime. Then on Tuesday they hit up the Apple store in Soho to play a stripped down mini set to the people who prefer to download, rather than steam their tunes. Gnarls may never be able to escape the shadow of the mega-breakthrough success of Crazy, but it won't be for lack of effort or fan service. They have never masked their intentions to embrace the internet to further the band's success, so these shows really did feel like they were giving back, in a way, to the culture that made them a household name in the first place.