Well, you hear some amount of self-conscious grumbling
every year. “Hipster” bingo. Cutoff jeans and Toms shoes with some kind of a
promotional tank top from 1992 with a caricature of Larry Bird on it, neon
green cheapo Ray Ban knockoffs, a straw hat of some kind, and multiple tattoos
of birds. What kind of a person is that? What are they celebrating? What does
that uniform mean? It means “I am coming to Chicago because of the Pitchfork
Festival.” It means “skip brunch this weekend.”
You hear all that grumbling.
All that comes from people who are going to
Pitchfork and want to establish some dividing line between themselves and everybody
else who is going to Pitchfork. As if there is a “good guy” team and a “bad guy”
team, and one’s membership in the good guy team must be proven through
overabundant displays of self-awareness. “We’re not like those people who just
rise up from the sidewalk and walk in the direction of the nearest crowd
wearing whatever they think will help them get laid, man, we’re here for the
music.” If that sounds like an exaggeration, count the number of times this
weekend a Pitchfork-goer says the apology “I’m just here to see ________.” It’s
as if going to the entire festival simply because you enjoy music and being
outdoors is implicitly frowned upon as gauche, so excuses must be made. You
know the attitude. You have it.
This is where the grumbling comes from.
People are grumbling about themselves. “Can you believe us? We’re the worst.”
Kelly McClure asked me to write about what it’s like to live in Chicago during
Pitchfork weekend under the assumption that I’d say it’s awful. It is not
awful. It is not anything. It’s no thing.
For most people in Chicago, Pitchfork is a
barely perceptible reason why an unusually high volume of young people with
stupid haircuts are pouring steadily out of the airports and train stations. Every
year is the same. They emerge and generally cavort like they’re the opening
credits of Laverne and
Shirley and you’re just some fucking guy in a blue shirt on the way to work,
and you go “oh yeah, Pitchfork.” It’s what young people do. It’s fine.
We don’t give a fuck, you guys. We’re not
Austin. You’re not “turning this city upside down.” There are huge, huge swaths
of land area in Chicago in which not one denizen knows about or cares about the
Pitchfork Fest. Can you imagine that, you little shits? Can you even conceive
of a reality (the actual reality) wherein you and your activities are not the
central storyline of everybody else’s life? No, you probably can’t. Well it’s
true. Nobody in Chicago gives a shit about you. We’ll take your money, sure,
but that’s it.
You want to know what I’m worried about,
like, a lot? I’m worried I’ll have some unforeseen reason to be in Wrigleyville
(it’s the neighborhood near Wrigley Field)(where the Cubs play)(baseball, you
fucking clod) tomorrow night, and it will slip my mind that fucking Pearl Jam
is playing in fucking Wrigley Field and there will be 50,000 plus Pearl Jam
fans in the streets while I’m there trying to renew the City Sticker for my car
(we have cars here, sometimes). Can you imagine the stress nightmare come to
life of being anywhere near there? Pearl Jam fans. Fans of the band Pearl Jam.
Making their presence felt in every restaurant and bar for square miles. Doing
whatever it is they do, I’m guessing drinking beer and being in touch with
their feelings about their parents’ divorce while taking fucking FOREVER to parallel park.
Which is fine, actually. Pearl Jam is fine.
Being a fan of Pearl Jam is fine.
Just, you know, 50,000 of the same kind of
person converging somewhere where there are also other things. A friend of mine
is doing a comedy show less than a block away from Wrigley Field that night. I
want to go to it enough for me to almost forget about the whole Pearl Jam
thing. I think about what I’m doing tomorrow night, and I have to remind myself
not to go hang out with my friend because of Pearl Jam. Even so, I might
forget. I might be dicking around at home and lose track of time and get kind
of bored and go “what was I going to do tonight? Oh yeah, there’s that comedy
thing,” and then find myself in my car driving towards cargo-shorted oblivion.
You want awful? THAT is awful.
Pitchfork is at Union Park, at the
intersection of Lake and Ashland. It’s a contained site. East of there is
industrial buildings and shuttered-for-the-weekend union halls, north is the
weird not-technically-Little-Italy-but-still-quite-Italian neighborhood that’s
one of the areas in the city where if you’re ever walking around you hear the
cawing of a single distant crow and turn to your date and say “let’s get out of
here” because the houses have no yards and that old lady is looking at you, and
south and west are the beginnings of those huge swaths of land where your little
white boy indie pop music fan life and safety are not a concern for anybody,
and will therefore through ancient evolutionary instinct send you scurrying
back to the hive. Pitchfork is contained. You’re not ruining anything except
for the “cool” businesses in the “cool” neighborhoods during the non-Festival
hours of a weekend. Those places are all already ruined.
I’m not worried about you guys. I see you
people every goddamn day. You look like nothing. I see you in my peripheral
vision and it’s like “what’s that” and then I point my eyes at you and I go “oh,
nothing” while you loudly explain something you once heard about Roman Coppola
to your friends who are also nothing. You’re just people. You’re not a thing
different from or better than or worse than people. You need to relax. I hope
you actually enjoy yourselves at this Pitchfork thing instead of constantly worrying
that you might be enjoying yourself more than might be cool, or that you might
be placing a burden on the City of Chicago. You’re not. We’re good. Go ahead.
Knock yourself out.
I’d be there too, but it’s going to be crowded
and hot and there’s not going to be anywhere to sit and nobody gave me a free
ticket.
