All right, so the third thing you should know about the (H)eat is that they beat the Celtics Saturday night to advance to the NBA Finals, giving me yet another reason to be pissed off about the heat. No matter how much sunscreen slathers you, no matter how much shade shelters you, no matter how much water you gulp down, the heat will still find a way to hurt you. It is a sentient, malevolent, anti-Bonnaroo force. Fuck the heat. Fuck Lebron.
Goofball hip-hop crew Das Racist opened my day with a very odd, but highly entertaining set of laid-back, East Coast hip-hop. Primary MCs Heems and Kool A.D. were joined on stage by their hype man, Dap, and together the trio laid down rhyme after rhyme, hopping seamlessly back and forth from the political to the absurdist with a flow reminiscent of early Cypress Hill, but a humor and attitude that felt a little closer to the Beastie Boys (particularly during a hilarious semi-freestyle number called “Womenâ€). There wasn’t a lot of variety to their rhythms, but what they lacked in genuine skills they more than made up for with their energy and infectious enthusiasm.
Next up was bizarro noise/math trio Battles, and their stage setup alone belied their no-nonsense, factory-precision approach. Stationed between two large video screens, an intense, murder-faced drummer played a standard kit with the exception of having his crash cymbal suspended a good two feet above his head. To his right, a bandmate stood between two keyboards, both tilted at 45 degree angles so as to be facing down and away from him. Throughout the show he played them simultaneously, holding his arms out to his sides like a synth-savvy albatross. A bassist rounded out the group, employing various odd pedal effects for a kind of muted industrial tone to his complicated patterns. What few vocals the band employed were highly modulated, pre-recorded parts, never in English or even really intelligible, and sung by screen-projected vocalists. By hardwiring the vocals into the background, the band dips a toe into the world of musique concrete, allowing their more freeform musical interplay to evolve around stationary, static voice parts. The resulting sonic storm of distortion and exquisitely choreographed chaos was fascinating to observe. All three band members had sweated through their shirts by the third song, looking wild-eyed and a little insane in a David Lynch villain kind of way, but they plowed ahead with a determined fury unlike any other band I saw all weekend.
After a quick walk across the grounds, I caught Childish Gambino (AKA Donald Glover) rapping his hilarious little heart out over at the secondary main stage. Though it was hard not to see Troy Barnes, his character on NBC’s “Community,” Glover affects an entirely different persona for his musical performances, and then promptly backs it up with an encyclopedic vocabulary and better freestyling ability than I ever would have expected. Much like Das Racist from earlier in the day, Glover relies more on humor than true verbal dexterity and rhythmic versatility, but it was impossible not to be impressed both with his quick delivery and quicker wit. Glover even showed off his pipes a couple of times, belting out some tender soul in between verses. He may be childish for now, but this is an artist who is growing up fast and meeting the future with panache.
The Roots were a dismal disappointment. Let me say that first and foremost. As a longtime fan of their studio recordings – their old-school flow and their overtly political messaging – I was very excited to finally see them live. What I got instead was not The Roots that I had known and loved these past ten years, but instead, the Late Night with Jimmy Fallon house band. For every (admittedly great) original hip-hop number (not to mention a faithful, tasteful rendition of the Beastie Boys’ “Paul Revereâ€), there were at least two, and usually three covers of classic funk, soul, and rock tunes. For every great ?uestlove solo (and there were some epic ones) I had to sit glumly through a watered down “Sweet Child O’ Mine†or a toothless, hornless “Jungle Boogie†(seriously, if you don’t have any horns, you don’t need to be playing “Jungle Boogieâ€). It’s not that they were empirically bad – for what they were doing, they were absolutely fine – but when your original material is as good as The Roots’ is, playing mostly covers isn’t just unacceptable, it’s wasteful. They came to the Super Bowl and trotted out their second stringers. As far as the dropoff between my expectations and what actually transpired is concerned, they were the biggest letdown of the weekend.
That disappointment would continue, somewhat, with the meritorious, Hall of Fame-enshrined elder statesmen of 90’s alternative rock – the Red Hot Chili Peppers. The jubilant, we’re-all-in-this-together vibe of the previous night had faded into a much drunker, and less considerate affair. Bros were broing out all over the place. Everyone seemed less excited and more self-aware as they desperately tried to squeeze as much partying as possible into what, for many, would be their last night in Manchester. Having seen the Chili Peppers several years back on the By the Way tour, I was going to need some truly phenomenal reasons to stay for this entire show as I was literally falling asleep on my feet in the middle of a field of 80,000 strangers, and as much as I loved the band in high school, they simply could not keep me awake. Playing essentially the same set I’d seen the last time, give or take a few (terrible) new songs from their past two (terrible) albums, I felt compelled to turn in early. Flea was still holding it down like a champ, but in a lot of ways he seemed to be carrying the band on his rippling, tattooed back. Popular and revered, but no longer truly relevant, the Chili Peppers seemed out of place amidst this young, vibrant, hippie-heavy crowd, and what’s more, they seemed aware of how out of place they seemed. I didn’t have the energy to fake it. We’ll always love the hits, and I could hear them playing most of theirs throughout the second hour of their set as I walked back to camp (“Under the Bridge,†“Give it Away,†“Suck My Kiss†– you know, the usual suspects. But God forbid they ever dust off “Aeroplane†or “Walkabout†from *One Hot Minute*! I guess that’s just too much to ask! . . . Jerks.), but watching an already-limited band fail to evolve is depressing, and I was exhausted. Mercifully, a light rain began to fall as I zipped up my tent, and pattered against the canvas throughout the night, cooling off the environs of the festival, and allowing me to get a full eight hours of sleep. Other than seeing Battles, it was pretty much the best thing that happened all day.
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