Spring Sonido

6 stages. 100s of bands. 3 days of music. Guessed it yet? Primavera Sound, my favorite music festival has come and gone once again. The summer is a blast of fresh musical air pumped out of a church organ. Spain tends to have a terrible music scene dominated by all varieties of MTV top 40 pop. We rarely hear anything that involves original thought, authenticity or creativity. Spain has gotten stuck in the musical philosophies of the early 60s and mid 80s: make music to sell, whether it be cheesy love ballads or sellout rock. Personally I blame it all on Franco (we have a tendency to either blame everything on him or say everything was better with him), who squelched the development of Rock & Roll in the late 60's and early 70s. While this was bad enough, it pushed back musical evolution in this country so that we missed the advent of the 70's punk scene. I think that was really the saddest thing for spanish music, never fully arriving at a proper philosophy for rock and its creation. Because of this, Spain has fantastic musicians who don't know how to make music that isn't packaged. Whereas you would hope that the 90s grunge movement, which reinvigorated this musical philosophy, would have come in to save the day, it didn't here because by the time the 90's came around we were still discovering Guns and Roses.

Anyway, all this to say that summertime in Spain is a breath of fresh air. Suddenly music festivals start popping up like the maligned prairie dogs in Indiana Jones 4. And sure, some have crappy pop lineups like Rock in Rio (though I wouldn't mind seeing The Police or Jamiroquai) but most music festivals are chock full of underground musicians. Why is this? Probably because festival organizers have realized several things: 1) american bands that never come to europe during the school-year tour here during the summer 2) indie bands charge less than big pop bands (Arcade Fire famously didn't charge anything but their flight and hotel the first year they played here) 3) The people who listen to indie music tend to be more fanatical about their tunes and therefore are more likely to pay for music festival than pop kids.

Side note: I hate the term "indie." It has lost its meaning in both the film and music industry and has gone from describing a method of production and distribution to being a genre in itself. Now you have groups like The Killers being referred to as indie. For the sake of clarity, I will be using the term in an amalgamated way, using it to describe bands that are out of the mainstream, though many of them do have things in common that could tempt us to classify it as a genre. That being said, just because something is "different" or "underground" doesn't mean its good. There are plenty of people jumping on the indie bandwagon that are making terrible music. I don't know how many Strokes knockoffs I've seen over the years... Also, pretentious indie fans (derogatively referred to as "those little indie fuckers" by a friend of mine) tend to irritate the heck out of me. Back to you Steve:

Out of all the festivals around, Primavera is my favorite. That is because it is the weirdest. El más friki as we say here. People dress oddly and do odd things. Last year I saw one guy dressed head to toe in gold spandex. It has bands that would never come around if the festival hadn't courted them into appearing. Some is weird for the sake of pretension, but a lot of it is honestly original. I tend to discover a lot of new music there. Last year I discovered Patty Smith, Blonde Redhead, Hot Chip, and Spiritualized. This year I discovered Bishop Allen, Animal Collective, Boris, Enon... I am still in the process of checking up on some of the bands I saw.
The headliners this year were a bit lacking in comparison to last year. Last year I got to see Smashing Pumpkins, Sonic Youth, Patti Smith, White Stripes... This time the big ones were Portishead, and (oddly) Public Enemy. Portishead was ballnumbingly awesome. Another fun surprise was the Swell Season (the group from the movie Once). Glen Hansard (also of Frames fame) has an amazing stage presence. Rufus Wainwright put on a great show too.

Perhaps I will be able to get another festival in before the year is out. I would like to go the Saturday Night Fiber (madrid's FIB day) so I can see My Bloody Valentine and Soiuxie. We'll see.