The New York Times review of the Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival draws interesting parallels between the shape of a festival and the metaphysics of our technologically-mediated listening habits:
“A few years ago, some music festivals seemed to reflect a world that was increasingly organized around obsessive fan Web sites. Like-minded listeners were forming micro-communities online, and you would see something similar at multistage festivals: ravers in the D.J. tent, hip-hop kids watching the rappers, thrift-store shoppers swooning over the indie-rockers, and so on.
But this year’s Coachella festival suggested a different model: narrow obsession has come to seem less appealing than broad familiarity. Insular Web sites seem positively old-fashioned compared to the scrupulously eclectic world of MP3 bloggers and iPod Shuffle owners, all of them finding ways to make chaos part of their listening experience. As the current Apple slogan has it, ‘Life is random,’ and listeners seem to be finding ways to make that truism true.” (New York Times )
