Festivals: The meadow rocks! Or rather not?
Festivals? I'm in, says Sonja Niemann
Sonja Niemann, 33, is a freelance journalist living in Berlin
I admit it: I'm over 30 and still enjoy going to open-air festivals. Unfortunately, the circle of my friends and acquaintances, who want to come along, with each year is smaller - just as if this is a thing that just does not make more from a certain age, such as navel piercings or "Germany is looking for the superstar " call. Well, there's my old friend Daniel. He has subscribed to about 37 different lifestyle, music and city magazines and goes to every concert every new hip-band from England, which is currently being touted as the hottest thing in the current week. But when Daniel goes to festivals, he quarters in the nearest "Westin Grand Hotel" and then just looks at the appearance of Radiohead. That's not the right sporty attitude, I think.
At open-air festivals you have to camp, that's just part of it. You have to buy silly caps and wear old T-shirts and rumwaten with colorful rubber boots in the mud (I refer to a photo of Kate Moss at the totally rainy Glastonbury Festival - she never looked better). You have to buy chips red and white and Chinese pasta pans at food stalls. One should lie with the boring bands somewhere with his friends on the flat kicked festival lawn and, if available, let the sun shine on his stomach. And when the band comes waiting for you, you should go into the middle of the crowd and hop with the crowd and sing along - all you have to do is make sure none of these people, who are letting themselves be carried across the crowd, suddenly hit the Head falls.
And by the way: Yes, you actually do not survive a warm shower for a weekend. The beauty of festivals is that it is not necessary at all to be a fan of any bands that appear there. First, the well-known groups are all playing their greatest hits anyway. And secondly, it's quite likely that you'll suddenly stumble at two in the afternoon with strangers to the completely unknown band from Uruguay, while the headliner in the evening sometimes rather disappointed. (The Beastie Boys at the "Hurricane" 1998 of course not!) Those were really the highlight at that time.)
Well, there are a few things that do not have to be anymore. For example, instead of feeding ourselves at the Festival campsite for three days with cold ravioli or five-minute terrines, we grilled salmon filets last summer. And instead of filling lukewarm canned beer in orange juice tetrapaks and smuggling it onto the festival grounds, I actually buy the beer there on the stand. Unfortunately, I have not yet come up with an alternative to the Dixi-Klos. After all, an open-air festival is nothing more than a summer weekend camping in the country with friends and live music, and sometimes even a lake for swimming is nearby. And what, please, can there be anything better?
That's why I still like to go to Scheeßel, Hohenfelden, Neustrelitz or Gräfenhainichen once a year. All places that I would never have met otherwise. Do you have to see it that way?
On the next page: ChroniquesDuVasteMonde music expert Stephan Bartels disagrees!
Festivals? No, thanks, says Stephan Bartels
Stephan Bartels, 40, is the ChroniquesDuVasteMonde music expert and lives in Hamburg
I think in the end it was the Norwegians. They were the last building block to the massive wall of rejection that I had built between myself and the open-air festival as such. I met the Norwegians in the summer of 1989. At that time I went to Denmark with some friends, three days Roskilde. On day two, I had twelve concerts behind me, ten of them standing, nine of them superfluous. My ankle was thick because I had jumped in ecstasy at a Danish wave combo. At two o'clock at night I was sober again, but smelled all over my body of beer, had an animal headache and only wanted to sleep. Four Norwegians from next door came to our tent, chorus chorus the modified Queen classic "We will, we will fuck you!" and peed synchronously against our tarpaulin. The beer haze mingled with Urinaroma. Should this be rock'n'roll? No thanks. In the future without me.
It was not my first festival. I got wet five times in Cologne in eight hours and got dry four times, got a sunstroke in Rothenburg ob der Tauber and was puked by a woman with a green-yellow face in a meadow in the no-man's-land of Schleswig-Holstein. All this has not happened to me in the last 19 years because, since Roskilde '89, I have been making an orbital bow for this kind of event. I miss nothing, thanks for asking, on the contrary: I feel free to release myself from the festival cult of my friends. I grew up in a generation where Woodstock wafted in our heads as a larger-than-life happening: free, casual, in-between. It took me a while to realize that I had never felt that. This is not a question of age, but of attitude. And I do not see any point in going through a whole weekend of survival with overstimulation.
Festivals are basically gigantic sado-maso parties with background music. For more the sound is not good, if you see the main act from about 200 meters away. No no no. I do not want that. I want music in small clubs, where I see the whites in the eyes of the guitarist. Will stay dry. Will not wait for half an hour at a Dixi toilet to get rid of what I had previously stood for another half hour on the overpriced beer stand. Will fall asleep in a reasonable bed afterwards.
Oh, that's stuffy? Unrockig? And what about the musicians? The fall after their appearance not on their damp mattress, but in her hotel bed. Do you have to see it that way?
