Earlier this month, I was at the Outside Lands 2011 music festival in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park. It was a great event with three days of music from four stages. And San Francisco’s relentless grey summer fog lifted for two days — it was a very happy crowd.
Discovering new music all in one place is a great way to spend three days and there was lots of music that was new to me.
Unmediated Experiences…
It was also good to be in a large mass of people, tens of thousands, and I realized how rare it is to see so many people at the same time. It felt like I was checking in with my larger community, the one I only see through other channels, mostly media channels of one kind or another. Yet here was a totally unmediated experience.
I started thinking about the word and taking it apart: “un-media-ted” and how wonderfully descriptive it is, especially in the context of our media soaked experience of the world.
How much of the world do we get to experience that is un-media-ted — that is not consumed through one kind of media or another? There’s not much, at least not much that’s meaningful.
I realized that meaningful unmediated experiences of the world are rare and that’s why it felt extra good to have this experience at Outside Lands.
In that spirit, I’m putting together a collection of videos I found on Youtube and elsewhere, that capture some of the spirit and fun of Outside Lands.
It’s all found footage from fans, most of it is shaky, some of it is extremely well shot, but all of it comes from people that are really into the music, you hear the crowd sing, the camera waves with the hands in the air… there’s some great scenes.
Say It Ain’t So…
Up top is an example of Foster the People performing a cover of Weezer’s “Say It Ain’t So.” You are right in center front, in the middle of the crowd, singing along. It’s the closest we can get to an unmediated experience of being at Outside Lands.
And I’ve collected lots more of these found fan videos into a curation of Outside Lands 2011 — it’s essentially a crowd generated documentary pieced together from hundreds of video camera phones.
The Decemberists…
Here’s the Outside Lands collection I curated for The Decemberists. Check out the incredible “Down By The Water.” Another great found video.
Arcade Fire…
Here’s the Arcade Fire collection. Check out the first video (below), you are right in the middle of the crowd happy and excited to be there, waiting for the band to come on. Then as the band starts “Wake Up” a crowd favorite, everyone is singing and waving, and you’ll be too — there’s tremendous emotional power in these videos. It’s good payback for the camera shake you have to endure at times with these videos. (I’d love to run them through iMovie’s anti-shake correction, it wouldn’t take long.)
Don’t miss the second video too, the incredible performance by Mavis Staples and Win Butler in a cover of “The Weight.”
Girl Talk…
The most memorable show was Girl Talk, which surprised me because listening to the music before the festival I was just mildly interested. But the show was so good.
It was just one man and his computer. He had the whole meadow full of happy and singing people — the vibe was tremendous. Fans filled the stage, and you couldn’t tell where the performer and audience started or ended — the whole performance became one happy, pulsating crowd. And the music was a superb mix of musical icons, cultural passages that each evoked a mass of additional connections. A great live show.
Tom Foremski is the Editor and Founder of the popular and top-ranked news site Silicon Valley Watcher, reporting on business and culture of innovation. He is a former journalist at the Financial Times and in 2004, became the first journalist from a leading newspaper to resign and become a full-time journalist blogger.
Tom has been reporting on Silicon Valley and the US tech industry since 1984 and has been named as one of the top 50 (#28) most influential bloggers in Silicon Valley. His current focus is on the convergence of media and technology — the making of a new era for Silicon Valley. He also writes a column at ZDNET.
