A week away from the first weekend kicking off! I'm super excited to tear it up for another year of fun.
Yesterday, I had another discussion with a friend about how his kids hated this lineup and didn't want to go to the Festival. And I get that sentiment at first blush. You want the whole poster to be catered to your personal desires each year. I don't care to see much of the EDM or R&B people that are ever on the poster, so there are always holes in the lineup for me, personally. If they would just replace Lil Nas X with Pearl Jam, and Flume with Taylor Swift, and SZA with Rage Against the Machine, this lineup would be amazing! But that isn't how it works because there are 150,000 people who are coming to the Fest and they all have different tastes.
I spent my dog walk this morning rolling this issue around in my head, and I came up with two thoughts. These may be things that everyone else has already thought about and discussed ad nauseum, but I had not seen them discussed anywhere, so I thought other might be interested in my take.
First off, before my new thoughts, because I have said this before, but I really do think that some of the more exciting bands or artists who could have been added to the lineup were skipped over because of the Astroworld tragedy. Live Nation and C3 are currently in litigation over those deaths, and so I don't think they are quite ready yet to book Rage Against the Machine or Ye and take the chance that people will get trampled again.
But beyond that, my two considerations for your consideration. This first thought is an evergreen one for the Festival circuit, but I think people have lost sight of it. A bunch of the artists on the poster are unknowns. So when people look at the lineup and see Ripe, or Twen, or Blondshell, or Ben Reilly, or Cimafunk, or any number of those smaller-type artists, they just see some random name that doesn't mean anything to them. But if you think historically about this Festival, and the artists who have been listed down in that small type in the past, then you'll realize that this might be your chance to see the next big thing without a big crowd around you.
In 2016, Lizzo played to a tiny crowd at 12:15 on a Sunday. I went both weekends and it was truly something to behold. Twenty One Pilots, Royal Blood, Leon Bridges, Gary Clark Jr., Kacey Musgraves, Car Seat Headrest, A$AP Ferg, Big Thief, Oliver Tree, Megan Thee Stallion, Denzel Curry, YOLA, and many more have all had early slots at ACL in the past five or so years. So if you would have had the stones to just try her out, you could have seen Lizzo twerking and playing her flute and spitting great rhymes from like 20 feet away (versus the last time she came when her stage was packed like a panhandle feed yard). So, you've got to embrace the things that you could discover here, my kids!
My other thought is one that really only applies to this particular year. A very common theme that I noticed in reading about the artists on this year's lineup is how absolutely SCREWED everyone is from the pandemic. Over and over, in interviews and articles for these artists, there are so many of them who were just on the cusp of breaking out when everything went to crap. Their big tour got cancelled, they had to go back home, and they tried to make sense of it all like the rest of us. Omar Apollo, or Zach Bryan, or Arlo Parks, there are literally so many as I look down this poster who had gotten some excitement and hype back in 2019 or 2020 - their song got play on Radio One, or they appeared on a late night show or two - and so they booked their big tour and prepped their debut album, only to have it all just chopped right off in front of them.
So what? I think it is important because some of the people on this poster could have come into this year riding a huge wave of excitement. Conan Gray could have just finished a massive world tour where people loved every second of it and had him on the same level as Harry Styles. Jackson Dean could have become the next big thing in Nashville after a feature on Yellowstone and now be touring with Willie and Dolly. Goose could be on par with Phish now. There is no way to know how the last two years could have played out for these folks. But any and all of them who are new-ish to the game - their only reality has been a burning trash heap for two years. Any and all hype they could have gotten fizzled out and they're only now getting their chance to shine. And some of them are going to really shine.
I have no stake in this game. Everyone, every year, is going to poop on the lineup and whine about how it used to be, but I think that this year has a particular set of challenges that shaped the lineup in a way that hasn't been done before. And I'm still hyped to go! See you dudes out there to catch the next big thing.
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