In the town where I live there's an annual "city rock festival" held every July. Let's call it here with the name Bummerfest. Year after year, Bummerfest celebrates its complete lack of imagination and total mediocrity with its choices of performing artists; apparently as its only intention to milk in as much money as possible from the audiences, who don't obviously demand much except their cosy alcoholic stupor in sunshine, listening to the same boring local rock bands who constantly tour in this town and every other rock festival in this country anyway. Bummerfest is as imaginative and fresh as a lukewarm, stale and overpriced beer one has wasted hours lining up for at a crowded bar counter.
I spent 90 minutes myself last Saturday night queuing up to my regular club. Some people wouldn't just accept having to join the end of long line of people waiting to get in, so they did their best to sneak in to the middle of queue, with the excuse of talking to their friends there, or anything like that. Naturally, some people who had already been standing there in line for ages didn't accept the nerve of these people, and there was some aggressive shouting and exchange of angry words.
Now, I consider myself a patient person so I didn't really mind (too much) having to queue up for an eternity; besides, I've got a VIP card to this club in question (the only one I own, and I have actually worked for that by my DJing and arranging clubs etc., unlike some other VIP card owners who have been just lucky to know someone in the "inner circle"), so I can pass the queues in normal weekends -- except for this night of Bummerfest when the VIP cards were not good, obviously to make more money for the festival as entrance fees.
So, in some sense of poetic justice, I felt it was only right for me, at least one Saturday night a year, to experience what the ordinary, non-VIP card-owning punters have to go through when they've got to stand in these lines for hours to get in and pay their entry fee. That doesn't mean I would have enjoyed it. But that's how this society works, isn't it? Through the elites, hegemonies and hierachies. You are either among the privileged, or then you are not. I guess being fair has got nothing to do with it.
See also:
We Are Cattle
"Year after year, Bummerfest celebrates its complete lack of imagination and total mediocrity with its choices of performing artists"
ReplyDeleteHa ha! I think the part that's sad is that the people who go honestly think they are 'alternative' when they are probably the worst sheep of all.