This is part of a special series, Indulgence, which explores extravagant living in a time of restraint. It’s also in the September 2021 VICE magazine issue. Subscribe here. Every year, music lovers brace themselves for the unsteady terrain of festival season. At any given moment, you’re liable to be dodging the elements: the puddles of puke you wish you hadn’t stepped in, the couple doing the unthinkable behind a Porta Potty, and don’t even get me started on how the sun has never felt hotter than it does when you’re waiting hours for an artist to hit the stage.
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Still, we press on. We buy tickets year after year, even though we said we’d never do that again. We offer ourselves as tribute to the chaos of festival season and complain every minute along the way—until this past year, when we couldn’t attend a single one.While the future of festivals is still up in the air, the memories are ours to keep. No one forgets their first festival, not even artists who have experienced it as a fan and have also graced the stage themselves. Take Jack Harlow, for instance. He told VICE he will never forget seeing OutKast headline Louisville’s Forecastle Festival as an impressionable 16-year-old. “It was a lot of waiting and sweating—something I’d be okay with never doing again—but it was an unforgettable show.”
These days, the “What’s Poppin’” rapper isn’t the one doing the waiting and sweating, but it’s safe to say that seeing that performance made him want to raise the stakes on his own set, even if it didn’t always work. “I once made a half-assed attempt at a stage dive and ended up hurting this girl in the front row,” he said. “Haven’t given it a shot since.” As attendees, artists are just like us, spending days trying to figure out the perfect outfit—which for Sam Hunt includes boots, shorts, and a bucket hat (plus sunscreen!)—one that should be both durable and functional. Even though none of those can protect you from a stage dive gone wrong, you believe that it can. That is the magic of festivals.
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Here, two very different artists—rapper Duckwrth and country music singer Sam Hunt—fill VICE in on what they love about festivals, their most memorable times performing, and how music is the great unifier.
Duckwrth
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[As a performer] I forget my lines a whole lot. You just have to master the art of mumbling sound and try to make it look good. Or what you do is, you do a little dance move and shit. Where it’s like, of course, you forgot to add a line there because you’re doing a double spin. But in actuality, I probably forgot. What I like to do now if I forget my line, I just say, “Can you start over again?” Unless it’s deep in the song. But if we’re early in it and I forget my line, I will even talk to my DJ and be like, “Bruh, what’s the line again?” and just kind of poke fun at it rather than like being the awkward dude that just stands onstage and looks stupid.I was doing a European tour in Sweden—this was [in 2019] when A$AP Rocky was actually locked up—and I sprained my ankle doing some type of dance move. I just literally landed on it really awkwardly. It could have been either: I sprained my ankle and I fall to my knees, or I just make it look like I purposely did it. You know when you sprain your ankle, your knees or your legs kind of do this weird noodle? It was a noodle. I tried to turn the noodle into like a dance move. My DJ knew what happened so he was laughing. He was in the back just dying, but nobody else knew. I just kind of turned into a G and just kept going.