Bumbershoot Music Festival: Thoughts on People, Things, Jay Electronica, and Marc Maron [Curiosities #73]

By Curt Busch

After three hours of telling people the posters and buttons were indeed free, I left the KEXP 90.3 tent I was volunteering at. I walked aimlessly with an empty backpack for about 45 minutes. I shook hands with RA Scion of Common Market and Victor Shade, one of my favorite local rappers.

I looked at art prints with dwindling excitement, wondering if the vendors could tell. I decided I don’t appreciate or have any interest in photography, but probably like people who do. I saw a man behind the “Pots” tent gyrating to techno. I felt my face grinning uncontrollably.

A piece by Seattle artist/Bumbershoot vendor Justin Hillgrove.

Further down a man set up a table with handmade sign that read “Ask a Black Man – 5 Cents” (which I later found out was local rapper Tilson). He was telling someone about computer programming in a funny way. I saw that I only had a $10 bill and left.

In trying to exit, I came to a fence that read “NO PUBLIC ACCESS,” and behind it a security guard who sulked with his arms crossed. Sexy teenage girls posed for a photograph in the Movin’ 92.5 tent. I overheard a father say to his daughter, “This is old school. This is like Black Flag.” [HA! Awesome ... -Gum]

Noticed lots of tweens/teens

The Bumbershoot Music Festival is the largest annual music festival in Seattle, WA. It has roughly 12 stages spanning about five city blocks in each direction. The Space Needle is the epicenter. Lots of walking is required and usually there is a heavy flow of human traffic in all directions. Sweaty masses move at different speeds, on different schedules, and contort their bodies, sometimes in a robotic fashion, in order to squeeze past delicate situations.

While traversing my way toward Jay Electronica’s set at 5:45 I wished I had brought a video camera to film everyone. I imagined creating a documentary consisting of walking around filming people, premiering it later that day at Bumbershoot’s 1 Reel Film Festival, and winning the Golden Space Needle, resulting in unanimous amazement at my completion of the documentary in a day’s time. The soundtrack would feature shoegaze/drone, sounding something like the ambient parts in No Age’s Nouns. Jim Jarmusch would call me the next week, but I would have already made plans to work with Werner Herzog.

I ate a plate of salmon and Caesar salad while watching New Orleans rapper Jay Electronica, who performed to an eager crowd earlier rocked by hipster-hop locals Fresh Expresso and L.A. afro-hop hippies Georgia Anne Muldrow and Declaime (aka Dudley Perkins).

Early on Jay tritely assured the audience that they were about to witness “that real hip-hop,” an expression, seeming to me, about as “real” as the ingredients in Spaghettios and, in context, a false suggestion that the genre is dead. Ever since Nas (apparently a good friend of Jay) clumsily declared hip hop to be dead, album after album of brilliant material proved Nas’ statement to be no more than a tacky PR attempt at career revival.

I’ve heard a lot of great hip-hop in 2010. The genre is not losing authenticity, it is transforming into something ’90s rappers don’t recognize. Influences are different, and varied. Every genre of music has to progress, reference new points, create new sounds – hip hop (one of the youngest ‘big’ genres) is evolving every day.

Even so, Jay Electronica can rap his ass off. He is old school. He is from the Second Golden Age generation (’92-’97, specifically ’93-’94) and showed this by rapping over “The World is Yours” and J Dilla beats. Jay has a complex and quick-witted tongue, indebted to the NYC gods who are both his peers and influences. His deep, rough voice commands audience involvement. He doesn’t mind being strange either, which suits him well in the Gucci Mane and Drake age, where punch lines and non-sequiturs are the popular rap vernacular.

Jay Electronica, scooped from Matson.

He performed his essential cuts – his breakthrough “Eternal Sunshine (The Pledge),” the one with no drums, only looped ambiance from the Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind soundtrack and drops of lion roars, and “Exhibit C,” his best and most recent single, produced with extreme hotness by Just Blaze.

My “economy ticket” did not include mainstage access, but I got in free (KEXP rules), so I could not fret about missing Weezer, a band I worshiped from the ages of 14-15, a band that made two of my favorite albums of all time (you can guess which), and a band I probably should have seen in 8^th grade.

I was heading toward the exit, visibly drained, and just before leaving at approximately 7:10 wandered upon a comedy show starring stand-up comedians Marc Maron, Tig Notaro, and Doug Benson. It was starting at 7:15. I promptly entered the Intiman Theatre. Benson told jokes about Seattle weather and weed and got huge laughs. Notaro is from the Sarah Silverman Show and was also funny, though she alienated half the crowd with her hyper-deadpan delivery and ironically stretched-out stories.

Cleary not my picture. Props, I guess, Alex Crick.

The headliner was Maron, who made fun of hipsters, called out a dad for bringing his 11-year-old and sardonically addressed his ex-wife with bitterness toward Seattle for her having lived here. He ended with a funny joke. It went something like this: his girlfriend sent him a picture of her vagina, and then his builder sent him a picture of his bookshelf. He regretfully admitted more excitement in seeing the latter, self-consciously quipping, “I’m not afraid to stick things in this.”

Music festivals remind me of the strange things that happen to us on a daily basis, things that sneak by without our attention. I guess I am guilty for too much people-watching and not enough music-watching. What kind of music writer am I, jeez.

STREAM/DOWNLOAD: Jay Electronica – “Eternal Sunshine (The Pledge)” and “Exhibit C” in the GG Media Player