Why Go To a Music Festival?

Why go to a festival? You have YouTube. You have Spotify. You have a BitTorrent site.

The best justification I have for going to a festival relates to Nitsuh Abebe’s latest article about nostalgia.

People listen to music to feel like someone they want to be. Our taste is plastic, but correlative with our personality. Music serves as a kind of emotional prosthesis.

And people go to festivals to become better amputees.

Music doesn’t exist as digital weather, just like a listener isn’t a headphones receptacle. Music throbs in physical space so being near it affects you harder.

Maybe I should put it this way: you’re more vulnerable at a festival to your own aching calves and dehydration and crowd mentality which means music has less skeptical razorwire to crawl through so it break into where you live.

Neuroscience tells us out minds are activities of our brains, like programs that computers run. If you trap your brain in a corner with sound it’ll be forced to run that software as well.

Now I should stop I sound even more like Deepak Chopra.