Sweetlife
Tucker Glotzbach
May 24, 2012
Filed under Arts and Culture
The Sweetlife Food & Music festival was a lot of fun and an overall great experience. The headliners were the Shins, Kid Cudi, and Avicii. I was there from beginning to end, a total of about 11 hours.
My first and maybe favorite performer I saw was Action Bronson, an underground rapper out of Brooklyn. His performance was a lot of fun to watch. I was at the front, and towards the right of the stage, so I could see the clock that showed the performers how much time was left in their performance, and Bronsolini started the trend of running late. By midday the stage was running over 40 minutes late. Bronson walked on to the stage sporting an over sized black zip up hoodie, and black shorts exposing his huge shin tattoos. While going into his first song he started coughing profusely right after he started rapping. He then looked at the crowd and said “I wasn’t ready” and restarted the song. Once the clock on the stage hit 0:00, he took a glance at it and said “This clock here is telling me I’m out of time. [I don’t care about] it, put on another rap song!” and finished his show with his hit, Shiraz.
Kid Cudi, one of my favorite artists, also put on a great show. I was on the lawn when he came on and everybody moved to the front to create a very dense crowd. His set was longer compared to many of the other rap artists (A$AP Rocky played about 4 songs). After playing some hits, such as Mojo So Dope, and Up, Up, and Away, he stopped and started talking about how he likes to learn his crowds and to get a feel for the crowd he started rapping the ’09 Freestyle a cappella, the crowd did not catch on. He then went to Maui Wowie and the whole crowd knew it. He then said “A’ight, now I’m gonna do three hits in a row.” He finished with Pursuit of Happiness.
The most energetic show I saw was by US Royalty. Their alternative rock show was complete with knee slides, hair flips, head bangs, and the occasional scream into the microphone. Avicii’s show onstage was not as energetic as US Royalty, but the crowd was going nuts. I think being a world famous electronic musician, you get pretty used to people losing their collective poop to your music. What I liked about Avicii’s show is that some artists like to set you up for the high energy moments with low energy moments, Avicii didn’t do that, his show was about 99% high energy, the 1% being a time where he had to talk with a guy on the stage about running late, there’s a law that makes it so that outdoor concerts can’t run past 11:30 PM, and it was about 11:28 and he was still going strong. Granted, there were times where he wasn’t throwing flames, but even at those times he was building up to them which were just as high energy as the songs were. They just left you wondering “Alright Tim (Tim is Avicii’s first name), what’re you gonna do now?” and never disappointed. There were three moments where Avicii showed a little bit of emotion. The time earlier stated where the guy told him he had one song left, where he looked a bit frustrated and disappointed. A time in the middle of the show where a guy ran on to the stage in a direct line at Avicii and got absolutely leveled by security before getting to him. The third time was something special, for his last song he played a N****s in Paris Remix that was pretty much dubstep, and killed it. He first played it and everybody freaked out because it’s a great song, and then he remixed it and when it dropped you could hear everyone in the crowd go “OHH!!” One cannot really describe it, I highly suggest looking up on YouTube “Avicii N****s in Paris Remix” and you realize there is a god, and his name is Tim Berg.