Pitchfork

Dirty Boots

Pitchfork is spending the week in Denmark at Roskilde, Northern Europe's largest music festival. The lineup is packed-- from Against Me!, Arcade Fire, and Arctic Monkeys to Beirut, Björk, and Boris through the Who, Wilco, X-Alfonso, and Zyklon with Machine Head, Mastodon, Matmos, and My Chemical Romance nestled somewhere near the middle of the alphabet-- but the first thing you notice are the muddy boots and the people attached to them: there are dirty boots discarded next to trashcans, crusty punks wearing crustier army boots, duck-printed baby boots, teenage girls in increasingly stylish boots increasingly covered in mud. I don't think I've used the word "galoshes" since I was a kid, but I've started keeping a notebook of the amount of times I've mentioned it here in Roskilde (so far, 73).

Noah's Ark

It's been raining off and on for a week. Yesterday a notice was posted at the official Roskilde website asking folks to please leave their cars home-- "the parking areas are flooded." Mix that sort of saturation with tens of thousands of campers stamping through the grounds and it's no wonder folks are tearing off their clothes and partaking in good-spirited mud fights. After the soil washes off, you see the beer... again, lots of it. I was told on-site beer prices have gone down this year, but it remains a tradition (Roskilde started in 1971) for concertgoers to purchase cheaper libations at grocery stores prior to entering and to lug them along into the concert grounds with their sleeping bags and backpacks-- I spotted one girl carrying six or so cases of canned beer; others walk by with hand trucks; some load dozens onto the graffiti-covered train that takes you a stop closer to the grounds. At this point, I've carried no more than two beers at a time.

"Warm-Ups"

The main festival officially begins today but the "warm-ups" started on Sunday at Pavilion Junior-- basically up-and-coming Scandinavian bands like the techy, tongue-in-cheek Norwegian trio Ungdomskulen or off-kilter, CocoRosie-colored chanteuse-pop vocalist As In Rebekkamaria (aka Rebekkamaria, who also performs in Danish/Swedish Glitterhouse crew, Lampshade). By the end of Monday, approximately 45,000 folks had already arrived. No idea where the headcount's at now.



A "Self-Sufficient" Neighborhood

We landed a couple days early to get situated. A depressing aspect of festivals is cutting it too close and never getting to see anything but the festival grounds. As a corrective, we headed twice to Copenhagen, where it was somehow always sunny. Denmark's capital city is a short walk and half-hour train ride from the hotel. Before heading down into the festival mud, we met up with some friends and their kids at Tivoli, a huge, overlapping amusement park, where we rode one of those free-fall things, sucked down ice cream, and drank Big Gulp-sized beers while our friends' kids drove a mini-rollercoaster. Afterward we went to a couple restaurants, wandered the brick streets, noticed that everyone in Copenhagen has a bike that nobody seems to lock when not using, and forgot to check out Christiania, the communal "self-governing" neighborhood in the city (i.e. pot brownie central).

I bring up Christiania because a) we really did forget to stop by, and b) the Roskilde festival has that same "self-governing" feel: It's this separate, enclosed space that's more self-sufficient than any festival I've attended. Basically, it's a very loud carnival: cinema (hey, the Tenacious D movie...), art installations, skate ramps, traveling choral groups, the campground and cooking area, an orange bar that only serves orange-colored drinks, volleyball, swimming, and, of course "a rap battle zone."

As one organizer joked, we went from the family-centered Tivoli park to a hyped-up bunch of muddy teenagers and twentysomethings running naked sprints, guzzling cans of Tuborg and Carlsberg, "staying warm" inside and outside of tents, and drinking orange-colored drinks in that orange bar. Well, time to strap on those galoshes and dive in...