When I Go To Music Festivals, Authenticity Is My Drug Of Choice

If there is one thing that is usually associated with weekend campout music festivals aside from music and camping, it is drugs.  Uppers, downers, psychedelics, and cannabis are never more than a stone’s throw away among the crowds of tye-die t-shirts within the festival grounds, and you can take what you want without the experiencing the paranoia that usually comes from the possibility of getting arrested for this non-violent crime of using one of the drugs has been deemed unsafe.  Alcohol and tobacco of course are not on the list of unsafe drugs but marijuana is so of course we all should be raising our eyebrows of this legal / non-legal distinction based on safety, but this is a topic for another article.  Today I would like to talk about another commodity that is not illegal, but is abundant at music festivals and very hard to find in everyday life in the US and that is authenticity.  

I am once again going through the withdrawal of returning from a place where conversations create real connection to where conversation are competitive, from a place where people are interested in who you are to where people are interested what you do to make money, from a place where people make art to make the individuality stand out to where hide behind corporate art (can those words even go together) to fit in.  I already miss the beautiful faces I may never see in person again, though I feel like I understand some of them as well as people I have known for years.  Yes, I also miss waking up with nothing to do but dance and play for the whole day, but I understand that even this would get old within a week or so.  What I don’t think would ever get old is waking up in a world where people converse with one another without judgment and comparisons.

Maybe there are some things about me that make me crave this kind of authenticity more than most people.  For one, I have been intentionally single for a while now, so I don’t have that person I can share everything with. For another, I notice subtleties that makes the whole, “what do you do?” conversations seem like nothing more than a dick size comparing, and in this competition I have never measured up.  For never having had an simple answer for “what I do,” people usually take this to mean I am a spoiled liberal-arts school brat.  This may be partially true, but certainly not my whole story (nor anyones).  Or maybe it’s because I simply relate to people better when they have their guard down (shocker!) that brings be back again and again to weekends of shitting in porta-poties, trying to sleep next to neighbors who blast their music all night, sunburns, dehydration, not enough food, and little windows of time where I can relate to people without walls of reservations.  

And it’s not even the drugs that create this foundation for common ground for connections among festival goers.  I’ve done many hard drugs at festivals, but now I stick with just marijuana, which I use regularly outside of festivals anyway.  It’s not that all festival goers have similar backgrounds which make relating easier.  I have met people from many walks of life and many different political leanings at festivals.  There is the common ground that we share a love for the same type of music, but there conversations I really enjoy rarely have anything to do with the music.  After spending this past weekend at Pyro de Mayo fest at Nelson’s Ledges in Ohio, I am once again convinced that there is a magic that happens when people get together for a purpose besides making money.  And since that magic is allowed to continue to 3 or 4 days rather than just one evening, there is time for the magic go deeper.  

I was talking to some campsite neighbors on the second day of the festival, and one of them told the story about how she had just told a complete stranger she loved them, and then ran away out of embarrassment.  This story illustrated perfectly the dynamic of tension between what is socially allowed in every life in America versus what is allowed at festivals.  It feels amazing to let down your guard and tell random people you love them.  But when it sounds weird and awkward the first time, don’t be discouraged. That’s completely normal. It’s part of the process for letting down your walls.  It always gets easier after the first time.  All of us are trained from birth to guard ourselves in this country.  Whether or not this training is explicitly expressed, it is forced upon us as we take part the zero-sum game we call capitalism.  But being guarded and isolating ourselves is the opposite of human nature.  Being at a music festival always reminds me how quickly we humans can break our conditioning. I hope and pray this happens on a large scale in my lifetime, but I won’t hold my breath on it.  Yet I promise you, it is better than any drug to experience humans as loving and nurturing community creatures again, even if it’s only for a short time.