They’re throwing a festival with “flannel” in the name in San Pedro, and it doesn’t have anything to do with fIREHOSE specifically, or Mike Watt in general.
I mean, it shouldn’t have anything to do with Mike Watt, because it sucks, but still, it’s the first inkling that this isn’t going to make any sense.
Does Everclear really have “many more” hits than the ones they listed there?
Does Soul Asylum really have “so many more” hits than the ones they listed here? I mean, I guess it’s missing “Black Gold”. They have a bunch more great songs, but are they “hits” as such?
Cracker does actually have more than the one hit, why is that not mentioned? Also, is “Teen Angst” the one that people are going to know? Not “Low”?
There is no version of the song “Molly (16 Candles)” that is, in fact, called “Molly 16”. How did it get printed that way? It’s not just for poster space – it also appears that way on the website. It’s weird.
Has the person who assembled this poster actually heard these bands? Or even heard of these bands? This is information that it really is not hard to come up with, given google, even if you didn’t spend any time with the radio in the nineties.
What actually is the difference between “Many More” and “So Many More”?
Is it because Soul Asylum is actually much, much better than Everclear and is, in fact, probably the only actually-good band on here?
Is the glitchy AI in charge of all this capable of being super-bummed when they heard Max Collins say on The Talkhouse the other week that Eve 6 doesn’t do these things anymore?
How must it feel to be one of the bands on this poster and see that you’ve been given more-or-less equal billing to both the idea of other bands, and specifically a “headliner” that isn’t even there yet (and I’ve checked the website: it still has not been updated with another “headliner”)?
Is this “headliner” going to bring the room together, as it were, and make sense of the disparate bands here?
Who is in the market for seeing every one of these bands (even the ones that haven’t been announced yet) all at once? Did these bands actually share a single fan between all of them? Is there someone who is, like, super-nostalgic for “the radio in 1996” that’s into this?
Don’t answer that, obviously the answer is yes.
Or rather, the person who put this festival together wants me to think it is
Actually, I have no idea what the person who started this wants me to think, because he clearly approved this poster, regardless of the quality of the AI that he plugged into designing it, and this poster is a mess.
A thing that is interesting to me about all this is that, as far as I’m aware, all of these bands have serious fans – I have had people my age explain to me, for each and every one of these bands (except one, see below), that actually their stuff after they were famous was super-good and I needed to dig deeper.
I did not dig deeper in any of these cases (except one, see below), but, you know, everybody gets to have their thing.
Soul Asylum, by contrast, was great, and is the only reason to even pretend to care about any of the rest of this nonsense.
Nostalgia is poison, obviously, but it must also be said that unfocused, market-group-conceived nostalgia is like…cancer poison. Extra-double secret poison. The most poison.
None more poison.
Ohio Needs a Train 