FYF 2015: I AM A GOD ( or the Year of the Kanye)

“I feel like there are only five people here, but they’ve been cloned over and over again.”

Last year it was The Strokes t-shirt circa 2003 – this year it was a sea of Kanye West t-shirts. Which, at first glance, appeared to be worn ironically by blue-haired girls with pierced septums flaunting handfuls of side boob. I watched as they dislocated their thumbs to slip on and off wristbands that read: Over 21.

Flat beers were the name of the game. They were readily available in the beer gardens, craft or otherwise. At first I was upset, but then it occurred to me that complaining about flat beer at a music festival full of kids too young to legally drink is like being perturbed that you share your dial-up internet with a fax machine. The kids aren’t drinking beers.

Still, I was on my tenth when they bumped into me. A girl who sat on a boy’s shoulders rolling so hard that she pulled on his pompadour as if she were barebacking a horse, trying to steer it through the crowd by it’s mane. Only it wasn’t a horse. It was a teenage boy. He asked her to dismount every three minutes or so, his turkey-sausage-fueled legs buckling under her eighty-six pounds of eyeliner and pink ombre hair. She swayed to Kanye as Kanye so expertly rapped over himself, floating in and out of a cloud of smoke, making proclamation after proclamation. Each greater than the last until he plateaued, having reached the greatest height of self-admiration it’s possible for a person with a microphone to hit. And everyone lost their shit. Except for me. I’m not really a fan.

So I watched as the masses passionately chanted self-flattering lyrics that were presumably written as Kanye stared deeply into… the mirror. Nothing says that you are a kind, caring and loving citizen of this earth like shouting with an effected Chicago accent, “I am a god!”

So yeah, I’m headed back for day two. I’ll be the guy with the flat beer standing in a crowd of people who claim to be huge D’Angelo fans, from waaay back. But really, I’m not going to see D’Angelo or Mac Demarco or Toro Y Moi. I’m going to casually observe America’s youth testing the limits of how much acid is a reasonable amount to do while the sun is high and the days are long.

*All images were Fat-Jewished.