As a live music appreciator but frequent concert pessimist (no, those labels are not contradictory), music festivals need to have a near-perfect alchemy. Portola — San Francisco’s annual electronic music festival hosted at Pier 80 — has it pretty dialed.
She may only be three years old, but Portola is already well mannered and potty trained. Every possible logistical grievance one could have has been dealt with. Security and festival entrance runs smoothly — there is an utter dearth of lines to get stuck waiting in — and free water refill stations abound. Its clientele is no different: save for the man with a grill who pushed me to get to the Crane Stage barricade and the M.I.A. superfan who yelled at me for not being adequately hype for her set, festival goers were remarkably well behaved.
Some of this can be attributed to the organization of the festival and the 21-plus age restriction, but there is also something a bit ineffable and maybe a bit eerie about the pervading chill, low-stakes vibe. Noticing this, a number of theories ran through my head. Is San Francisco too infected by productivity and optimization culture to really go feral? Is it just ketamine? Are we all too burdened by our status as perpetual observers and documenters of when we’re having fun to actually have fun?
Appointing myself the Carrie Bradshaw of festival reporting, I couldn’t help but wonder: How do you preserve the rough-edged scrappiness and sense of urgency music festivals ought to have while not making the experience utterly miserable?
I offer this solution. Return to the music, muster the will to revel in your subjectivity, adhere to the Natasha Bedingfeild credo: “release your inhibitions!” “feel the rain (or San Francisco pea soup fog) on your skin!” Here is my rundown of the weekend:
Saturday:
Natasha Bedingfield
Bedingfield, a last-minute surprise addition to the lineup, played a 15-minute set right before the headliner slots on Saturday evening. Pressed up against the barricade, waiting for her to take the stage, I texted a friend who was in the back of the crowd. “Do you think she’s just going to play Unwritten and then dip back to England?” Pretty much. But her set, owing perhaps to its brevity and novelty or the recent virality of “These Words” and “Unwritten,” produced one of the weekend’s few moments of crowd synergy. She may have only given us three songs, but Bedingfield more than delivered, embellishing each with transcendent riffs and vocal flourishes.
JPEGMafia
JPEGMafia — one of the few rappers on the lineup — played just ahead of Bedingfeild. A favorite of NPR heads and college kids, the JPEGMafia crowd was one of the more disproportionately Gen Z of the festival. A few minutes ahead of 6 p.m. the Gorpcore contingent descended. Reading over one such individual’s shoulder, as is my wont, I saw him get a text from a group chat entitled “Arc’ tola,” a play on the brand Arc’teryx. When Peggy, as he’s affectionately known, took the stage, he brought an entourage with him, a group of six or so dudes that could have just as easily been plucked from the crowd, who proceeded to stand behind him — occasionally lighting up a joint but otherwise doing nothing — for his entire set.
JPEGMafia’s aesthetics and demographic mirror that of other rappers favored by Gen Z (the likes of Playboi Carti and Yung Lean). He seems to attract the “Gorpers” too, a new kind of rap fan with a proclivity for outerwear, despite being a very different artist — he is markedly sillier. His crowd work was agile and witty (“if you ain’t got no motherf—ing hair make some noise!”), and he broke up his set with an autotune-rich cover of “Call Me Maybe.” But the crowd often failed to match Peggy’s energy, even when he commanded it. During “SIN MIEDO”, they opened the pit at his behest, but it was shockingly tame. Jacketless and shivering, I was tempted to go in just to warm up but I’m not sure it would have even been very effective.
Peaches
Peaches was the flop of the weekend, but for classic failure-to-manage-expectations reasons. The Canadian electroclash icon brought easily the most San Francisco (derogatory) set to Portola, with an astonishing number of social justice slogan bodysuit reveals. I have to at least give her credit for being able to sing with that many layers on.
Abrasive feminism and vulgarity are integral to the Peaches image, which drew a slightly older audience with slightly bad vibes to the Crane Stage. Flanked by two incredible backup dancers, Peaches played her hits methodically, with only a brief and somewhat poorly executed crowd surfing interlude. I wish her live performances of songs, particularly the ones off of 2002’s The Teaches of Peaches, hadretained more of their original production. It was almost as if they turned the speakers and bass way down for her set. Fortunately, there were ample distractions from the sonic shortcomings — the giant vagina costumes, for one.
I’m not sure how alone I was in being perturbed by the onslaught of sexual visual stimuli and didacticism — the crowd seemed to lap up both the pussy and platitudes. How many times can you have boobs thrust in your face before they become just flesh? How many times can you scream “F— the system, make it crumble” before it becomes white noise?
Snow Strippers
If Peaches was the most San Francisco, Snow Strippers was the most ardently and passionately Florida. Sean Baker, Harmony Korine, the City Girls and now Snow Strippers have done far more for that state than the Everglades and the tourism board ever could hope to accomplish.
Snow Strippers, a duo composed of DJ-producer Graham Perez and vocalist Tatiana Schwaninger, emerged from Detroit (though Schwaninger hails from Clearwater, Florida) in 2021, and are often spoken about in the same breath as another Portola darling, The Dare, as arbiters of the “indie sleaze” revival. As tired as this framing may be, Snow Strippers lean all the way into the post-irony of it all.
Perez and Schwaninger possess the opposite of stage presence in the sense that all of their movements, physical and vocal mannerisms recall the interpretive dances nine-year-olds perform for their parents when they want to have a sleepover, but it’s all part of their charm. Schwaninger, in baby pink crochet micro shorts, stiffly swayed like a doe on hour three of its life, while Perez mostly stayed behind the DJ booth. When he emerged, it was always to run awkwardly across the stage or bounce up and down for a few seconds.
While hits like “Just Your Doll” and “So What if I’m a Freak” brought heat, the crowd really turned up for their songs with Lil Uzi Vert, “It’s a Dream (Remix)” and “Fire Alarm”. Pitchfork astutely wrote (in a less astute review of the recent Night Killaz Vol. 1 EP) that its “songs are based solely on evoking this tremulous state of perpetual climax.” There are no moments of reprieve, from noise or from cringe — but we’re pushed to indulge. Nary a song went without a blaring alarm or “We love prescription drugs” audio sample. I left feeling sticky, like a nerd and a prude, but also embarrassed by my prudishness. In short, I felt sleazy.
Sunday:
horsegiirL
Undeniably my favorite act of the festival, Berlin-bred DJ horsegiirL (Is she mostly horse or mostly girl? Or a clean 50/50? The people around me were stuck on this detail for at least five minutes) played a high-energy, brain-rotted set in the Ship Tent Sunday evening as the sun was setting.
Another artist to have successfully courted Gen Z, I first got put on to horsegiirL by my little cousin who’s way cooler than me. But I’ll confess, the vision didn’t quite gel for me until I saw her live.
Her mixes included a bounty of quintessential 2024 tracks — Troye Sivan’s “Rush” and Charli XCX’s “Club classics,” to name a few. The back half of her set was heavy on her own material, which the crowd seemed well-versed with, imbuing the tent with that unbridled, dizzying festival fervor I had been craving. It was the first and only time I worked up a sweat dancing, and I thought my lungs were going to give out screaming, “‘Cause hay is what I like! Yeah, hay is on my mind!”
Behind her, for the full duration of her set, she played absurd horse videos and images culled from equine niches of the Internet that I wish I had the technological agility and stamina to track down. I stood right in the middle of the tent, where my attention was directed to (and held hostage by) the wide center screen, which distorted each video and image to heightened comedic effect.
Imagery aside, horsegiirL is a damn good DJ — which makes sense, as a German, she is genetically predisposed. Still, I really don’t know how she gets her hooves around all those little dials.
M.I.A.
I came to M.I.A.’s set hankering for some classic M.I.A.-isms, and left mostly satisfied. The British and Sri-Lankan rapper-singer-publicist’s nightmare, had one of the higher production values of the weekend, outfitted with metallic jumpsuits, a brigade of dancers and a robust scaffolding set.
In an episode titled “Global South-core”, hosts of the podcast “Nymphet Alumni” discuss M.I.A.’s brand of “globalist maximalism” — i.e. her fraught efforts to communicate the refugee experience through electronic music. M.I.A. has historically been very averse to the decorum or respectability politics foisted upon her by the media — being vocally anti-vax, a defender of Alex Jones and born-again Christian. This maneuver has not always worked out well for her, and it was clear Sunday evening that she perceives herself to be a victim of the “cancel culture” and has risen from the ashes of “woke”.
“Before you canceled Snowden, M.I.A. got canceled,” she said.
The comparison to Snowden is a bit ridiculous, but for me it is a reminder that M.I.A. is very much a relic of the Obama-era, where her clumsy but well-intentioned activism was more permissible (see, for example, the music video for “Bad Girls” featuring Saudi Arabian women driving cars, or this performance’s inclusion of emergency blankets).
With this framing, it’s hard not to feel a bit sad about her decline in popularity and turn towards contrarianism. M.I.A. is a musician of the highest caliber; her work is complex, caustic and hook-y. The glitchy scrapbooked rhythms and infectious “galangalangalanga” of “Galang” aren’t ephemeral or superficial. The gunshots and cash registers of “Paper Planes” sync with your pulse and make you feel alive.
Honey Dijon
Taking a Sunday evening headlining slot alongside the very hetrosexual acts of FISHER and Justice, Chicago DJ Honey Dijon brought down the Warehouse.
Dijon has been an exciting voice in house and club music for quite some time now, with an impressive global resume. A student of the early house scene in South Chicago, she is as pro as they come. Dijon had a lot of influence on Beyonce’s Renaissance, producing the tracks “ALIEN SUPERSTAR” and “COZY.” But her influence is not confined to production, the milieu and history captured on the record is hers — arguably more than it is Beyonce’s. Dijon’s atmospheric set included mixes of Renaissance tracks alongside other recent releases, such as Azealia Banks’ “New Bottega.”
In a world where anyone and everyone can be a DJ, Dijon is a reminder of how much better house and techno can be with a slightly higher barrier to entry.
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