As part of my agreement to get a press pass to the Pitchfork Music Festival, among other things, I said that I would write a review of the festival. The thing is, writing a review of a music festival being good or bad misses the point. The festival was good if you played your card right. The acts were good. The music was good. Pitchfork was good. The best part of the festival was the little moments. The moments that couldn't have happened anywhere else at any time. These are moments of poetry that would quickly be forgotten if we didn't catch them.
These are my favorite little moments that happened at Pitchfork this weekend.
- Bartees Strange trying to contain and explain his giddy joy of playing Pitchfork by saying, “I’ve been dreaming of doing this since I was a kid." Taking a pause, and saying, "This is what dreams are made of” before bashfully cutting himself off, trying to play it cool, and getting back into his set, while still having a huge adorable grin on his face.
- Maxo Kream taking off his yellow hoodie after the first song, going belly out, turning up, and creating a mosh pit at the rap show.
- Maxo Kream pausing mid song to day, “I’m going to give you some advice. Don’t eat a six pack of Harolds chicken before getting on stage.”
- Waxahatchee singing the line “If the dead just go on living, then there’s nothing left to fear” bathed in the golden hour light of the setting Chicago sun.
- Stepping out to get three al pastor tacos for six bucks from “Real Taste of Mexico” food truck and savoring each delicious bite leaning on the fence and hearing Kim Gordon in the distance.
- A girl reading "Crying in H Mart" in the middle of the crowd waiting for Angel Olsen.
- Angel Olsen saying, “I want to play you a song we wrote last night” and then launching into “Shut Up Kiss Me.”
- The hug Angel Olsen and Sharon Van Etten gave each other after singing “Like I Used To.”
- The perfect amount of melt on the ice cream sandwich from the ice cream truck on the way out.
- Seeing all my friends.
- A group of guys in dad hats and mustaches passing a j and quietly mouthing every word to an Oso Oso song.
- A guy with tiny hands that they sell at American Science and Surplus on his index finger and thumb being able to clap with a beer in his hand.
- A security guard asleep at her chair before 3:30 in the afternoon.
- Caroline Polackeck’s story of her nightmare of jumping out of a plane over L.A. because the conversation was so bad, then being terrified because she was falling, then relieved to realize she has a parachute, the wind pushing her back over the ocean, then being certain the parachute would drown her, then being pushed back onto a parking lot of a stop mall next to a soccer field north of L.A. and never being so happy to see something so mundane, and that dream leading to the song “Parachute.”
- Thundercat burping loudly into the microphone in the middle of a story, not even acknowledging it and battling through about his love for Louis Cole.
- Girl applying deodorant during Danny Brown.
- Danny Brown saying, “Admittedly I’m a little rusty. Y’all think I was in the pandemic, sitting around, listening to Danny Brown?”
- “I made 'XXX' when I was 30 years old. I’m 40 now. I’m old as fuck. I take a Tylenol before I go to bed just in case.” -Danny Brown
- Laying in bed in Bay View, after it’s all over, listening to “St. Cloud” by Waxahatchee as I go to sleep.