After this quite exhausting review of what happens in a festival, we're left with the question that haunts us since the begining (doesn't it?):

Why Music Festivals?

Because when you really think about it, the concept of "Music Festival" doesn't go without saying. What is it? A music festival? You make a lot of bands play music on stage one after the other, from late morning to... hem early morning. You make it last non stop for days. You sell drinks and food next to the stage and wait for customers.

And the customers come, by the thousands. By the hundreds of thousands in our particular case. In most cases, they are ready to pay to be allowed in the festival. In most cases, they are ready to pay a very high amount of money. Tickets for the next Roskilde festival (in 6 month) are available at the moment I'm writing this for 230€.

What does the customer get for that? He gets to see a panel of bands playing live. He gets to have access to expensive junk food, expensive warm beer in plastic glasses, chemical toilets that are soon brimming over with bodily fluids, and a pair of square meters to pitch a tent, away from the shadow and in the middle of a tent-maze.

Sounds like a freaking concentration camp. But people are lining up with a check book in their feverish hands to buy their access to that slum.

Why?

I haven't come with the answers myself, I have actually interviewed a couple of people in the festival and outside of it and gathered enough elements to arrive to a conclusive answer. Or a couple of them.

Why music festivals

Three reasons really:

To have a good time. Well, it's not so obvious, is it? In particular after the non-biased objective description of the life conditions in a festival I just gave :) . In particular in the light of the high entrance fee that most festivals practice. But "having a good time" is something that seems scarce enough that people are willing to travel long distances, pay a lot of money and endure death-camp-grade conditions to get. Of course, if they are fanatics about bands, it's great value that they might be able to see a couple of the musicians they like ; but the most important in a festival is the atmosphere.

The bands are just a marketing trick. You put a couple of high profile band names on the poster to get more people to come, but they won't have a good time unless you provide them with a nice atmosphere. In a good festival, people are kind to each other, because we're all in the same festival, hey! It's a place that is safe (for you if not for your belongings), where everybody has come for the same reasons, probably people with the same musical tastes, which make it easy to befriend them. Which brings us to the second point of human contact.

Back in the normal world, on another week day, you're just walking between your office and your bus stop. When you get there, there's already someone waiting: "Hi, what's up?" - "Cool man" - "Got some beer man?" - "Sure take some, what's your name?" - "Julien. Shit man I'm so excited, this place is freaking awesome" - "True that bro"... And so on... Now, this is something very unlikely to happen at my bus stop, but in a festival, it's quite common. It gives festival-folks the impression that it will be super-easy to get laid too, which is just an illusion as most conversations are extremelly shallow, and during a concert, everyone is looking to the stage, with no exchange between the spectator, if not of blows and pushes.

If I said "Hi, what's up man?" to the guy at my bus stop, even if he'd be my age, even if he'd be dressed like a punk too, he'd probably look at me suspiciously, checking his facies databank to check if he knows me from somewhere else. And after finding nothing, he'd probably try to skip the exchange with a "nice nice", having reached the conclusion that I'm a total freak and that if he replies in a friendly manner, I'm probably going to tell him all about my life in a never-ending monologue.

In a festival, people would usually not judge you.

And this absence of judgement is the perfect excuse to, what the tight-ass-society calls "lose control". Because most human beings on earth spend most of their life with a broomstick up their asses. They are trying the enact the dream-child to their parents, the dream-employee to their hierarchical superior, the dream-partner to their spouse, and if at any time they stop acting, someone will quickly remind them to "pick themselves up". In a festival, carrying the broomstick is seen as abnormal. In a festival, you're expected to be yourself.

Removing the broomstick from the sphincter is painful to most people. So "losing control" usually involves massive amounts of alcohol. Or whatever drug is acceptable and available.

To some people, not all but a significant part, festivalism (let's call it so) fills the spiritual void left by rampant atheism in developped societies. Some of the people to whom I asked what they liked in festivals drowned me in a partisan speech on some deeper meaning to the soul... The fact of the matter is that festivalism shares a lot of specs with religious cult. The main one being the "crowd trip".

You are one with the mass, hardened by the power of love (- Sizzla), with nothing but absolute respect for each other, all chanting the same repetitive psalmody, all looking the same way, focused on infinity, under the guidance of the microphone-man. "Everybody say Ooohooo" - "Ooohooo".

This way to experience a festival as a surrogate of spirituality may sound like a sort of "dark side" of festivals, but I think it is one of the most positive points about them. Because there seem to be a need for spirituality in the human-being blueprint, and if it will not be filled with this, it will take the next on the list. And as we all know, some forms of spirituality are dangerous. Deprived of festivals, the atheist might turn to fascism, or worse. Buddhism... you name it.