Electric Picnic

Anarchy, funk, nostalgia, surrealism….just another day at the Electric Picnic.

This brief assemblage of slightly countercultural and embarrassingly outdated buzzwords (except nostalgia of course which is painfully now) demonstrates aptly how the success of Electric Picnic lies in its knowing articulation of bourgeoisie collective fantasy.

The reaction to the announcement of this year’s obligatory unexciting lineup was as lukewarm as could be expected (it is slightly encouraging that despite the enthusiasm many people seem to be able to force for the likes of Duffy, Franz Ferdinand, Foals, Josh Ritter etc in their individuality, when taken as one giant mediocre whole even the most die-hard Indie-ists cannot deny their collective underwhelmingness). However, as anyone involved will tell you, the appeal of the EP has never been music (which from the start was notably absent from the title ‘Music Festival’, replaced by a telling ‘Boutique’), rather, it is the experience.

The experience, when recounted second hand, never fails to sound like a slightly grubbier, slightly ‘artsier’, weekend health-spa retreat; naturalistic chill out zones, organic Fair Trade snacks, clean toilets, and a general ‘positive atmosphere’; indeed the whole thing is like a temporary realization of the contents of multiple broadsheet weekend supplements. Everything is calibrated perfectly to appease the latest middle-class concerns; eco-friendliness, fair trade, health foods, ‘awareness raising’, and of course a tiny part of the profit goes to charity. The festival thrives on one of the great bourgeoisie fallacies of our time; that good, or at the verry least a clean conscience, can be wrought from the exercise of consumer choice.

What really defines the EP experience however, is what is absent, or more accurately, what is excluded. The EP is a private zone created exclusively for the young middle-classes, a brief utopia which allows them to enjoy themselves, to exercise their choices, to ‘voice’ their moral concerns in a context where that which normally spoils their enjoyment, curtails their choice and undermines their moral choices is excluded.

EP’s exclusion mechanism is subtle and insidious, encoded in every aspect of its design. For who exactly would want to fork out €240 to effectively go drinking in a field, albeit under the pretence of purchasing a brief engagement with pseudo-hippiedom (pseudo, because while sixties hippies believed - however wrongly - that their permissive hedonism might actually have some sort of revolutionary purchase, today’s hippies are under no such illusion) soundtracked by an endless softly barrage of nostalgia-rock, world music, alt.folk, and conscious rap in the company of slumming students, coked-up bankers and weekend bohemians?

This exclusion is made explicit only by the punters who define themselves and Electric Picnic itself in opposition to Oxygen and its denizens. Oxygen, where commercialism is not insidiously concealed behind a muddy gloss of whimsical earthiness, where the food is fast and greasy, where the music is often good (or at the very least inspires some enthusiasm among the youth), and where the crowd is frequently *horror* working class.