12/12/2019 Lollapalooza 2019 lineup brings inclusivity back to Chicago | The Butler Collegian

Lollapalooza 2019 lineup brings inclusivity back to Chicago

Opinion Rotator Featured Articles March 27, 2019

Photo courtesy of www.lollapalooza.com/line-up

TATIANA MONTAVON | OPINION COLUMNIST | tmontavo@butler.edu

On March 20th, Lollapalooza announced its 2019 festival lineup. This year seems different than more
recent years, which has caused disappointment from Lolla fans. This reaction from fans isn’t entirely fair,
as it ignores the acts that make the lineup great in its own right.

In recent years, the Lolla lineup has featured a litany of big-name artists that stretched almost halfway
down the lineup page. Included in those headliners were countless rappers and hip hop artists, alongside
DJs and EDM artists. Most of that had to do with the explosion of those genres; rap, hip hop and EDM
took to the mainstream rapidly in the past couple years. Lolla’s lineup reflected that, as they continued to
recruit well-known artists to play the four-day festival.

This year, however, looks a little different. “Big names” don’t last more than a few lines on the festival’s
full lineup poster. While there’s still a significant number of rappers and mainstream artists, there’s more
genres to the lineup than just what’s popular.

The lineup represents artists from countless genres of music, many of whom don’t see a lot of
mainstream attention. There’s heavy metal bands, independent artists, R&B musicians, punk bands, pop
punk bands, emo rappers, soul musicians, art pop, all of whom are still a relatively small sample of the
genres featured. There are names on the poster that many people have probably never heard before.

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Take, for example, the emo rapper nothing,nowhere. His name appears farther down the list where most
people tend to skim through the names aimlessly. He exemplifies what the genre is all about with his
powerful lyrics and melodies. Emo rap, according to Spotify, was the fastest growing genre of 2018. Yet it
still remains a genre that most people don’t know exist.

On the heavy metal side, there’s British band Bring Me the Horizon. Despite having been nominated for a
Grammy this year for Best Rock Song, they still remain a band who’s unknown amongst mainstream and
radio listeners.

The trio of brothers known as AJR are also going to be performing at Lolla. They’re representative of the
rising DIY model in music, as they produce their own music in their living room and aren’t signed to any
major label. While they do get some radio play and some attention from the mainstream, they’re still an
independent band doing their own thing and many people don’t know of their existence.

There’s more unknown names on the lineup than known — and that’s the point.

Lollapalooza was created in 1991 as a music festival that toured across the country and it highlighted
bands who were out of the mainstream. It’s a call to bring people together to listen to music they probably
never would’ve thought to listen to without the festival.

This year’s Lollapalooza is going to be a celebration for fans across many different genres. It’s bringing
together genres of music that would most likely never cross paths. How often do you see EDM and heavy
metal artists perform in the same place?

This year’s lineup is a necessary return to what Lolla used to be. It’s no longer mostly-mainstream artists
that inevitably dominate the stage for the entire festival. It’s a place of discovery, of inclusion. Anyone is
welcome at Lolla — if you can afford the steep ticket prices, that is.

While this is a chance for smaller bands to find a bigger audience, the ticket prices seem to negate that.
The people who can afford tickets are a smaller group of people than if the tickets were cheaper. The
high prices mean that the new audiences for these bands are a wealthier pool of people, rather than one
that represents people from all walks of life.

Even though more mainstream genres still have larger billings, there’s more unrepresented genres that
make the lineup than in more recent years of Lolla. This year’s lineup returns to one principle that was
lost among Lolla lineups long ago: Lollapalooza is for everyone, not just the mainstream music fans.

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