CHICAGO — What if they held a festival and everyone came? Lollapalooza, which concluded last Sunday, expanded to four days at Grant Park in Chicago for the first time to celebrate its 25th anniversary and drew a record 400,000 people. At moments during the crush on the night of July 30 as headliners the Red Hot Chili Peppers prepared to take the stage, it felt like a lot more.
Since moving to Chicago in 2005, the festival has grown from modest beginnings — two days and about 67,000 fans — into a mega-party that swallows the city’s most prized piece of public property every summer. At times it resembled a multisensory experience under the auspices of Texas-based promoters C3 Presents, including massages, wine tastings and shopping at a roofed, air-conditioned mini-box store called the Lolla Shop, where you could buy a 25th anniversary T-shirt for $50. C3 Presents confirmed July 31 that Lollapalooza would remain a four-day event in 2017.
The headliners included Radiohead, which played its third major show in Grant Park in a two-decade career. The U.K. band topped off the July 29 line-up with a performance that began in the red-and-black lighting of the scarifying “Burn the Witch” and peaked with the triple-drum attack of “There There.” Lana del Rey brought her concert to a halt July 28 to sign autographs and take selfies with the fans packed against the barriers, and Major Lazer somehow kept the dance bacchanal going through two power outages July 29. LCD Soundsystem, reunited after a five-year hiatus, closed the festivities July 31 with a set the cruised through a series of high points, from the New Order-worthy flashbacks of “Tribulations” to the moving eulogy “Someone Great.”
Outdrawing them all was the Chili Peppers, which played the festival for the fourth time and packed Hutchinson Field. The band’s almost sleek professionalism contrasted vividly with the manic punk-funk bravado of its first performance at the festival in 1992. An hour earlier, Lolla godfather Perry Farrell and Jane’s Addiction delivered another nostalgia-filled set, as the retooled quartet played its 1991 album “Ritual de lo Habitual” in its entirety and assorted decades-old favorites such as “Mountain Song” and “Jane Says.” Dancers and guest stars dropped in, including Rage Against the Machine’s Tom Morello and the Smashing Pumpkins’ Jimmy Chamberlin.
But the festival was defined, for better or worse, by the youth brigade. Four days spread across eight stages and 40 hours means more bands — more than 170 — and many of them had not ripened into performers able to command a festival stage. A well-curated festival gives young music fans an opportunity to discover a young band or artist before they get famous. In past years, Lady Gaga, Courtney Barnett and the Black Keys have used Lolla as a key stepping stone in their emergence.
This year, it was South Side rapper Vic Mensa’s turn. Despite going head to head with the Chili Peppers on July 30, Mensa drew several thousand fans to his set on a smaller stage and delivered a series of dramatic statements about his city and community. Against a backdrop of dancers dressed like riot police, he delivered chilling commentary on police shootings (“16 Shots,” which chronicled the Laquan McDonald slaying) and the Flint, Mich., water crisis.
“The people with the least gotta pay the most,” he rapped.
He also called out the festival itself for pricing itself beyond the means of many of his young peers in the city’s poorer communities.
“The festival is not accessible for people where I’m from … the West Side and the South Side,” he said (a one-day ticket for the sold-out festival would have cost $120).
He closed by turning his rage and disappointment at himself in the title song from his latest EP, “There’s Alot Going On.” Hunched over at the waist, he poured himself into the song’s harrowing accounts of drug addiction and domestic abuse, then left the stage in darkness. It was one of the few performances of the weekend where more appeared to be at stake than providing a soundtrack for weekend revelry.
Mensa joined a handful of Chicago hip-hop artists who got a shot to showcase their talents to a big audience. The biggest revelation was Saba (Tahj Chandler), whose thumbprints as a producer and rapper are all over the Chicago scene in recent years, but who is little known outside the city. His excitement was palpable, performing for the largest audience of his career so far, and he leap-frogged genres: Caribbean steel-drum rhythms, hard rock, lush vocal orchestrations and protest tracks. Like Mensa, he made his moment personal. In “World in My Hands,” he addressed the need that music filled in his journey: “Sometimes I wonder what my life would be like/If I didn’t try/To take my whole life/And put it in writing/And put it on wax/To play while you drive.”
For the early arrivals Sunday who might’ve missed church, Sir the Baptist had them covered. The Los Angeles-via-Chicago artist staged his own service, complete with a funeral, a church pew and gospel organ chords. Peering from inside a casket, he addressed the history of gun violence in his hometown.
“Would you care if it was me?” he cried. “We gotta wake up.”
The service concluded with the singer-turned-preacher’s version of a sanctified protest song, “Raise Hell.”
Once the defining event for the alternative-rock era, Lollapalooza now brims with acts beloved by young fans who weren’t even born when the festival was launched in 1991. About 40 percent of Lolla ticketbuyers are under the age of 25, and they flocked to see up-and-comers such as the R&B singer Kehlani and electro-pop auteur Grimes.
Yet this year’s lineup felt stretched thin of talent, the misses far outnumbering the hits. The duo Lolawolf epitomized the problem; its eerie brand of electo-soul is best suited for a dark, dank club, but it hadn’t worked out how to translate that claustrophobic energy to a big stage.
