Are guitars dead at music festivals? A Big Guava primer – Tampa Bay Times

Joey Santiago is stumped. Asked to name an up-and-coming rock band he could see headlining a major music festival in five years, he draws an utter blank.
“God, that’s a good question,” said the guitarist for influential alternative legends the Pixies. “Well, it wouldn’t be a band. It’d be Kanye West, crashing a festival: Hey, move over, man!”
Santiago couldn’t be more right. Major, multiday music festivals, once largely the exclusive dominion of guitar-based rock acts, have long since been overtaken by DJs, rappers and pop stars.
In 2015 alone, you have Drake closing out Coachella and Austin City Limits, Deadmau5 and Kendrick Lamar toplining Bonnaroo, Sam Smith up high at Lollapalooza and, yes, Yeezus himself astride the granddaddy of them all, Glastonbury. And in Tampa this weekend, you have Colorado electronic artist Pretty Lights co-headlining the 2015 Big Guava Music Festival at the Florida State Fairgrounds?
Guitars have faded into the background of millennial music culture; rock no longer moves the needle like pop, hip-hop and even electronic dance music. When Pretty Lights (real name Derek Vincent Smith) was added to Big Guava’s lineup in February, he immediately shot to the top line of the poster, leapfrogging rockers like Ryan Adams, Hozier and, yes, the Pixies.
“It was a great opportunity to broaden the bill a little bit,” Live Nation Florida president Neil Jacobsen said of booking Pretty Lights. “He’s a big enough, established act that on a Friday, that would make sense — and it just worked out. We’re very pleased. We think he adds to the lineup, it’s a little different element, and from a show-spectacle standpoint, he’s very exciting live. That’s the most important thing. People who haven’t seen him are going to walk away and go, ‘Wow.’ “
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We have to be careful here, lest we be marked with that dreariest and most undesirable of labels: “rockist.”
The term applies to any dino-dad who thinks hip-hop and EDM are somehow less relevant than rock, that rappers and DJs have no place alongside the guitar gods of Mount Rockmore. (One recent example of rockism on the festival circuit: the guy who launched a Change.org petition to have Kanye dropped from his top slot at Glastonbury, calling him “an insult to music fans all over the world.” To date, the petition has nearly 134,000 signatures.)
It’s ludicrous to think that a nonrocker can’t headline a major, multigenre music festival just as well as a rock band. Just last year, reunited hip-hop duo Outkast threw down an electrifying, hit-filled set at Big Guava that had those in the pit rapping along to every word. If Daft Punk suddenly announced a return to live performances, there’s not a festival in the world that wouldn’t empty its coffers to book them.
“I think the best reactions I’ve gotten to my show have been at eclectic music festivals, which is not what I expected,” said DJ Porter Robinson, who’s high on the bill at a diverse array of festivals this summer, from San Francisco’s Outside Lands to Tampa’s EDM-only Sunset Music Festival this month.
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Why have DJs like Robinson ascended to festival dominance? Even he isn’t sure. “It might just very well be that styles of music come and go,” Robinson said. “It’s the same reason we don’t have big-band music at festivals. I don’t mean to say anything about the future of rock music, necessarily, but I think that trends kind of change.”
And, it must be said, rock acts still comprise the bulk of the lineup at nearly every major multigenre music festival. When it comes to a live setting, there remains nothing quite like a full band.
“That techno stuff, it is what it is — it’s what the kids are embracing now. There’s nothing wrong with it,” Santiago said. “But there is something about four people getting on stage, and the audience can feel it. It’s never perfect, which is awesome — it’s not supposed to be.”
The most of-the-moment rock act on Big Guava’s poster is Irish singer-songwriter Hozier, whose Take Me to Church was among the few huge alt-rock crossover hits of 2014. Hozier made the top line of Big Guava’s poster, right up there with the Strokes, Pixies and Pretty Lights.
Will Hozier someday find his name atop a festival poster? Time will tell, of course. Five years ago, you might have wondered the same thing about Mumford and Sons, the Black Keys or Kings of Leon.
And so we come back to that original question: What young rock acts right now will be headlining a major festival in 2020? Imagine Dragons? Alabama Shakes? Walk the Moon?
The question so vexed Santiago that, hours after our interview, he called back to offer the best answer he could muster: “I’m sorry,” he said. “It’s the White Stripes.”
True, a White Stripes reunion would be a slam-dunk for just about any festival around the world. But they haven’t performed together since 2009. And Jack White turns 40 this summer.
Maybe it won’t matter. Jacobsen said the point of festivals like Big Guava is no longer necessarily to showcase the biggest guitar bands on the planet in one setting. In other words, they’re not just catering to rockists.
“We want to encourage people to come and sample and see,” he said. “That, to me, is the best part of a festival, is to walk away from an act you’ve never seen before and say, ‘Oh my god, they were great!’ “
Contact Jay Cridlin at cridlin@tampabay.com or (727) 893-8336. Follow @JayCridlin.
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