“Are you on the way to Bonnaroo?” Palliative for the people or place of radical possibility?

“Are you on the way to Bonnaroo?”

Someone working in a local store has innocently asked me this every June since 2002 (the year that the Bonnaroo Music & Arts Festival began). Even though I’m probably more middle-class & mainstream than I want to be, even though I’ve only flown my freak-flag at half-mast since moving to the south a decade ago, I still get profiled as hippy, peacenik, other.

“Actually, I live here.”

While my friends & I prepare to celebrate the summer solstice in proper pagan fashion, another annual party draws thousands to a farm a mere fifty miles south of my rural, communal home. Even if one weren’t a tuned in music fan & conscientious student of cultural phenomenon, you would always know what’s up.

View the traffic jams on I-24. Study the lineup at Bonnaroo-dot-com & discover a sonic feast that should interest any serious fan of alternative music. Witness a distinct case of economic opportunity for every business within regional radius. See how some of the curious locals mix religious disdain with crass cultural voyeurism.

Until this year, the closest I’d physically come to this spectacle was get stuck in traffic in Murfreesboro or listen to mixed reports from my friends who have been as vendors, activists, & volunteers. Last year, I even had a student write an essay in composition class about his personal “musical utopia,” the place friends & family warned him not to visit as hive of criminal immorality.

As a participant in & promoter of many festivals & convergences for all of my adult life who is also infested with a lifelong case of critical rock fandom, I had to finally let my curiosity get the best of me. This year, I’m finally going to check out Bonnaroo.

At one selfish & self-indulgent level, I’m going to see a long list of cutting-edge bands, singers, & performing artists that might never visit Tennessee if it weren’t for this musical orgy. At another level, I’m going as a friend & ally of those I know working the festival as performers, vendors, revolutionary educators. Finally, I want to discover if the corporate-sponsored spectacle-as-carvival has anything at all in common with the more authentically subversive communal feasts of foolish defiance, those that define the deeply countercultural: Burning Man & its offshoots; Rainbow & its regionals; Mardi Gras & its deep meaning to the post-Katrina continent; raves or Reclaim the Streets protest parties, house parties or backyard hoedowns, faerie & anarchist gatherings.

My neighbor & friend Maxzine went in 2004, & he was offended, challenged, & dismayed at what he saw as merely superficial rebellion, essentially an all-white “Hippie Plantation,” a sort of trustafarian “club Dead” for the suburban masses of weekend-freaks, upper-crust misfits whose caste came with an unquenchable taste for mind-altering substances & good music. I want to see if I can skim some radical & redemptive cream off the top of the sour milk he tasted & eloquently expressed in this rant.

Will I confirm the thesis of Mat Callahan pursued in his provocative book The Trouble With Music? He contends, “The modern festival is disconnected from history, astronomy, the bounties of the earth or the celebration of tradition. It is a baldly commercial affair which might, at times, present great music & a lot of fun, but it cannot be a Feast.”

I’ve heard that Bonnaroo is unparalleled for the sheer party of it all. Is the partying just the opiate of the people, the putrid palliative, a spectacular & even shocking safety-valve to prevent real rebellion? Or can this ostensibly crude convergence of the ex-Deadhead set mixed with alt-rock nerds actually capture a whiff of the spirit of subversion, no matter how watered down? Will the people who make the festival not just a show actually transform it into something at once immanent, transcendent, & truly challenging?