Do you really need to give up all this information just to enjoy some music?
Do you really need to give up all this information just to enjoy some music?

Practically everyone I spoke to in and around the second annual Upstream Music Festival + Summit this past weekend had something to say about the household income question.

“Like being a broke-ass musician isn’t embarrassing enough already.”

“Why does Paul Allen want to know how much money I make? Not enough to afford tickets to this.”

“Have they sold my data to Cambridge Analytica yet?”

“Super weird.”

“Democracy is dying but demography is alive and well.”

Et cetera.

My misgivings about Upstream began before the music (which you can read more about here) did, when I went to activate my wristband on the Upstream app and was confronted by a series of questions that struck me as both familiar (it’s not like I’ve never signed up for an online service before) and draconian.

I completely understand the logic behind programmers wanting to know more about the people attending an event—the better to serve us in the future, if we’re taking them at their word—but given the tentacular invasiveness and nightmarish ramifications of surveillance capitalism, Upstream’s brazen embrace of data collection before and during (and who knows, maybe even after?) the festival threatens to make the music seem like subterfuge, a loss leader for the real product: the digitized souls of the people in the audience.

It occurred to me several times that this kind of thinking belongs to another era. As I mentioned above, lots of people took umbrage at being asked for their average annual household income, but none of us objected strongly enough to stop filling out the registration altogether. (I admit I waited a couple of days, though, FWIW.)

And in a way, who cares? Isn’t that information out there anyway? And anyway, doesn’t The New Yorker ask survey questions like that of its readers from time to time? Doesn’t SIFF? Doesn’t The Stranger?

Yes, they do, but only on voluntary surveys, not as a condition for entry. The fact that there was a “Prefer not to state” option on the drag down menu doesn’t excuse it. “Prefer not to be asked” is more like it. Will they want your social security number next year? Bank details? Blood sample? Loyalty oath?

Even more abrasive is the way those wristbands, once activated, are scanned by the venues not merely to allow or deny entry, but to identify the wearer by name (and who knows what else? Income level? Mac vs. PC preference? Likelihood to support a second Trump term?) on a handheld device, and, with the help of a second scan upon exiting, track that person’s whereabouts during the festival.

I found it was simply too much to stomach—not because I felt persecuted, but because I felt insulted. Again, I get the logistical advantages of all this stuff. For THEM (crowd control, anti-bootleg protection, the appearance of being well-organized, which they seem generally to be). But the aesthetics of Upstream’s presentation are so vulgar, authoritarian, and borderline dystopian that it made the prospect of going inside the venues feel like a violation, however minor, of a live music patron’s inalienable right not to be reduced to a target.

By contrast, over this same weekend, I also attended a traditional rock show in a club, a house show in a semi-legal DIY space, and saw a movie at the Seattle International Film Festival. They represented a wide variety of styles, schools, and aesthetics, as well as a broad spectrum of artistic quality. Upstream was the only one that made me feel like I might be living in the film Brazil.

I know this is all kind of far-flung. But it was how it felt. Not as dark as 1984, obviously. But a little like Max Headroom—just 20 minutes into the future, but that was far enough.

After last year’s festival, I wrote that the technical hassles associated with the notorious Upstream wristband (activating it, being scanned into and out of venues) were annoying but tolerable: “if you were willing to surrender to a bit of inconvenience (and a ream—in every sense—of personal data) in exchange for being able to wander through Pioneer Square, of all neighborhoods, and see and hear an indisputably heroic array of local talent.”

This year, however, all I could think about was that wristband dangling from my arm like a LoJack. Not that there weren’t lots of excellent local and national artists on the bill—from Hot Snakes to Mirah, from Y La Bamba to ItsTR3NT, from Great Grandpa to Warren Dunes to Kyle Craft to Zola Jesus—it’s just that the real cost of seeing them, individually or as an agglomeration, wasn’t included in the already-not-cheap ticket prices. (Which, to be fair, I didn’t have to pay because I got a review comp.)

That’s why my experience of the festival largely consisted of hanging around the outsides of venues, especially Little London Plane, where KEXP was broadcasting live sets all weekend (highlights: the fantastic Zola Jesus on Friday, the savage Hot Snakes on Saturday, the bewildering Valerie June on Sunday), and wandering from one sidewalk to another, dodging construction, and enjoying the temporary transformation of Pioneer Square into a music rich environment.

As I wrote last year: “That perfect feeling of passing between rooms at a party with different waves of music coming at you from every direction—that was going on all weekend. If you stopped in your tracks pretty much anywhere within Upstream’s ambit… you could be forgiven for thinking you were in the epicenter of Seattle’s musical energy. Whether that made you feel energized and optimistic or manipulated like a sucker is entirely up to your particular disposition.”

To the festival’s credit, it was actually very easy to hear and in some cases see a lot of shows through various doorways and plate glass windows. And the outdoor stages obviously helped that a lot.

In other positive news, they streamlined and massively improved the main stage experience this year. No more headliners playing to a two-thirds empty stadium; the big shows were moved onto two adjoining stages in the CenturyLink Field parking lot, allowing for very fast changeovers, as well as a much more concentrated crowd.

I only overheard Miguel and Tacocat’s sets from that parking lot on Friday and Saturday respectively, but I sucked it up on Sunday and entered the field to see the end of Cut Copy and the beginning of Flaming Lips. As expected, it was exactly like a festival. Excellent production from a large, well-appointed pro crew, people drinking and laughing and enjoying themselves, a VIP section that made you feel incredibly self-righteous, and more branding than a cattle auction. Cut Copy sounded exactly like all the music from that past 15 years that I can’t get into but have no quarrel with—they whipped the crowd into an admirable lather.

I was curious to check in with the Flaming Lips, who long ago took a sharp, intentional turn away from what I had loved about them, transforming from absurdist acid rock to… I don’t even know how to describe their Soft Bulletin and onward work, except to say that it is obviously good and even more obviously beloved, and that I just don’t enjoy it as much as Hit to Death in the Future Head, et al.

Crowds eye view of Wayne Coyne.
Crowd's eye view of Wayne Coyne. SN

One of the most vivid showgoing memories in my hall of recollection is of their set at old Moe in 1994 (I think? ’95, maybe? With Richard Davies opening? Maybe? So, maybe not that vivid?), when they opened with “Turn It On,” and right when the loud part kicked in, the stage exploded like a toybox into a miniature carnival of Christmas tree light-bedecked ferris wheels and other handmade props. It was glorious.

As a result, I’ve watched their ascension to the role of white-suited, plastic-ball-rolling, crowd-thrilling 21st century festival attractions with a mix of eternal admiration (I could never not be on the side of the Flaming Lips), and the low-key private bummer that what I think of when I hear that band name is not what most of their fans think of, and in any case, not what the band is anymore.

And so, when Wayne Coyne appeared, wearing a red suit and what looked like a suicide bomber vest that had just passed through a Mardi Gras parade, I watched the spectacular opening—a live rendition of Strauss’s “Also Sprach Zarathustra” that led straight into, guess what, “Race for the Prize,” complete with exploding steam cannons and five-foot balloons bouncing everywhere—and headed (smiling!) to catch some of the Asahi reunion at Axis 1, though I got spellbound on the way watching ItsTR3NT get a relatively small but indisputably humming crowd moving through the window of Axis 2.

En route both to and from these shows, I was struck by the presence of the buskers, playing and singing to small clusters of people, though in some cases to one person or fewer. It’s easy for the sound of one voice and one guitar to be lost in the crossfade of so many simultaneous amplified performances, but contrary to my prior feelings about busking in general, I found their indomitability during this deluge of sound and foot traffic to be both beautiful and melancholy.

This pic summarizes my Upstream.
This pic summarizes my Upstream. SN

It’s tempting to let the image of a solo performer playing Neil Young’s “Cinnamon Girl” to an audience of three in front of a Starbucks stand in as some sort of caustic commentary on Upstream’s essential corporate nature. But I preferred to see the singer’s fortitude, and the listeners’ temerity. (And I sang the harmony part in my head.)

I’m perfectly willing to stipulate that, a week or so shy of my 45th birthday, I may not be the ideal assessor of a music festival’s zeitgeist reflection, or, given my chronic unease, the most accurate vibe barometer who ever drew breath. Events like this are built for people younger than I am, and people of all ages who both know how to have and are good at having fun.

However, I feel confident that it’s well within my jurisdiction to suggest that going to see live music should feel less like being investigated by the NSA. The surveillance state is not the ideal organizing principle for the promotion of any artistic medium, but especially rock’n’roll and hiphop.

I have vivid memories of when people—the very kinds of people who might otherwise be happy to attend an event like this—used to regularly voice ominous, angry paranoia about the likelihood that we’d all have barcodes tattooed on our wrists and foreheads and that “the government” would monitor our behavior and whereabouts to ensure that we were compliant little consumers.

Even then such sentiments seemed mildly embarrassing, especially when uttered by fully entrenched ideologues (like the guy who told me at a party that The Matrix was an accurate depiction of literal reality). But they were also just ever-so-slightly-not-impossible enough to keep you feeling wary of allowing yourself to get too docile about the corporate culture you were ineluctably soaking in. Not so much that you’d actually give up drinking Diet Coke or whatever, but enough that you’d feel slightly ashamed for buying it.

But now that we have an inkling of the degree to which the entire fabric of society is predicated on the amount of personal information about our identity, finances, and political/cultural preferences that Google, Facebook, and Amazon can extract from our “free” accounts with our simultaneous ignorance and consent, those old, embarrassing hippie anxieties feel retroactively prescient. It may not inspire many of us to actually summon the nerve to delete our Facebook or Twitter accounts, but it surely makes some of us hyper attuned to additional impositions on what tatters remain of our illusory privacy.

As a produced event, Upstream is top-notch. You can quibble with this or that facet of the programming, and the fact that this or that band suffered hassles with parking in the construction hellscape that is First Ave, but the music is generally excellent, the sound is generally strong, and the audience, to paraphrase the immortal words of Ice Cube, is generally down for whatever.

As a concept and a gesture, the festival ends its second year as a bit of a blur. What is it trying to be? Why does it exist? Who is it for? What is it saying? I couldn’t give you a specific answer, and I suspect that the organizers couldn’t either. They haven’t yet.

In the absence of a manifesto, or even a discernible voice, one is left to speculate either that it truly is just a folly to be filed in the “just because you can doesn’t necessarily mean you should” pile—not great, but essentially benign—or that Upstream represents some manner of Trojan Horse. Something to do with real estate? Something to do with softening the ground in Pioneer Square for the kind of transformation that has blighted Lake Union? Some further vengeance for Seattle’s blinkered failure to vote for the Commons all those years ago?

“Meantime we shall express our darker purpose. Give me the map there.” –Lear (King Lear, Act I, scene one)

All right, all right. This is obviously ludicrous hyperbole. But it arises from something real: the festival’s unconscionable gluttony for data. Maybe Vulcan, Inc. has the noblest of intentions. Or maybe they’re selling your data to the highest bidder, reporting you to law enforcement, reading your texts.

There’s obviously no evidence to suggest they are; this is a hypothetical. But since big tech and data mining companies show no signs of being brought to heel by either the government or the populace, skepticism—at a minimum—about the motives of any company that collects data is a good reflex to develop.

And even if all this speculation reveals nothing more than the depths of my ignorance about the way the world actually works (a perfectly plausible outcome), I still believe the data harvesting element of the festival’s design is what will prevent it from achieving glory. Not because it’s out of step with the times, but because it makes Upstream another agent in the already very-crowded field of music-based attractions that further debase and dehumanize the experience of listening to music.

Maybe not.
Maybe not. SN