All Points West '08 Recap: Friday
Festival
Radiohead's Thom Yorke / Photo by Shawna Adams
The Dance Dance Revolution
This year's festival season has proven that sets featuring dance music truly generate that communal, festival spirit. CSS and Girl Talk played back-to-back on the Bullet Stage right before sunset for a one-two punch that proved the normal hipster stand-still crowd can also be an uncontrollable circus.
CSS was nothing short of a technicolor Talking Heads, as if we could have been watching "Stop Making Sense" on psychedelic drugs. And Girl Talk's sonic collage that followed was undeniably the biggest dance party Lady Liberty has ever seen. Greg Gillis' entourage on stage was a glammed out group of a freak show recalling Rocky Horror, and no one really seemed to care about the excess of toilet paper streamers and confetti being chucked into the audience at an eco-friendly festival.
As Girl Talk, Gillis is ultimately expressing his revenge – he's an intellect onstage with his funny friends while the popular kids below are commanded by his computer chops, not realizing essentially a nerd is responsible for the time of their lives – and from this perspective, revenge is sweet.
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Read Saturday's coverage of All Points West here.
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