If werewolves controlled the House and vampires ruled the Senate, New Orleans would be our nation’s capital. It is a city without conscience. The bars never close. You can drink on the street. Everything smells like a combination of puke, donkeys, shrimp scampi, Victoria’s Secret, and lawlessness. Citizens walk the alleys and boulevards with human skulls nestled under their arms. The air on Bourbon Street is 21 percent oxygen and 26 percent sex. You can’t swing a dead cat without hitting a stripper who’s also a prostitute (and I’m 99 percent certain you can buy a dead cat here, if you’re so inclined). There are people who move to New Orleans in order to die? Those people know what they’re doing.

 

All of this makes New Orleans an ideal location for a rock festival, particularly when said festival falls on the weekend of All Saints Day (the vigil of which is referred to as Halloween by godless pagans). That's the premise of the fifth annual Voodoo Music Experience, a collision of arena rock and decadence in pastoral New Orleans City Park (complete with live alligators!). This year's voodoopalooza was expanded from one to three days and featured 62 acts scattered among three venues (one for rock, one for hip-hop and jam bands, and one goofball circus tent for goofball dance DJs). If you ever wanted to jab a needle into a Jack White voodoo doll, this was your chance.

FRIDAY (DAY ONE): Though the festival officially started just past noon (with local rave DJ Tony Estrada spinning in the dance tent), the first artists anyone really noticed were Kill Hannah, the gutter-glam Chicago rock boyz who wear socks on their arms like Britney Spears and sing songs like "Is Anyone Here Alive?" Looking and sounding like a well-mannered, Generation-Y Faster Pussycat, Kill Hannah were generally received as "not altogether bad" by the few hundred kids who cut school to watch rock music at two in the afternoon.

While Urine napped, Ludacris unleashed his rapid-fire delivery on an audience that seemed more dehydrated than hungry for chicken (or beer). "I see a lot of white people out there," Ludacris said after his first song. "Why don't you white people make some noise?" Across the park, the Supersuckers dealt with a similar problem: An inordinate percentage of their audience didn't even face the stage -- including several guys in the first row! The 'Suckers did, however, triumphantly end their show with a killer version of Thin Lizzy's "Cowboy Song" and their own minor 1995 hit, "Born With a Tail."

Frontman Eddie Spaghetti also mentioned that he wanted to finish the set early in order to see 50 Cent, and I don't think he was kidding. Yet the most entertaining part of 50's much-anticipated appearance occurred before the music started. Behind the stage, 50's entourage (which appeared to number in the thousands) showed up ten minutes early and waited for their main man. The van that supposedly contained 50 drove toward the stage but then inexplicably turned around; this happened at least three times (always followed by several of his Starter-clad cohorts whipping out the coolest cell phones I've ever seen). At the last possible moment, 50 arrived via golf cart, looking as though he were in some kind of Buddhist trance. But when it was time to light up the sky, good ol' Curtis Jackson sprang to life like Roy Horn's tiger. The minute his shirt disappeared, he was prowling the stage and imploring us to put our motherfucking hands in the motherfucking air. "What up, blood?" 50 asked. "What up, gangsta?" These are valid questions. He also ran through a version of Missy Elliott's "Work It" that was just about impossible not to adore.

The evening concluded with a three-hour tour de force from George Clinton and the P-Funk Allstars (who performed with a puppy) and performances by earnest n?-metallers P.O.D. and Godsmack (who unironically jammed on the other side of the park). Oh, and "Macho Man" Randy Savage appeared in the Slim Jim promotional tent and was introduced as "wrestling legend and Slim Jim advocate." I was so very proud to be there.

SATURDAY (DAY TWO): The one problem with staging a rock concert in New Orleans is purely atmospheric -- it's profoundly hot in Louisiana, and the sun seems to hover a mere 12 feet above Earth's surface. When Mos Def went on at 3 p.m., the crowd appeared to be preoccupied with trying to find (a) an inch of shade and/or (b) the score of the Georgia-Florida football game. Even Roots drummer ?uestlove's DJ set was remarkably underattended.

Better Than Ezra hit the rock stage at 3:45, shocking their critics by continuing to exist. Since they're local N'awlins boys, they drew a decent crowd, but this was generally a disquieting sonic experience. Songs like "Good" and "King of New Orleans" were on the radio constantly only eight years ago, but it felt like I hadn't heard those tunes since the Bronze Age. In stark contrast, the Roots' 4:30 set felt almost futuristic in its tightness.

However, when speaking of the past or the future (and, I suppose, the present), there was really only one act at Voodoo that needs to be mentioned: Iggy and the Stooges. After an afternoon of some of the worst music anyone could imagine (Fuel and Staind), the Stooges imploded in a way that -- honestly -- I did not think was possible. It was probably the greatest live performance I have ever seen by any band anywhere. And I know that makes no sense, because Iggy has to be somewhere in the neighborhood of 4,000 years old, and I don't even like punk rock. But what this concert illustrated was not only that the Stooges were the first punk band (as rock historians like to suggest) or even the best punk band; this concert proved that the Stooges were the only punk band that ever existed. The first punk record was their 1969 debut, the last punk record was 1973's Raw Power, and the single greatest non-Beatles, non-Guns N' Roses album ever recorded was 1970's Fun House. Live, the music seemed to be moving in three directions simultaneously.

Now, this is not to suggest that the Stooges' shtick doesn't raise a few questions (for example, Iggy's overt hatred of television definitely makes me wonder why he participated in an episode of VH1's Behind the Music). There are several things he does (particularly his hyper-spastic stage moves) that should seem idiotic, especially this late in the game, but they make sense somehow. And I think this is because no other artist so deftly fuses the complexity of reality with the simplicity of performance: At one point, Iggy stopped and said, "I need some love...some intelligence...some money...and some sex." Isn't that pretty much everything? I mean, is there anyone else who could describe the totality of the human experience in 11 words? More trenchant, he also pointed at an especially enthusiastic fan in the audience and expressed the paradox of self-loathing and self-adulation in eight words: "You suck, just like the bands you like." Think about that for a while.

SUNDAY (DAY THREE): The festival's final day included music by Cypress Hill, Queens of the Stone Age, A Perfect Circle, jam hams the String Cheese Incident, funkoids Galactic, DJ Shadow-style turntablist RJD2, and Rusted Root. Don't quote me on this, but I suspect some members of the audience may have been smoking marijuana. In fact, I'm pretty sure Sunday afternoon was the first time City Park ever levitated to about sea level.

Since I'm a "rock journalist," I used Sunday afternoon to get "the inside scoop" on "the rock'n'roll lifestyle," which means I talked to the guy who cooked the musicians' meals. "Staind ate the most food," said chef Josh Katz. "Aaron Lewis ate more chicken than anyone I've ever seen. B-Real from Cypress Hill also ate the shit out of some chicken. 50 Cent is mostly a vegetarian, so he enjoyed my barley pilaf dish a great deal. But he also ate one sausage!"

Judging from their affable demeanor backstage, the members of Queens of the Stone Age and A Perfect Circle are friends. QOTSA mastermind Josh Homme and girlfriend Brody Dalle of the Distillers (looking much softer than usual) drank Coronas with new Perfect Circle members James Iha and Jeordie White. Both bands put on serviceable, workmanlike sets. "This is the end of our two-year tour," Homme said before playing "No One Knows" to the sun-soaked crowd, "so this is the last Queens of the Stone Age song you'll hear for a while. Now go get drunk and fuck somebody." That certainly seemed to be his intention, at least.