Prospect Park
Brooklyn
August 25, 2002
Midway through a confetti-spewing set, the Flaming Lips' Wayne Coyne mused with an acidhead grin: "Us, De La Soul, Kinky, Modest Mouse, Cake--that's kinda fucked-up, don't you think?" Nah, not really. By any decent-college-radio standards, the musically diverse Unlimited Sunshine lineup wasn't weird at all. What was radical, though, was how damn joyous the bands were. Never confusing the serious with the morose or the playful with the moronic, they offered a five-and-a-half-hour seminar on the subversive power of positive thinking.
Mexican techno-rockers Kinky had trouble moving booties in their afternoon opening slot, but frontman Gilberto Cerezo did a credible jumping-bean impression while his hermanos drove salsa, samba, house, and electro riffs into a giddy pileup. Culture-moshing continued between acts via kitchen-sink mixes (opera, Afrobeat, Led Zep) and mini sets by slacker crackers the Hackensaw Boys, an eight-piece band seizing its post-O Brother moment with bluegrassy songs about cannonballs and moonshine. By comparison, Modest Mouse's Isaac Brock could've been a party pooper. But his passive-aggressive guitar displays were mood elevators, and on the romantically self-loathing "3rd Planet," he chanted, "The universe is shaped exactly like the Earth" over bell-toned arpeggios, while Coyne--alt-rock's Obi-Wan Kenobi of hearts adrift in space--nodded sagely in the wings.
Happy to preach their Serge Gainsbourg-sampling gospel in any setting, De La Soul ambled onstage like they'd just come from a barbecue across the park (though Maseo, stuck in traffic, didn't show up until halfway through the set). They freestyled off their old hits and brought out Black Sheep's Dres for his early-'90s bangers "The Choice Is Yours" and "Flavor of the Month." Sadly, nerd boys and the girls who love them do not a lively hip-hop crowd make. After his calls for shouts of "Ho" went largely unheeded, Posdnuos observed: "Fellas, you lame as shit tonight."
No participation was needed for the Lips, who cavorted with dancers in animal suits amid huge mirror balls and dry-ice fumes in what resembled a high school production of Cats--except, of course, for the video loops of topless dancers, atomic-bomb blasts, and Japanese schoolgirls machine-gunning one another. Yet, somehow, it all projected a childlike spirit of wonder. When a fake-blood-soaked Coyne triumphantly sang, "Yeah! Yeah! Yeah!" during the dosed-candy chorus of "The Spark That Bled," the crowd pumped fists as if to say that anything--be it horrible or absurd--is worthy of affirmation if approached with the right attitude.
Even, for instance, Cake--the selfless tour organizers whose wiry Mexi-Cali funk couldn't help but seem an afterthought in the wake of Wayne's wonder world. But with collective endorphins flowing, evangelical frontman John McCrea (looking like a grizzled extra from Smokey and the Bandit) soon had the crowd singing under the starry sky. And Cake's finale of Gloria Gaynor's disco anthem "I Will Survive"--sounding tonight like a Lollapalooza elder's rallying cry--summed up the day's can-do DIY vibe. Optimism: the new nihilism?
