Lazy's Austin City Limits 2024 review: Day 0
Lazy's Austin City Limits 2024 review: Day 0
33% of this is a Chappell Roan fan rant. Sorry
Watching live musical performances is an experience that can’t be compared to other forms of entertainment. Whether it’s knowing all of the lyrics to your favorite band’s deep cuts, dancing for the entire set or just feeling a sense of belonging with other fans, it’s a uniting and liberating experience at every level.
My wife, Haylee, and I share a mutual love of live music, screaming out the lyrics to rap songs from every decade and showing support for musicians we listen to daily. One of our first road trips together was to see St. Paul and the Broken Bones in Austin, filling the rest of the day with a date at a local Mexican spot and a walk around 6th Street before the demons descended at nighttime.
This year, Haylee and I headed packed up our dog Diamond and drove to our state’s largest music festival, by far, Austin City Limits. It all started a few months ago when I was looking at tour dates for Houston’s own That Mexican OT, a rapper who has been seeing a steady rise to mainstream stardom since his Lonestar Luchador album in 2023. Despite living in the Houston area, I couldn’t see any of his shows due to scheduling conflicts with work. After seeing that he was going to perform at Austin City Limits this year, we checked the rest of the lineup and saw several other people we knew we’d like to see: Tyler, The Creator, Blink-182, Dominic Fike, Vince Staples, and a bunch of other artists that indicate we’re millennials on the cusp of being Gen-Z kids.
We decided to cop our tickets as a birthday celebration for myself since the festival also comes to town near my birthday every year. We also invited my wife’s little sister along for her first music festival. Things were looking perfect: the hotel was booked, Haylee’s sister’s flight was secured and we began to gather supplies for the October heat that Texas is known for. We set a budget for merch, my wife created playlists for every day of the 3-day festival so we could get more familiar with the artists we didn’t know and we enjoyed discovering new artists over the coming weeks. But, as we edged closer to the festival, things began to get shaky for ACL.
First, Dominic Fike, the hip-hop adjacent indie bad boy, dropped out of the festival, which was a punch in the gut for all three of us. If anyone was disappointed it was Haylee’s sister, who chose to go to one day only, Sunday, because he was supposed be there. This wouldn’t have been so bad if several more acts didn’t drop out before October came. Tyla, Caamp, and Catfish and the Bottlemen also dropped out weeks after. While we didn’t plan on seeing any of two of those acts, it didn’t bode well for the rest of the weekend: could a headliner drop out? What about That Mexican OT? Who will fill Dominic’s empty spot?
Well, ACL had an answer for the last question: Chappell Roan. Yes, the red-haired, TikTok meme soundtracking, PR-allergic pop sensation that has had arguably the largest rise of any mainstream artist in 2024 was promoted, which makes total sense.
(I say arguable because Shaboozey has been kicking the country charts’ ass at #1 on the Billboard charts for 14 weeks this year, but no one cares as much for some reason. The same could be said for Teddy Swims, another artist who performed at ACL. Chappell Roan has more streams than some of the artists, but hasn’t had a single song hit #1. If anything, Sabrina Carpenter is the top pop darling, but the internet says otherwise. )
The latest favorite lesbian of the moment, Gaylor Swift in the flesh, had her performance moved forward to the last day of the festival, set to play before Tyler, the Creator on the festival’s biggest stage. Although I am not a fan of her music and respect her talent and popularity, I didn’t find the move a particularly fair one - we didn’t get a replacement act, they just moved an act over to a different time slot.
It was a bootleg move, but it was also the move that probably made the organizers a lot more money. My wife and I took turns groaning and sighing every time a drone shot of Chappell Roan fans doing their weird YMCA dance to a song about getting eaten out, we immediately realized how busy and Chapell-obsessed the Sunday crowd would be. This isn’t her fault, at all, but her fans are absolutely obnoxious and self-centered. The size of the crowd wasn’t the problem but the fans camping out for spots and sleeping in front of the performing bands, scoffing at anyone who dared to say they didn’t like her music, flooding the ACL subreddit to insist that the festival only sold out because of her (it sells out at least one weekend every single year) while begging for advice on how to camp for her performance only, and generally just being rude was disappointing to see leading up to the first weekend.
It seemed like the droves of TikTok-based fans obsessed with Chappell (she doesn’t even like those fans by the way) were ready to make the festival about them. Not Chappell, the artist they all decided was their favorite within the past six months, but themselves. It will be a dream when these people move on to their next favorite thing, another Olivia Rodrigo or a Sabrina Carpenter or another supposed gay icon, because then we won’t have to hear from them while they take up seats for another artist while staring at their phones or arguing with other ACL attendees that camping 8 hours for an artist while blocking the view of the stage is their way of “enjoying things” that can’t be criticized. This rant is over for now, but we’ll get back to them on Sunday.
Despite the kinks in ACL’s operation, we were still excited to attend all three days. We knew that live shows in 2024 had been fickle on whether or not they will actually happen since every artist seems to be getting sick, not selling enough tickets or exhausted. Even Orville Peck, the indie darling and gay country artist who peformed at ACL this year, dropped from another festival the week prior, as did Chappell Roan. We had shows for TisaKorean and Veeze canceled on us earlier this year and even Childish Gambino halted his tour for health issues. So, this wasn’t an ACL specific thing but rather an industry-wide problem that also affected ACL. Plus, artists drop from festivals every year, so that also wasn’t a total surprise.
We were ready to head down to Austin to see our favorite artists and have a good time regardless of weird online wars surrounding the festival and lineup issues.
Next entry we will enter Day 1 of Weekend 2 of ACL, featuring WhoKilledKenny, Foster The People, Young Jeezy and Blink-182 performing on one of the hottest weekends Austin has had recently. Get ready for the expensive merchandise, surprisingly good performances, questionable outfits, teenage mosh pit dwellers and excessive heat that non-Texans definitely were not prepared for. Thanks for reading.