Modern Sky Festival and its Crowd

Amid the effusion of praise that I have lavished on China's rock scene, I must admit that the Modern Sky Festival fell well short of my expectations.

Granted, my observation was not truly representative, since I was to attend only one of three days of the festival (I reserved tomorrow for hiking and for the rest of the week, I would be in HK), which featured dozens of artists performing at different time slots over those days. Nevertheless, I found my patience running out as I went from stage to stage, only to find artists who severely lacked the kind of punch and energy which one would typically expect from a rock festival, and a lukewarm audience whose apathy seemed to feed right back to the subconsciousness of the artists.

To be sure, there were exceptions to the case. At the stage for new bands, an enthusiastic audience clamored for more after No Name completed their set with a Sum 41-like, whirlwind locomotion infused with well-known Chinese elements. Enthusiastic audience members would also climb over each other and wave their limbs in an absolutely gorgeous, blue-sky day in Haidian Park. At the electric/techno stage, a few ebullient souls showed off their acrobatic dance moves neither caution nor compulsion. There was also the flag-waving, body-thumping, beer-splashing crowd in front of the main stage, a scene reminiscent of Woodstock. Those aside, however, I couldn't help but recognize a wall of expressionless folks, who looked either too tired, too stoned, or just plain too indifferent to physically react to the music. Not even the head nod...not even the lap tap...are we all becoming the disengaged philosopher whose relationship with live music is strictly analytical? Most of the time I just felt that people were just standing there in front of the stage, as if waiting to board an imaginary subway train.

Perhaps it was just me, but while it seems that the organizers did a great job by putting slightly different music on different stages to cater to each and everyone at any given time, the heavy metal on one stage seemed to drown out, for example, Sandee Chen's melancholic, twitter-like ballade on another. Was there not enough insulation mechanism to at least compartmentalize the sound a little better? Of course, nobody would be serious enough to demand concert hall acoustics at a rock festival, but when it got to the point where the sound from another stage became a distraction, the feeling of liveliness and spontaneity instantly became a nuisance.

Would I go back? Sure...only to prove myself wrong. The crowd was perhaps merely recovering of a full day of partying on National Day, but I am sure music fans, and a lot of them, could do better not merely by showing up physically but by being more engaged in circulating (and amplifying) energy to and from the artists --something which I find to be the unique hallmark of live rock music. But I would give the benefit of the doubt, until next time.