But what if you don’t know a musician’s work very well? PELL is a newish act on the national level, out of New Orleans. His fan base isn’t huge yet, though his magnetic stage presence lures in passersby like sugar cubes do to wild horses. In such a situation the best thing to do, as an ensnared stranger, to find a true fan, somebody who knows all the words to all the songs, and stick by them. People like that have energy to spare and radiate it outwards. If the fans can’t infect the newcomers with fun, PELL certainly can. His call-and-response style coupled with crowd interaction and dance leadership, makes everybody feel included: “Alright y’all, move back and forth like this: left, right, left, right. You got it! Y’all are turnt up”. He ends his set with a surprise appearance by G-Eazy, and they sing in alternation to the crowd’s delight.

From above, certain shows take on the appearance of solar systems in space. Hermitude performs an entirely new, previously unrecorded set, causing the audience to erupt in dances. Following the rule of magnetic personalities and radiating energy stated above, the wildest dancers tend to be circled by other spinning bodies. There are rogues floating without a system, but they eventually get pulled into some group, and others get ejected out. At this stage, the core of the galaxy, signs and debris fly through the air, heads bob and hands fly up. Then, when PELL makes a guest appearance, the crowd goes supernova. Though the ambient temperature at Hermitude’s stage is around ninety degrees, it rises to over two-million while bodies melt into a glowing, radioactive dance orb, pulsating to the electro-bop of the Australian duo’s computers.

Please allow a moment’s digression to lament the poor, ignorant parents of the Lollapalooza teen. How unaware they must be. If only they could see the group huddled around a hot bottle of vodka, smuggled in under someone’s armpit. If only they knew what their daughter wasn’t wearing after she got out of the car that dropped her off. If only they knew what their son was saying, or what he did to provoke a fight. Such is the scene at Tyler the Creator. A serious fan would never be deterred by a few vomiting post-pubescents, but the less determined will instead visit Chet Faker. Himself an Australian, the Faker crowd possessed as many accents and languages as a UN coalition. As the lanky, bearded Aussie crooned, the audience swooned. In this environment teenage troubles melt away, and everybody in the vicinity got an automatic upgrade to become twenty-three for the duration of the set.

If Saturday’s headliner, Metallica, could be summed up in one sentence, it would be: “Go home dad, your embarrassing me in front of the metalheads!” The defining feature of that show would be the mosh pits, which ranged from delightful push-parties to flailing orgies of senseless violence. When a man is old enough to have grandkids, he shouldn’t be punching strangers in the back of the head, Metallica show or not. Nonetheless, the stage lasers were cool, and they somehow stretched the five-minute long Master of the Puppets song for a raging half-hour. It would have been a perfect show if they stuck to their pre-Black Album catalogue, but alas, they didn’t. Gimme fuel, gimme fire, gimme that which I desire: a quick death.

So long, Lollapalooza!

The post A Saturday of mixed decisions at Lollapalooza from Chet Faker to Metallica appeared first on Quip Magazine.

“From the BART train to a tour bus,” Bay area rapper G-Eazy has been making impressive strides in his career lately, completing his first string of performances in Europe, appearing in an issue of The New York Times, and racking up over a million views in less than a month for his latest music video, “I Mean It.” Perhaps G’s most noteworthy accomplishment comes in the form of his newest album, These Things Happen, a 16-track musical diary that embodies the dapper rapper’s complex persona. We talked to G-Eazy about how his journey started, where he is now, and important lessons he’s learned along the way.

Caitlin LoPilato: You just finished your first-ever European tour. How was that?

G-Eazy: It was crazy. It was wild to think that music could take me and my team all the way overseas and allow me to perform these songs thousands of miles away from where they were made.

CL: Were the crowd reactions different in Europe than they are in America?

GE: Sometimes, their accents would come through [Laughs]. In some cities where they were really loud, you could hear them screaming the words to a song and there was a collective, slightly accented sound in the lyric.

CL: When did you first know that you wanted to pursue music? Why hip-hop?

GE: Hip-hop was the culture and the genre that I was surrounded by. In terms of a career, I’ve always had this strong entrepreneurial drive, and music just became the vehicle for it. My friends and I were all into writing raps and rapping them to each other. It eventually became competitive; we would freestyle and battle each other sometimes. You just wanted to be the coolest one. This was around the time I started making beats, and it was the entrepreneurial side of my brain that was like “I could take these raps, record them over the beats that I’m making, put them on a CD and be kind of official.” It was that idea that really struck with me.

CL: Was there any pressure there, since you were a white kid trying to make it in rap?

GE: Yeah, for sure! That pressure seemed like something that could be tough, but I never saw it as something that would keep me from doing what I loved.

CL: I know you majored in Music Industry Studies at Loyola. What was one of the most important things you learned while in college, and how did you apply it to your career today?

GE: The single most important thing I learned was the importance of building a brand. That was one thing my teachers talked about the most; every artist, every band, every company, everything in the world has a brand and an identity behind that brand. Everything you do, whether it’s a song, album art, music video, performance, or interview, you’re representing your brand in a certain way. You need to know who you are and what your brand is.

CL: In your song “Far Alone” you talk about growing up on Bay area rap like Mac Dre and E-40, and now E-40 is joining you on stage, and you have relationships with pretty big-name Bay area rappers like Lil B…What’s that like for you?

GE: It’s completely surreal. Even those local guys who weren’t necessarily known on a national level or selling tons of records are still legends in my eyes, and were people I idolized growing up. To finally grow to this level and consider those people as peers is crazy.

CL: Especially within your fan base, you’re associated a lot with other white rappers, like Logic, Hoodie Allen, Sammy Adams…are you comfortable with that association or are you looking to step out of it?

GE: Ever since I was 13 or 14, I was like, “Well if I’m going to do this, I want to be as big as Drake or Kanye.” That’s the category I aspire to be in.

CL: These Things Happen is a really introspective record, and it definitely seems like you took your time to perfect this one. For old fans, new fans, or anyone who’s never heard your music before, how would you describe your new album?

GE: It shows the different sides of who I am as a person. It has the more introspective, reflective side, where I tell real stories about coming from not much and aspiring for big things, and I talk about what the roller coaster has been like so far. But it also shows the party side. Depending on what time of the night it is, I can be a drunk asshole partying my face off, and looking for the next bar to go to. Sound-wise, it’s a mix of my influences. There’s a lot of Kanye and Drake, there’s a little Lil Wayne, and I have a record on there with A$AP Ferg. The album as a whole is really an all-encompassing look at who I am.

The post The bay, branding, and being white in hip-hop: G-Eazy tells all appeared first on Quip Magazine.