The Reader’s Guide to the
Nonmusic attractions on-site include the Flatstock 17 Poster Convention, a record fair organized by the Chicago Independent Radio Project, and the DEPART-ment store, where mostly local vendors sell handcrafted clothes, jewelry, and more.
6:00 Mission of Burma
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During indie rock’s 90s heyday, Lou Barlow seemed to hover over the genre like some sort of mythological archetype or patron saint—the solipsistic sad sack a lot of dudes aspired perversely to be, filling tape after tape with four-tracked misery. And for sure, between Sebadoh and what seemed like dozens of side projects, he made some crucial contributions to the world’s stockpile of breakup-mix songs. But he was way more interesting when he indulged his weirder side—the part of him that’d rather do bong rips and play hardcore records than mope. The synergy between those two halves peaked on 1993’s Bubble & Scrape (recently reissued on Sub Pop), where bum-out classics like “Soul and Fire” share space with lo-fi dirt-weed freak-outs like “Elixir Is Zog.” Drummer, multi-instrumentalist, and noisemaker Eric Gaffney, who’d founded the band with Barlow, quit after that record, but in 2007 the seminal Sebadoh lineup—which also includes the underappreciated Jason Loewenstein—started touring together again, and they’ll play Bubble& Scrape top to bottom here. aConnector Stage —MR
It’s not a tremendous surprise that in 2008 Flava Flav is better known for his reality-TV endeavors than the jovial solo cut “Cold Lampin’ With Flavor”—it’s pretty much the only thing on Public Enemy’s 1988 classic It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back that isn’t nonstop brick-to-the-grill real. Actually “classic” is the wrong word, because it doesn’t contain the vast number of ways in which the album was truly revolutionary, the way it took every record that came before it hostage—not just in hip-hop but in all of pop music as it had existed till then. “Too black, too strong” goes the sample that opens “Bring the Noise,” and It Takes a Nation comes for you where you live, a flawless, righteous indictment of American racism and the abdication of the media that showed there was no vehicle more perfect than hip-hop with which to raise that critique. P.E. will perform the whole album tonight. aAluminum Stage —JH
Just when you were convinced that the only Jersey bands getting born to this world were horrifying New Found Glory-style emo knockoffs, voila: the Garden State blesses us with this furious six-piece, which sounds like the Vaselines by way of Richard Hell’s dick, circa 1977. They finesse their loaded, greasy switchblade swagger with troubled-boy pop rage that they handle so casually they can’t have a clue how powerful it really is. aConnector Stage —JH
2:00 Caribou
