Bonnaroo: Your musical vacation from reality
It’s that time of year again, when 80,000 music heads flock to a 700-acre farm in Manchester, Tenn., to delight in melodic bliss and disturbance for four days straight. It’s a time to lather up with sunscreen and drink water like a camel that’s been stranded in the desert for 40 days. The Bonnaroo Music & Arts festival has begun.
This year Bonnaroo will run from June 7-10 featuring the likes of Radiohead, Bon Iver, Foster the People, Skrillex, Kendrick Lamar, Das Racist and more satisfying divergent tastes from roots rock to dubstep.
Bonnaroo is 10+ stages of bone-shattering guitar solos and synth lines that cause ample minds in attendance to unleash a flood of dopamine and serotonin. In other words: best four days ever. Bonnaroo is like “a giant communal art project,” according to the The Bonnaroovian Code posted on the festival website.
“Think of yourself as an artist, which you are. Come on mini Picasso paint the wall, invent a dance, clap along, bang the drum of your creativity and together we can all create a life-altering performance,” the Code reads.
Bonnaroo attendees are some of the happiest campers anywhere -- literally. Most attendees opt to camp on the festival grounds for easy access to early sets and late ones.
This year we talked with Chava Quinn, a rising sophomore majoring in advertising marketing and mass communication at the Fashion Institute of Technology; Barry Rein, a recent James Madison University grad and Alicia Fusco, a recent Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University grad.
Below they’ll share how they prepared for Bonnaroo, what they brought and their festival must-sees.
Getting pysched
Barry Rein and Alicia Fusco: We have been listening to bands in the lineup on our iPods and CDs for weeks. Also, the lineup portion of the Bonnaroo website has links to all the bands/comedians attending. We used the website along with YouTube to research bands we had not yet heard. We plan on listening to playlists of the bands attending on the long ride down there.
Chava Quinn: I looked up suggested packing lists and asked other kids who had been before. Also, I checked out some of the smaller bands like Dale Earnhardt Jr. Jr. and Alabama Shakes that will be there and have become a new fan.
What to bring
Rein and Fusco: Besides the obvious -- tent and chairs -- we're bringing a ton of water, Advil, Tylenol, Tums, sunblock, Goldbond, koozies and a canopy to shade our tent in the morning. It keeps that morning sun from heating up the tent and making it a miserable start to the day. A solar water bladder for makeshift showering will also be coming with us this year.
Quinn: Well first, a tent so you aren't sleeping in a car. Second, water -- because it is four days straight in the Tennessee sun with minimum shade Third, comfortable shoes so you can focus on the music and not the pain your feet are in after 12+ hours standing. Finally, good spirits...it's a music festival!!
Enjoy what you pay for and don't worry about the minor details. Bonnaroo only comes once a year.
Must-sees
Rein and Fusco: Radiohead, Red Hot Chili Peppers, The Roots, Art vs. Science, fun., Two Door Cinema Club, Battles, The Kooks, Hey Rosetta!, Machines are People Too and The Main Squeeze
Quinn: Bon Iver, Young the Giant, Childish Gambino, Radiohead and GROUPLOVE. To use a line from the 1986 cult-classic Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, “Life moves pretty fast. If you don't stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it.”
The same goes for college students, according to Quinn.
“We only have a short period of time in college where summer vacations still exist, but we have a new freedom without the stress of being an adult: four days to spend camping with your friends and strangers, all there to listen to fantastic music and be truly free…,” Quinn said.
Emily Genco is a senior at the University of Wisconsin majoring in journalism and is a summer 2012 intern for Paste BN College. Learn more about her here.
This story originally appeared on the Paste BN College blog, a news source produced for college students by student journalists. The blog closed in September of 2017.