Yours and Owls: double gonzo

Levi: The constable was built like a brick shithouse, and he was not moving.

"No more entry," he said. "Weather."

The rain was coming down in all directions. My socks, like Napoleon, were defeated. Somewhere behind him, past fences, Yours and Owls was carrying on without us. Jess asked, with great dignity, whether media might be allowed to slip through.

He laughed and shook his head.

Jess: The rain hits us almost horizontally, I wear my sunglasses as a windscreen without wipers. It was over before it started. Incredible.

I tell Levi, "If the rain is going to fuck us over, I want us to be fully fucked over. If it is shit, I don't want it to be half shit. I want it to be a disaster. I want it to be like Woodstock '99."

L: We retreated to the surf life saving club and huddled with the rest of the condemned, a damp congregation of the festival's rejects, huddled together, shivering like wet mongrels. Jess found some people she knew. Most of the conversation was lost on me, I was cold and drenched, I caught the claim that Lithuania is the Wollongong of Europe, and that Bob Dylan is an honorary Lithuanian.

DAY ONE: GETTING PISSED ON

J: I pack in my pleather Kmart bag my book, my ID, and some lipgloss. The bag has that fishy smell that pleather gets from overuse, especially when they have been weathered by the sweat of festival and club environments. I search my dump of a room for my hat that says ‘Critic’. Maybe I am a critic rather than a journalist. That would really be a vibe for Yours and Owls, an ironic critic cap to go with my VIP wrist band. But the hat isn’t found, so I meet Levi around KB and send my bare head out in the rain.

L: Jess complained about the set-up and began linking the event to the book she'd brought along, The Culture Industry by Theodor W. Adorno. Who brings Adorno to a music festival? Jess does. I nodded in agreement. She was the smarter one of us two, and my mind, fully occupied with how cold I was, had no spare capacity for intellectual thought.

J: After using our dedicated VIP entrance, I desperately need a drink and buy a $15 premix. I think about how there is something sinister to creating conditions that would drive someone to drink, those conditions being a rainy festival with a strangely curated lineup in a regional city known perceived as a lesser version of Sydney, then in order to socially manage the poor effects of alcohol consumption, consumption is regulated through selling premixes for $15 a pop. For me, it is not a deterrent to drink, but the waste of my remaining paycheck. When it works as a deterrent, it just means that people are sneaking alcohol or drugs in. This year, Yours and Owls does not have a pill testing station.

After securing drinks, Levi and I head into the VIP area, which could be more accurately named VIPiss. VIPiss was a tiny tent identical to the tents for the masses, only there were cane patio lounges and a table of Samaras catering inside. There were also the stars of the section, the VIPissers, 15 or so portable toilets completely separate where the masses go to piss or snort lines. Talk about distinction. I needed to get out of there.

L: Inevitably, Jess and I became separated. Jess marched off one way, I waltzed off another.

I found myself before a row of portaloos, disoriented and confused. Remarkably, they were gendered: pink for women and blue for men. Who would have guessed. Even in my state of inebriation, I could not bring myself to break the social construct of who uses which toilet. Blue it would be.

I blinked, and I was inside: an echo chamber of thought, sound and the smell of hell's own creation. And there, bolted to the door, was a small square of scratched plastic that someone at the hire company had optimistically labelled a mirror.

I was smiling. I hadn't known I was smiling, but there it was: wide and toothy, far too many teeth, stretching from ear to ear like it had been painted on. This was Wonderland, and I was the Cheshire Cat, grinning his mischievous grin at nobody in particular, fully prepared to disappear and leave the smile hanging there in the portaloo for the next poor soul.

I nodded at him. He nodded back. We were both having a beautiful time.

The festival outfits were all similar and none remarkable. But one did stand out. A woman in a bikini. A cow-print bikini. My jaw hung open, and the sole thought in my head was: How is she not cold?

Lady in the cow bikini, you were, in my eyes, the true hero of that night.

J: Genesis Owusu’s set was tight. The sun came up from behind the clouds and a rainbow formed in the sky. It was almost too obvious for a festival experience. I felt totally alienated, as if I wasn't in Wollongong.

Looking for someone to talk to, for some potential energy, for some event, for something reportable, I approach my coworker and see in his group a familiar face. My friend K. We immediately grab hold of each other and tell each other how much we miss each other. I attempt to sneak her into VIPiss, but the seccie clocks the wrist band she is wearing is different to mine. Thus, I am usurped from my golden throne to the common peoples' loos.

K and I make our way over to the end of Playlunch's set. We dance together as if it were 2019.

L: It was remarkable. For the first time all night, I forgot how cold and wet I was. I was just there, one body in a harmony of thousands, all of us moving to a remix of a remix of a song by a man who'd been famous since before my parents met. By any reasonable definition, it was the most mass-produced thing I had ever experienced. It was also the most alive I'd felt all weekend.

bbno$ entered dressed as a jester and played all his hits: "Lalala," "edamame," "gigolo," and the rest. Then Abbie Chatfield entered stage left, my left, smashing back strawberry milk, while Go-Jo made a guest appearance to perform "Milkshake Man," and an entourage of circus performers paraded across the stage performing tricks of every kind.

Then bbno$ drank a beer from his shoe: the shoey, Australia's weapon of choice for testing the strength of every foreigner who lands on our soil. He drank it. The crowd cheered. We all agreed he had earned the applause.

J: Is bbno$ a misogynist? Well, not quite, or at least not in the traditional sense. If the animation of his dweeby Canadian face super-imposed upon an ironically huge, muscular body seems to reveal anything, it is a play on the falsehood of his pussy-getting practice. bbno$ is a series of contradictions; he is just a meme, an object to mock, but at the end of the day he is afforded the subject position of being just a really ordinary guy goofing around. He is a white rapper who speaks of the usual subject matter of internet rap, but in being a white rapper he is afforded the privilege of approaching his subject matter through ironic detachment and memes. Is he actually getting pussy or joking about getting pussy? He speaks of women, constantly, incessantly, in a triangulation with cash, where money occupies the same symbolic position as chicks. Yet, as his name and the repetition of his name in songs will tell you; bb, in fact, has no money. His music does not appear as aspirational, rather his persona itself seems to be satirical. Yet, as I look upon the crowd of Wollongong men in ironic button-downs and bucket hats, manhandling their girlfriends, undoubtedly going home to jerk off to the most degrading of internet porn, I cannot help but wonder is the joke landing? 

bbno$ is a mirror, and as put by a dear friend of mine, a mirror is a false perspective which distorts the object it reflects. I stand still for the entirety of his performance, mostly disappointed I would be in fact not getting the interview. Levi and I Uber home. I wonder why, or how, I even enjoyed going to festivals in the first place.

DAY TWO: THE JOY OF BEING A YO-YO

J: I find Levi and a liquor store, manage to squeeze my bottle of soju into my handbag, and head to the line at the Illa where it dawns upon me that I will be searched. I say goodbye to Levi and walk around the corner to drink my Soju in one fell swoop. As the sickly sweet substance hits my lips, it is of little difference to Proust’s madeleine.

If bbno$ was a romp in de/subjectivising plastic arteface, Miran.da was a return of the beauty of the authentic and personal. The space is tiny and cramped, but packed to the brim with faces of mutual friends and complete strangers. 

L: Through some navigational failure I ended up on the wrong side of the crowd, behind her, so that for the entire set I was standing stage-side, staring back out at the audience while they stared at her. And, by extension, at me. How romantic. I put my sunglasses on to avoid eye contact.

J: Miran.da performs with her whole heart and produces an emotion in me I haven't had in a long time; being genuinely moved by a live performance. She showed me that intimacy and authenticity, concepts I had previously done away with, were still possibilities worth being invested in.

I ask her, “you've spoken out consistently about Palestine, against One Nation. What do you think the role of the musician is in activism? What do you think the relationship between politics and music is and what role do you see yourself occupying?”

She tells me, “I think it comes back to the emotional thing. Art makes people feel things. It's the story around what is happening in the world which makes people feel things, and that's what art can tell. And I think when people actually feel something, they're more mobilised to do something. So I think there's a really powerful role for musicians. This is the other thing. People were like... ‘Oh, you don't have a big platform. Why are you destroying your own chances in the industry? By speaking out when you don't even have a platform yet?’ I'm like, bitch I have a fucking platform. I'm making my platform by speaking my values.”

Period. Like fucking thank you.

My mind gropes towards thought, I wonder what would have happened if I chose to keep creating like Miranda did as Miran.da, I wonder what other ways of feeling have been cordoned off by my choice to occupy the critic position. Perhaps I lost my critic cap for a reason. Miranda and I head to Roppongi, a Japanese restaurant where I used to go with my family when I was young. This is because at Roppongi an artist named Silvas is playing.

L: I made my way up, entered, and found a man I can only describe as Michael Jackson, if Michael Jackson had worn the wrong coloured glove.

J: Silvas is a from-the-ground reappraisal of virality. He is at once referential to music from classic rock and pop from the ‘80s, but entirely new and anachronistic with his references to the phenomena of mogging. I knew I had to interview him. I message Levi and insist upon his attendance to take photos.

I ask him, “what does it mean to you to mog?”

He says “to mog is to be yourself. It's as simple as that, right? So I started saying mog as a substitute for using the word rock in my songs, and then defined my own meaning, really.”

L: I wrote down, for future reference: Is “mo__ing” spelt with one g or two? Jess and I would settle that later.

J: At the Globe Lane stage, Miranda and I recreate our youth dancing in the crowd when I feel something dripping over my head. I thought the rain had stopped. The dripping stops and starts again about three or so times before I finally get the bright idea to look up and see that some bitch is totally pouring her drink on my head. Finally, some action. Instead of continuing my angry tirade, I note the time, 7:20pm, and write it in my notes app. If I couldn't find who did it, I could at least own the narrative.

L: Jess questioned many patrons, but no one was willing to confess. A crime such as this carries the death penalty, which is why nobody admitted to it.

J: The spilt drink may as well have been the return of my critic cap to my head.

L: The artist was Spike Fuck with his ensemble of spike fuckers (that’s my description for them), and I attached myself to the sound immediately: something like Iggy Pop, maybe a little Sex Pistols. At one point the crowd was informed that heroin is great until it isn't. I scoffed. All drugs are great until they aren't. That's why people do them.

Reality, I remembered, is also great until it isn't. It just happens to be the only one they let you take to work.

J: I begin insisting upon seeing Silvas' second set at Heyday. I attempt to make a case to Levi.

"Only ten minutes of getting mogged."

It was decided, we were getting mogged a second time. We stay for one song, the title being 'I Wanna Be A Rockstar. As we leave, I hear him yell to the crowd.

"You'll remember this moment one day."

L: On the drive home we debated how many g's are in "mo__ed," and arrived, after rigorous academic debate, at a scale of enjoyment. Mo, pronounced "muh," signifies extreme disappointment. Mog signifies contempt, or at best average enjoyment. And mogged is reserved for something so amazing and breathtaking that there are no other words to describe it. Adorno would have hated it. Jess, the smarter one of us two, was certain it was correct, and so it was.

Maybe that old German was right. Maybe a thousand people draped in bucket hats are exactly the standardisation he feared. Bugger that! Adorno never stood on a flooded out hill in Wollongong, soaked to the bone, forgetting he was cold for the length of one song. He never watched a jester drink from his shoe. And I'm certain he never saw a woman glide through a storm like it was summer, covered in nothing more than a cow-print bikini.

The factory, most days, is dull. Row after row of the same tired sedan in the same drab colour scheme. But once a blue moon, off that very line, rolls a Monaro. Which tells you that the factory still makes something real. You just have to be standing in the rain to feel it.

“Mogged”. Two g's.