Pitch(fork)ing this playlist for you
Summer has finally hit the (61820) area. Champaign is deserted except for the occasional student rolling down Green Street like tumbleweed. Professors have finally begun enjoying the sights and sounds of campus without the dreaded fear of running into Pete, the 6'2 sympathetic blockhead whom they failed in Calc 3 the last two semesters. We now inhabit a new bountiful season. Summer is rarely all fun and games though. Personally, I’m back at home following my mom's rules and using my chemistry background to maximize the output of outdoor seating at a restaurant in town... But whether you’re swamped with summer school homework, the internship extravaganza, or steadily holding down a barista job, I think we can all agree: it’s festival season! Time to crack open a cold one (or three) and start listening to Pizza FM's summer festival playlist. This week we’re honing in on the sounds of a festival near and dear to me, the Chicago giant that's known as Pitchfork Music Festival! Hosted in Union Park since 2005, Pitchfork Music festival has been catering to the good people of Chicago with platter after platter of talented artists for more than a decade now. This year's festival takes place during the weekend of July 20th to the 22nd. For me, the Pitchfork lineup gets better every year (so maybe my music taste does too, symbiotically). Conde Nast seems to cater to my Spotify algorithm with this year's highlights being everything from the Australian hailing Courtney Barnett to the soft hip-hop sounds of Ravyn Lenae. Until as recently as a week ago, I was pronouncing her name as Rah-Vee-n instead of the actual Ray-ven, so let's stop this muddlement and get her name right. In all seriousness, Ravyn captured my ears when Spotify spat out Moon Shoes in 2016. I was hooked, for I had a pair of shoes deemed Moon Boots (before you look up the price and roll your eyes, they were knock-offs and well worn since my mom bought them 3 sizes too big), the name of the EP alone encouraged me to give her a listen. Of course, there was more than a very vague personally commercial reason to keep her album blasting. Moon Shoe's lyrics discuss the pitfalls which come with holding preconceived notions of how relationships ought to be. “I think this is happy,” Ravyn croons. “I think we should go now”, “I think, I think, I think...” There is often a pressure to be a certain way, rather than an embracement of the freedom to just be. Which is just a nice way of saying, "young people can overthink a relationship rather than realizing the uniqueness of each one."Ravyn's music travels through experiences that are familiar to most and important to many: romance in the age of technology, the toxicity of social media, and the challenges of political unrest. But hey, if you're more into the old but gold sound, check out Fleet Foxes. Their music is good to cry to and they're headlining Saturday's lineup. So what are you waiting for? Queue up this year's Pitchfork playlist, carefully curated for our listeners, readers, and viewers of Pizza FM.