Pizza Recap: Pygmalion Weekend

Now that we're a few weeks out and everyone's festival hangovers have hopefully mostly dissipated, I want to review some of my favorite and least favorite parts of this year's Pygmalion festival. Like every year, good music, tasty eats, and hip folks were plentiful, and everyone made it out of the weekend relatively unscathed. The only really bad part of the festival is that we now have to wait a whole year until the next Pygmalion. Let me reflect on my experiences from that magical weekend: The Good-The headliners lived up to the hype. By midnight on Friday, I was feeling a little weary of an entire day of an entire day of Pygmalion, but I had a drink to fortify myself and hit up Savoy's midnight show at Canopy, which was an absolute trip. My eyes and ears were assaulted by their sweet laser light show and funky dance rhythms respectively, 10/10 would rage again. RTJ, TuNeYaRdS, and the other headliners also all killed it.-Food trucks were on point throughout the whole weekend. Thank you, based Pop Stop.-Free shows were plentiful and awesome, big shoutout to Exile on Main St. for hosting shows, the Resinater show on Sunday afternoon was a great conclusion to my weekend. Also, it was a great excuse to spend more of my hard-earned $$$ on records...you got me good, Exile.-No shows got rained out, ensuring that drunk and belligerent festival-goers didn't spill over into campus too much.-Everybody talked about how awesome of a town Champaign is, even the big-time bands who have clearly been to much larger and cooler cities. d'awwww <3 The Bad-Seriously, what's the deal with all the premium shows? If I receive an all-weekend pass, I would expect that pass to work all weekend. Paying $40 on top of the pass for the two shows I actually want to see is pretty infuriating to poor Pygmalion attendees everywhere. The free coffee coupons are sweet, but maybe keep those next year and let people see the shows they want to see?-I feel like a bad person for not attending any of the tech//lit//made activities over the whole weekend. That's 3/4 of the color plugs on the Pygmalion posters, totally passed up! Should I feel guilty? Maybe I'm just not hip enough to have the full Pygmalion experience, but it seems to me like if we had just music and no other nonsense, we might be able to have more artists, shows, or venues. Steven Wolfram is pretty cool though, he can stay.-Food trucks with special increased festival pricing. Not cool, guys.-Pizza FM had one press pass that was shared between people, so I couldn't be a festival bum and spend all weekend loitering around downtown Champaign without accomplishing anything. In hindsight, this is probably a good thing. The Weird-I saw multiple little kids wearing RTJ shirts throughout the weekend. I love RTJ and their musical stylings, but nothing says "good parenting" like having your kid rep a band whose most famous track is "Lie, Cheat, Steal, Kill, Win".-Those weird guys who hang out right outside of every venue smoking cigs constantly. I see you have the wristband, so are you intending to actually hear any music or just look cool outside the show and then mutter later about how the band sucked?-Resinater branded rolling papers. ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)