Outside Lands 2023 Captured the Tension Between San Francisco’s Past and Present

Paolo Ragusa
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The post Outside Lands 2023 Captured the Tension Between San Francisco’s Past and Present appeared first on Consequence.

Fifty years after its psychedelic heyday, it’s easy to look around at San Francisco and feel like the city has moved on from its countercultural spirit. What once was a mecca for artists, queer folks, and outsiders now caters to the Silicon Valley elite. But every year, Outside Lands festival mounts its three-day adventure in Golden Gate Park in an attempt to unite both past and present in San Francisco. At Outside Lands, you can see expansive, mind-blowing psychedelic rock and socially-charged hip hop, all while participating in this upscale experience that seems to be more concerned with satisfying as many techbros as possible — and, well, that’s San Francisco in the year 2023.

But of course, Outside Lands works overtime to ensure that it never feels like a Salesforce company retreat. The 15th anniversary edition of Outside Lands this past weekend (August 11th-13th) was, as it is every year, a completely unique festival experience. Not only is the natural beauty of Golden Gate Park on display at each and every Outside Lands stage, the park’s frequent onslaughts of thick fog and mist make you feel like you’re in a totally different universe. The lineup this year, which featured headliners Kendrick Lamar, Foo Fighters, and ODESZA, as well as Lana Del Rey, The 1975, Megan Thee Stallion, and Janelle Monáe, felt in conversation with past, present, and future.

But it’s not all just great music — there’s heavily-upgraded Grass Lands, which allows attendees to purchase and consume cannabis from local California growers. Wine Lands, a usual purveyor of “Napa Valley Vibes” at Outside Lands, moved to the shady McClaren Pass this year, and the newly-mounted Cocktail Magic featured boozy drinks amidst scratch-heavy DJ sets.

As Outside Lands has expanded the breadth of their experiences, so too has the festival’s overall volume and density. This year was one of the most packed editions of the festival in their 15 year history — with somewhere around 250,000 tickets sold, Outside Lands was particularly ambitious with how many attendees they could hold this year. This certainly came at the detriment of the festival’s SOMA tent, which experienced such a massive influx of people early in the day on Friday that the stage’s dancefloor reportedly collapsed.

Still, if you played your cards right and expertly planned your bathroom breaks, then Outside Lands 2023 was one to remember. The festival was streaming via Amazon Music this year, so if you caught a bit of the festival this year — or you didn’t — here’s what went down.

Heavy Traffic

The overall volume of attendees at Outside Lands this year was bewildering. I’ve been to quite a few editions of Outside Lands and many festivals myself, and I’m a huge supporter of getting to the grounds early to check out artists in the 12:00 p.m. to 3:00 p.m. window — but I have never seen a festival so crowded for a 12:45 p.m. stage-opening set. This is great for the smaller undercard artists who might have feared playing to an empty field, and ended up playing some of the rowdiest sets of the festival. But it did mean that when the late afternoon and early evening hours rolled around, the density was high, and the lines for food and bathrooms were very long.

Outside Lands Recap 2023 Review
Outside Lands Recap 2023 Review

Outside Lands 2023, photo Courtesy of Alive Coverage

Some attendees suspected that this year’s particularly high volume was due to the newly-offered GA+, which was given select lounges throughout the festival grounds and expedited entry, all designed to be a hybrid VIP and GA experience. That’s on top of super high-end VIP experiences, which continues to expand every year. Perhaps this year’s packed attendance and VIP-centric experience will lead to an even bigger price-hike for next year, but only time will tell.

Then, too, Outside Lands know their audience. San Francisco is a big electronic music city, and the festival delivered. ODESZA’s Sunday night headlining set was, frankly, enormous — certainly bigger than Foo Fighters’ headlining set on Saturday night, which happened to be in direct opposition to both Lana Del Rey and house producer FISHER.

This all led to the unfortunate closure of the festival’s SOMA tent, which was evacuated shortly before 5:00 p.m. on Friday and remained closed for the rest of the day. They reopened SOMA the following day at 2:00 p.m., and once again closed the tent three hours later. On Sunday, they made do with the area surrounding the tent and mounted a temporary open air stage instead — it may not have had the air conditioning or the dazzling light displays that the tent promises, but it sure looked like fun, and might be the move for the future.

Those Foos Fought Hard

“It’s gonna be a long fuckin’ night,” Dave Grohl said on Saturday evening of Outside Lands. It’s something he says at nearly every Foo Fighters concert — but at this performance, it seemed like Grohl took the 10:00 p.m. curfew as a personal challenge. As he reminded the crowd, it’s hard to condense 28 years of music into a two hour set, and even harder when that set is supposed to include a well-deserved two song cameo from Grohl’s daughter Violet… and also a prank where Michael Bublé shows up to sing “Haven’t Met You Yet” with the band.

Grohl’s insistence on beating the clock came at the price of a more meditative, mournful return. They’ve certainly been busy since kicking off their first tour post-Taylor Hawkins back in May, so it makes sense that the air of the show was less fraught than, say, their headlining performance at Boston Calling. But I, for one, thought that the Foos would bring a bit more sentimentality to the table, and maybe even feel less obliged to churn out hit after hit with little time in between.

It is kind of a perfect metaphor, then, that the band seemed to focus harder than ever on cramming in their songs than publicly mourning, with Grohl gleefully grabbing the stage clock as they wrapped up “Everlong” and showing it to the crowd, as if to say “Look! We did it! We finished on time!” Dave didn’t say much to the crowd other than dedicating “Aurora” to Hawkins and “Show Me How,” with Violet Grohl, to his late mother. Instead, he’s letting the music say what he needs to say — and whether you can hear those words through his full-throated belts or not, he and the Foo Fighters will keep on running.

The Secret Weapon of Outside Lands ’23 was… The Toyota Music Den?

They’re at lots of festivals, these mini promo stages with 30 minute acoustic shows or mostly-vanilla DJ sets. They’re usually reserved for the earlier hours of the festival and very often under-attended. They’re almost always sponsored by a car company or Amazon or HelloFresh or something. When the Outside Lands schedule came out this year, I took note of the Toyota Music Den and assumed very few attendees would be stopping over to its location in McClaren Pass.

I was totally wrong. The Toyota Music Den was absolutely lit. The impossibly tiny stage was not desidgned for such a high volume of people, but it allowed for incredibly intimate and engaging performances. Bay Area natives No Vacation played Saturday’s opening set on the Lands End stage, and drew a decent crowd for a noon performance, but their 4:20 p.m. set at the Toyota Music Den was exorbitantly packed, highly energetic, and filled with some rousing new tunes. Similarly, with the absence of the SOMA tent, Justin Jay’s surprise DJ set on Saturday was hugely attended, making McClaren Pass a full woodland dance party.

An Ode to San Francisco

Outside Lands endeavors to honor the culture of music and community in the city. A wonderful new experience this year arrived with Dolores’, an open air dance party that specifically celebrated San Francisco’s extensive queer, trans, and DIY history. Not only were there jaw-dropping drag performances and ecstatic DJ sets happening all throughout the day, it was an oasis of fun and openness that speaks to the heart of San Francisco’s LGBTQ+ community.

Outside Lands, Photo Courtesy of Alive Coverage
Outside Lands, Photo Courtesy of Alive Coverage

Outside Lands, photo Courtesy of Alive Coverage

Similarly, psychedelic rock is always welcome in San Francisco, and this year featured the historic genre in droves. Brooklyn band Crumb played a dazzling, jam-heavy set on Friday, with their new songs “Crushxd” and “Dust Bunny” killing on the cozy Sutro stage. Alvvays broke out a bevy of songs from last year’s stunning Blue Rev, and vocalist Molly Rankin truly soared atop jangly guitars and dreamy synths (Blue Rev‘s “Very Online Guy” is great on the record, but even more hypnotizing live). No Vacation, Soccer Mommy, Wednesday, and Beabadoobee all brought plenty of fuzz, plenty of hooks, and plenty of psychedelic vibes.

Some More Standout Offerings

Here are some moments that made Outside Lands great this year:

  • Interpol performing Turn On the Bright Lights in full. It’s not often that you’ll get an anniversary album play-through at a festival that isn’t Riot Fest, or that you’ll get it for the 21st anniversary… but Outside Lands’ indie rock fans were treated with a special performance of Interpol’s landmark debut, Turn On the Bright Lights. While classics like “Obstacle 1” and “PDA” often make their way into Interpol’s sets, it was the build-and-burst energy of deeper cuts “Hands Away” and “The New” that drew in the crowd most of all. Furthermore, it was a fascinating look back at the band’s early output, and how some of those songs have become even more precious with time.

  • Janelle Monáe brought utopia to Golden Gate Park. Her standout tracks from this year’s The Age of Pleasure were irresistible, and Outside Lands were very smart to book her this year. In fact, seeing Monáe keep older bangers like “Yoga,” “Electric Lady,” and “Tightrope” in her sets help to show just how much she’s evolved over the last decade, and how she’s constantly looking for new ways to entice her fans and step out with authenticity.

  • Alex G, take a bow. His Friday afternoon set — mostly comprised of songs from last year’s remarkable God Save the Animals — was focused, restrained, deliberate, and most of all, emotional. The true power of his songs is not always immediately evident; it often takes just one purposely-placed chord shift or one crushing line to land in clarity. Sometimes his music doesn’t quite make sense — and sometimes, like on the final two tracks “Miracles” and “Forgive,” his music has an overwhelming openness that feels like a bright light in the dark.

  • The food, oh my, the food. There were some incredible choices this year that reflected the melting pot of the Bay Area. Some highlights included Pantry Pigeon’s marinated cheese plate in Wine Lands, duck fat fried rice from Dirty Habit, and Korean BBQ beef waffle fries from Koja Kitchen.

  • Biking is the way to go. If you’re planning on attending Outside Lands and don’t want to deal with shuttle bus lines or an eternity for an Uber, commuter bikes (specifically electric ones, because, well, San Francisco) are the way to go. It was very easy to get a bike, even in the most concentrated portions of the night — and pretty cheap too.

Outside Lands 2023 Photo Gallery (click to expand and scroll through):

Outside Lands 2023 Captured the Tension Between San Francisco’s Past and Present
Paolo Ragusa

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