I feel like last year, I was revving up for this sort of article to help us break out of the dark shadow of the dystopian nightmare that was the world-crippling plague. We needed a hot girl summer on fucking steroids to help undo—or at least distract us from—worldwide trauma, deaths, loss of livelihoods, etc. For like five seconds, it looked like it was safe to crawl out of the cave and wave our genitals at the sun. But alas, too many folks thought the vaccine would make their dick fall off, and COVID came back with a righteous left hook. It didn’t knock us out, but it did put us down for a spell. Before you know it, holy crap, here we are at the second summer where we’re coming out of the haze of an unprecedented global health crisis. Like, didn’t we just do this?
I stand by my idea last year of having an all-nude music festival out on Collins Beach on Sauvie Island. That still needs to happen. However, if this is indeed the end of COVID-life, I think it’ll take more than just one bareback, sandy-butts-and-boobs fest to help celebrate the end of a truly shit era.
Summer is festival season, and this is the time when every city is trying to do its own regionally-flavored Coachella. Since Sasquatch died and Coachella has basically become an Instagram content generator for fashion, there’s definitely room for another city to pick up the torch. Why not Portland?
Before you @ me with South By Southwest, Bumbershoot, or Treefort, I think those are their own animal of festival with tech, film, and other stuff. I’m talking specifically music (and obviously, skimpy outfits.) We need a Pacific Northwest Lollapalooza. An urban answer to Pickathon.
Obviously, I stand by the wangs-out jamboree at Sauvie Island, but I also think we need to start working on repairing the image of Portland’s rather...tarnished image. Between these ideas and my socialist takeover plan from last month, I think we can successfully rebrand Portland as America’s Upper Left Corner’s Music Hub (that’s not Seattle).
Bridgefest
Bridgetown, Bridge City, we got a lot of bridges here. There’s this big fuck-off river that splits the city in two, and it is a somewhat iconic part of the city. Sure, San Francisco and New York have like...more "famous" and "visually stunning" bridges, but Portland has like...a lot of them. Well, ten. But get this—Bridgefest actually takes place on the bridges. We float the poor bastards who agreed to play this half-baked idea out on barges under each of Portland’s iconic bridges, and the poorer bastards who agreed to attend this thing can watch from their favorite bridge/stage. Quick! We gotta get to the Tilikum Stage to catch Billie Eilish’s set. Fuck! But then we gotta run all the way to Steel Stage if we’re gonna catch Run The Jewels. I know I’m aiming high with the talent, but you gotta shoot for the moon. Ideally, we’d get Phoebe Bridgers to headline. Sorry. The best part: curfew would be easy to enforce. We just raise all the drawbridges to get people to go the fuck home. Might be some legal issues there, but whatevs, we’re firing from the hip. World War III is just around the corner, and time isn’t real.
Stripperpalooza
Same gimmick as Treefort, Bumbershoot, or the ill-fated Musicfest Northwest—but instead of bars and smaller venues, each stage is at one of our beloved strip clubs! All of which you’ll see mapped out in this very magazine. It might be wise to keep it localized to downtown since we are trying to rebrand an admittedly destroyed reputation. Also, these kinds of urban festivals should be at least somewhat walkable. I understand not every nudie bar has the space or resources to accommodate live music, but come on, we can make do. I’ve seen shows in shoeboxes downtown. We’ll make it work. This music festival might have to lean more towards electronic, hip hop, and DJ sets since the booth is already set up, but I know there are clubs that have a corner that’s just as workable for a live band as some house shows I’ve been to. We do strip club haunted houses, so why not this? It’s no less cheesy.
Homeless Man
I recently saw yet another news story about the "homeless" problem in Portland. And as usual, the only people interviewed were several Super Karen homeowners upset that the view from their overpriced house in the Pearl District was ickier than usual. Usually, my eyes glaze over at this classist hogwash, but I noticed a striking similarity amongst the complaints from these American Dream Seekers. No shootings. No murders. No cop cars. Across six insufferable, nosy neighbors, the only thing they were bitching about was that these mentally ill unwashed folks were sleeping in tents, doing drugs, and having sex out in the open. Then, it hit me. You just described Burning Man! We need to stop looking at these tent cities as a problem to be solved and start looking at them as an audience to exploit. Until we do something like lynch all the landlords to lower housing costs or simply put these folks in the metric fucktons of housing simply sitting around unused, these shanty towns aren’t going away. If you shoo them away, they’ll just pop up elsewhere. I say build a goddamn music festival around them! We’ll find the biggest hotspot downtown, near the park blocks, and build a stage. It will literally look identical to Burning Man, except without the sand. Same vibes. Less privilege. And we don’t even need to build a giant, faux-pagan effigy to burn down. Inevitably, one of these houseless folks will burn down their own tent—probably with them inside. It’ll be more authentically pagan than Burning Man, ’cause we’ll actually be sending a real human sacrifice to the Old Gods! Summer Is Icumen In!
