WE Fest: Is This the Future of the Music Festival?
WE FestWilmington, North Carolina
Begins: May 22
http://wefestival.com/
In a jovial North Carolinian drawl, Kenyata Sullivan, lead singer of indie pop band Majestic Twelve and cofounder of the Wilmington Exchange Festival, laughs as he issues something close to a mission statement: "We can't wait for the music industry to die — we've been stabbing that bloated fucker for years!"
The roots of the festival extend back 12 years, when a group of hungry filmmakers, writers and musicians began mailing cassettes and photos back and forth to each other, creating a pre-Internet, snail mail–based P2P network. "You have to remember," says Sullivan, "back then it was really hard to be exposed to anything outside of your local community, other than what you saw on MTV or heard on mainstream radio, college radio if you were lucky. If another band liked what we were doing, they would mail what they were doing back to us, and it turned into this huge community." Sullivan describes the five-day Wilmington Exchange Festival, which begins today, as a "physical representation of the global mail culture we were all participating in."
What drove you to start a festival?
WE Fest began in 1996 as a reaction to other conferences going on — Philadelphia Music Conference, NEMO, CMJ, SXSW. All of those events are driven by money, so you will pay them money to be considered to play for free, and then drive halfway around the country and play to an empty room 'cause the Jane's Addiction reunion is down the block. We had participated on some level in all of those events — either as showcasing artists, organizers, speakers on a panel — and we decided to have an event that we thought stripped away all of the bullshit.
Like what?
To begin, we took money completely out of the equation: We quit having bands send us money in order to submit, got rid of the idea of panels because we never thought anyone learned anything, and focused on being a community event, which we didn't think existed. I mean, it's brilliant when you think about it: Record labels give festivals money in order to give away their stuff for free to the people who come who have paid money to get stuff for "free." We only charge a dollar a day, everyone volunteers, from the organizers to the bands, and we all work for free beer…and have a great fucking time for a change.
Wait ... no swag bags?
The only reason festivals have bags instead of not having bags is so that you can charge people money to put something in the bag [laughs]. "Hey, if you give us $500 we're gonna put something in the bag." Fuck it. What we do is put all the stuff people donate on this big table in something we call Giveaway Alley, and people can pick and choose what they want. It's more personal that way. We just have free shit.
How is the vibe different from the industry-oriented festivals?
You get back into this environment where people are doing it for the love of it, and everybody just kind of falls back into why they first started playing. When you are 17 and you start a band, you do it to get laid, to rock and so your friends will think you are cool. For a week we all really get back to that, where it's really just about, "Dude bring the rock, drink some beer and ... man, you are cute!" [Laughs] It's our new childhood, in a lot of ways.
