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READER
I'm not thrilled about this week's spate of Lollapalooza news, not least because of the ho-hum lineup. The festival consistently fills its lineup with rock dinosaurs (Journey) and dreck (Angels & Airwaves, Front Bottoms, headliner Post Malone) as reliably as it manages to book at least some great acts I want to see (Polo G, Megan Thee Stallion). But when you have more than 170 slots to fill, an incentive to sell $350 passes, and the financial and structural backing of the single-largest multinational in live entertainment (Live Nation), there's a high probability of having a mediocre batting average when it comes to booking. Taste is subjective and all, but I do wonder what target demographic Lolla organizers were thinking of when they ranked Limp Bizkit on the same line as Young Thug and Playboi Carti in 2021.

My concerns about Lollapalooza have always been more than just its lineups. Yesterday, Mayor Lightfoot 
tweeted a video promoting the return of Lollapalooza at full capacity at the end of July. Sure, watching Lightfoot and Dr. Allison Arwady pretending to like Polo G made me cringe. But I'm more concerned about the city prioritizing an event run by a monolithic entertainment company that stands to re-emerge from the pandemic more easily than the country's litany of independent venues that have been on the precipice of closure since March 2020. Kendall Polidori recently wrote that local venues are still struggling to receive any of the $16 billion in aid from the Save Our Stages Act via the Small Business Administration. Watching the city continue to give preferential treatment to Lolla not long after Live Nation attempted to build five venues in the Lincoln Yards development makes me anxious about the role this year's festival could play in giving a company accused of monopolistic behavior more ground in Chicago. 

Beyond that, I'm still worried about the Bridge Phase of our pandemic recovery. I still have a hard time understanding the rationale behind all the chain stores that have 
decided to abandon mask safety guidelines for fully vaccinated customers when not even 40 percent of the country has received a full dose of the vaccine. So the thought of our city hosting a four-day event that draws 100,000 people a day two months from now does not set me at ease. As I wrote earlier this week in regards to the recent spate of announcements for late summer festivals, vaccinations are trending in the right direction, but the rush to host events that cluttered an entire summer calendar at this juncture feels a little like taking a Divvy onto Lake Shore Drive. Lollapalooza draws most of its crowd from outside the city, and there's so much we still don't know about COVID-19 and its variants that I do worry about the greater health risk of cramming that many people into Grant Park. (I have yet to attend a Lollapalooza where I don't end up squeezing through a crowd of strangers simply to walk from one stage to another, or en route to a porta-potty.) 

At the moment, Lollapalooza's COVID-19 policy matches the ones presented by other festivals. Attendees must show proof of their vaccinations or a negative COVID-19 test from within a 24-hour period. (How anyone who hasn't gotten fully vaccinated and plans to attend all four days will pull that off is beyond me.) That puts me at some ease, but I may wait till we're further out of the woods before attending a terrifically huge event.

Sincerely,
 
  "Bodies of Water LP Takes Moontype From Solo Bedroom Songwriting to Chicago's Most Hyped Rock Trio," by Jessi Roti (Audiofemme)
  
"Who Killed Mac Dre?," by Donald Morrison (Passion of the Weiss) 

 
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