America’s Inaugural Air + Style Festival Sounds Like It Was A Ripoff

America’s Inaugural Air + Style Festival Sounds Like It Was A Ripoff

There are about a million music festivals across North America right now, and not all of them are run by people who know what they’re doing. Case in point: The inaugural Air + Style Festival, which came to the Rose Bowl in Pasadena, California this past weekend. Other versions of the festival have gone down in Austria and Beijing in recent years, and the American version is primarily owned by the snowboarder Shaun White, who started off the show sailing down a huge man-made slope. But reports claim that things did not go well from there.

The L.A. Times reports that the festival had some of the same problems (for ticket-buyers, anyway) that have become so depressingly common at festival shows lately: Long lines for everything, $14 cans of Tecate, dangerously drunk fans. The lineup was decent enough, and on the first day, Diplo, Portugal. The Man, the Black Lips, Phantogram, and METZ all performed without incident. But headliner Kendrick Lamar cut short his 90-minute set around the halfway point after complaining bitterly, over and over, that the sound volume was too low. (Apparently, officials posted near the soundboard wouldn’t let it get up past a certain decibel level.) So maybe take this as a reminder that you should have a good look at what you’re paying for before you take the plunge on buying festival tickets.

[Photo by Chelsea Lauren/WireImage @ Made In America]

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