It's happened at almost every festival I've attended this year: Run The Jewels are there, and for some increasingly small amount of time I think about how I should really check out some other artist I haven't seen during their set, because I've already seen them so many times in so few months. At FYF, the fight finally died out, because how you can ever say no to seeing Run The Jewels? If they're there, it immediately becomes a guarantee that they'll be one of the best things about whatever festival you're at. At FYF, they took the main stage after Dinosaur Jr., with a billboard displaying their album cover up above the festival fences, overlooking the main crowd. (Was this coincidence? Or did they just rent that thing forever, knowing they'd be showing up to hilariously play under their own billboard?) For much of the set, it was all the same setlist flow and schtick that currently make Run The Jewels one of the greatest and most violent joys to see live: the "We Are The Champions" entrance, the bit about how the American Way only includes five things (lie, cheat, steal, win, kill) before "Lie, Cheat Steal," El-P's requisite warning to those up front before the beat to "Close Your Eyes (And Count To Fuck)" dropped. This time, however, Zack de la Rocha showed up from backstage just in time to rap the final verse of the song. People lost it. That's one of the best songs of the year, but as brutal as it is live the one small complaint is that it does always feel truncated without de la Rocha there. This just might've been the best of the many times I've now seen Run The Jewels — Gangsta Boo and Travis Barker also had big showcases on their respective feature tracks ("Love Again" and "All Due Respect"), but seeing de la Rocha onstage with them for "Close Your Eyes" let us see how that song could get even more intense than your average, already exhaustingly-visceral Run The Jewels gig.

Frank Ocean cancelled last minute, and it was announced Kanye was replacing him. You've probably heard about this already; there were plenty of confused and halfway-incensed blog posts about it, questioning just what in the hell Ocean is up to this year. Who cares. It would've been cool to see Ocean, but him pulling out suddenly, then being replaced not by someone lackluster and eminently available but by Kanye West — one of the biggest and most important stars out there, one of the best live acts I've ever seen — made FYF exponentially more exciting just days before it started. It changed the whole vibe and scope of the festival last minute; there was that throbbing intensity in the air before Kanye like there always is, like you have to imagine there definitively isn't before a moody Frank Ocean gig. Wish You Were Here boomed from the main stage in almost its entirety, the giant light rig Kanye had along at Glastonbury idling in the air in wait. It just feels like an event when you're able to see Kanye live. When West did take the stage, it was for one of the most simultaneously hard-hitting and jubilant sets I've yet seen him do. He opened with "No Church In The Wild" — which one could take as some kind of nod to the fact that he was stepping in for Ocean, but it's hard to say whether it would've been a slight or a tribute — and proceeded through one of the most ruthlessly exhilarating sets of songs imaginable in 2015. "Stronger," "Power," and "Black Skinhead" formed a kind of thematically spiraling trio of heavy-hitters early on; there was another trio later, with Cruel Summer tracks "Cold," "I Don't Like," and "Mercy," grouped together. This is the kind of set where he can bring back "Niggas In Paris," everyone loses their shit, and then he can just keep rolling through to "New Slaves" and "Blood On The Leaves." He just feels unstoppable.

But as much as the FYF set was as raw and sweaty as any of the other post-Yeezus festival slots, Kanye was also obviously in just such a great mood. He smiled and laughed, jokingly cut himself off when he realized he could play "Runaway" for forty minutes but that he still had ten years of hits to play for everyone. Rihanna showed up suddenly for "FourFiveSeconds" and again for "All Of The Lights," amidst West's promise of doing one hit a minute, for ten minutes, at the end of the set. It was a little more than a minute for each, but still: the end of the set consisted of West blasting through bits of "Jesus Walks," "All Falls Down," Gold Digger," "Touch The Sky," "All Of The Lights," and finally "Good Life" before closing on a more meditative note with "Only One." I mean, there are not many other artists who could fill a set approaching anything like this. Every now and then it's easy to get caught up in the Kanye of the moment, and to forget that other guy he used to be, to forget just how long he's been on top and casually delivering this century's most immortal songs. FYF might've been my favorite time seeing him, because it was a night where he seemed to be celebrating that, too, and because it was a show on a level entirely different from almost everything else I've seen in my life.

Title Fight's success has been built up incrementally since high school — where, full disclosure, I knew the band's bassist and drummer, Ned and Ben Russin — growing steadily but always shored up by a fervently devoted fanbase. It's something I'd only ever witnessed on general home turf in the Northeast, but apparently it follows them to L.A., too, where people crammed up against the rails in the brightness of just-about-to-wane evening, thrashing along to the band's more muscular, aggressive take on the more spaced-out material from this year's Hyperview. Even "Head In The Ceiling Fan" — the bleary standout from 2012's Floral Green, a track that approximates some lo-fi vision of dream-pop — was more cacophonous, more heavily droning than its studio counterpart. The set paired well after Spiritualized — one the spacy, washing-back-ashore re-entry to FYF Day 2, the next the gut-punch wake-up call. It's still totally surreal and special for me to see these guys do this at this level, a continent's length away from where we grew up.

Sunday at FYF was an unusually over-crowded final day of a festival, a stacked lineup spread out over the oddly laid-out festival so that there was a whole lot of "Catch twenty minutes of this, run back across the entire festival grounds to see twenty minutes of that." But there was a bit of a lull in the early evening, perfectly filled by a strangely danceable Battles set, full of experimental rock that often times sounds like some kind of 8-bit video game hitting the Singularity, or something. Of course, the thing with these guys is the musicianship, the incredibly tight jams and the chunkily catchy riffs mingling with quirky synth layers. For me, personally, having once briefly taking a detour from my interest in guitar for drums, watching John Stanier was the highlight. His beats have this light aggressiveness, more like whiplashes than thunder crashes, and he really forms the backbone of the Battles live experience: center stage, directing the show, propelling them forward with a playing style that has all these little dexterous, quick details but also this inevitable, locked-in groove.

Solange showed up a little over twenty minutes late, which means by the time she actually did come onstage, what had been a tightly packed crowd had already begun to thin out. While the wait sucked, it was pretty much worth it — by the time Solange started, it was pretty easy to move decently close to the stage and feel like you were in a more intimate party, as these festival sets go. Being a sucker for the '80s synth tones and basslines sprinkled occasionally in her music, I'm one of those people who kinda sorta prefers Solange's music to her much more famous sister's, but I wasn't sure what to expect of her live. Having figured it might be a smaller kind of production, it was surprising to find that Solange can do the full-blown pop-star thing, just on a particular level where she promises she's going to go backstage and smoke a massive joint right after the set. (It's pretty hard to picture Beyonce saying that onstage these days, but I've never seen Beyonce live so who knows.) After showing up super late, Solange also stuck around super late, hanging onstage for something like twenty to thirty extra minutes and just continuing to play, bringing Dev Hynes, Moses Sumney, and R&B trio King onstage to sing Nina Simone's "Young, Gifted, & Black" with her before wrapping up with an infectious, crowd-pleasing rendition of “Losing You.”

Frank Ocean and Morrissey were an on-the-surface odd pairing as headliners that also made a lot of sense: both are artists who clearly function according to their own interior rhythms and authority, both make music that can brutally emotional and nakedly honest. When Ocean cancelled, the obvious joke was that the sometimes-erratic Moz hadn't yet. Kanye West and Morrissey were also an on-the-surface odd pairing as headliners that also made a lot of sense: both are thoroughly uncompromising when it comes to their personae as artists, both as much endearing and inspiring as they can be frustrating. Both are the kinds of artists who can show up a festival and burn everything down with the hits, as Kanye more or less opted to this time around, or could go more insular, follow their own thing and bore the casual listeners or the unfamiliar festivalgoers. Morrissey split some kind of difference last night — much more so than late in July, when he played what amounted to a somewhat anticlimactic set at Madison Square Garden. Early on, he dramatically proclaimed himself to be home (L.A. has been his adopted hometown over the years), knowing he was greeting a passionate crowd in this city. Where the MSG gig flagged significantly through the second half of the main set, Moz's FYF set was almost as unstoppable as Kanye, just inherently more suited to the (very large) gathering of the devoted than to anything too universal. "The Queen Is Dead" and "Suedehead" opened the show in one of the best one-two punches you could put together in all of Morrissey's catalogue; "Stop Me If You Think You've Heard This One Before," one of the best Smiths songs, showed up and would've made the whole night worth it even if Morrissey insisted banging his drum to "Meat Is Murder" the whole night. By the time the show began to reach its finale with "Now My Heart Is Full" and "What She Said," it was easy to believe in the legend of Moz again.