Fuck Yeah Fest IV or Why I Stopped Caring

The Fuck Yeah Fest is an annual music festival that takes place in the Echo Park neighborhood. It's one of the cheaper festivals that take place around California, so a few of us decided to make the drive to L.A. to check it out.

Spanning across four venues (The Echo, Echoplex, Rec Center and Taix), the festival charges $13 per day for an entire evening and night of obscure, unlistenable and/or mediocre bands from around the country. A handful of O.K. bands, like L.A. locals The Muslims, were on the bill too.

Unfortunately for me, I was in a rather despondent mood, a lot like Bill Murray in Lost in Translation, feeling numb to everything that was happening around me. So in other words, I'm unable to write up an objective or even fairly subjective report on the Fuck Yeah Fest. So if you get annoyed halfway through this post, please do stop reading.

The first act we listened to were The Mae Shi. I remember them being loud and somewhat catchy, but their lyrics started to annoy me 30 seconds into one song. The lead singer sang on and on, "I get everything I want" or something abrasively bratty like that. Toward the end of the set, he started crowd surfing, and by that time, I was already tired and wondering what the big fucking deal was.

The Mae Shi have received a lot of blog hype, and maybe if I was in a better mood that night, I would be writing something like, "They had a lot of energy, and they played all sorts of interesting instruments I can't name. I am very optimistic for their careers." But since I don't know anything about music writing, I'm just going to shut up and say they were pretty O.K. Whatever.

We tried to head over to Taix, a fancy French restaurant that was hosting the comedy lineup, but the place was closed to anyone under 21. So we headed back to The Echo and sat through a hip-hop act, Brother Reade, who I can only say resembled a mix between Brother Ali and El-P. Another white emcee who had decent lyricism, a couple of hard beats, but nothing amazing. Mind you, I am not bashing on Brother Reade because he is white or claiming that white emcees need to be better than the average black emcee to prove their worth. This black/white argument in hip-hop is null and counterproductive to the culture, unless you're part of that potentially awesome and yet-to-exist Hip-hop Studies major at U.C. Berkeley. Then it might be a relevant topic to discuss.

Anyway, I digress. I've already driven this post to a level of self-indulgence unforeseen in Forest Fire, so I'll just end with a review of the last act I saw before I left the festival to eat (which was the best part of the night), Lavender Diamond.

Lavender Diamond is a "folk/country-pop" quartet from Los Angeles that has toured with The Decemberists. They were the headliners for the first night of Fuck Yeah Fest at the Rec Center. I remember Lavender Diamond from The Decemberists show at The Wiltern last fall. At that show, I couldn't really hear lead singer Becky Stark very well, since Decemberists fans don't care for anyone else but Colin Meloy and would love to perform sexual favors for him if they could. Sorry for being crass. But from what I could hear and see, Lavender Diamond performed some catchy whimsical pop music, the kind that you listen to while making scrapbooks about ghosts and dinosaurs.

But on the night of Fuck Yeah Fest, Becky Stark was unbearable. She talked as if she was nine-years-old with a Valium prescription and was more Madonna than "folk/country-pop" singer. She started out with a cutesy, somewhat funny bit on mistaking the Fuck Yeah Fest for the "Fuck You Fest." Then she went on and on about how people shouldn't use plastic bags at the grocery store. Adding to all this, she could hardly keep the high notes on her songs. She blamed the sound guy for this and then, like a nine-year-old, stated, "I can't sing if I can't hear myself," as she sulked around on stage for another five minutes.

In the thirty minutes I stood up for Lavender Diamond, I had to watch this prima donna shout out "Fuck the patriarchy!" more times than she should have before it stopped being funny, bitch about the sound, bitch about plastic bags (not very sincerely, but ironically, I assume, as most hipsters like to do because they're afraid to be sincere and earnest about anything) and leave her more talented and more level-headed band members to distract the crowd while she acted like an undeserving, overprivileged nine-year-old whose parents didn't shower her with enough attention. I overheard someone saying, "Isn't she radiant?" at the beginning of the show. But that sentiment soon shifted to, "Maybe she's like this because it's a smaller venue." I don't know what was wrong with Becky Stark that night, but it was a piss-poor showing on her part.

Midway through the show, we left and went out to eat at the Brite Spot (1918 W. Sunset Blvd.), where they serve nicely priced breakfast sandwiches and O'Brien potatoes until 4:00 a.m. on weekends. Best part of the night.

Tom and Ian went to see Busdriver back at The Echo, and they mentioned he was good as expected. He also did a They Might Be Giants cover, which I wish I had seen.