The third day at North Coast was by far one of the best, strongest and most thrilling days! I had a packed itinerary and I was going back and forth, back and forth jetting through amazingly strong acts all day.
I started off right away with Benny Benassi. Benny, for someone who has been in the “game” for such a long amount of time, was so energetic, fun, and overall proud of being there. He was signing beach balls, dancing, smiling, videotaping and even wrote a thank you to all his fans on his Mac towards the end of his set. He did not dissapoint at all especially with “New York City Boy” by the Pet Shop Boys and “House Nation” by The HouseMaster Boyz. For a small afternoon set, the crowd was extremely intense as opposed to the past two days. Let’s not forget “Satisfaction” which really just pushed the entire set over the edge.
Afterwards Mayer Hawthorne really helped relax a crowd which possibly by this point had experienced a ton of dance music. It was just nice to sit on a bench and have “Gangster Love” make me feel like I could breath. I really enjoyed some of the parts where it was nodding to jam bands. The crowd was especially excited to just see someone a bit different than Hip-Hop, Dance and Jam Bands.
After Mayer I headed over to Green Velvet who had a live set and just destroyed, annihilated, put to shame most of the sets that gone on. From the juke dancers, to the singing, the beats, the energy. Every single thing was just pushing and pushing this amazing Chicago sound through and through. When the set got to “La La Land” it was clear that Green Velvet and the crew gave a lot of people a run for their money. They even played “Percolator”! I was once sitting through someone just tearing Chicago House as something old and bland. Green Velvet made it obvious that (in a city where most people do not understand the global contributions Chicago has made to dance music) it is a phenomenal out of body experience to live through a classic set, let alone just watch a performer have so much power over people. Every single person, even the security, was moving along to the beats.
After Green Velvet, I caught a little bit of Lupe Fiasco who performed “Kick, Push” and “Superstar”. After Lupe ended, Nas and Damian Marley just lit the earth on fire with peace, love and harmony. Not to mention several sing alongs amongst a tired and drunk crowd. Watching them backstage, made me feel extremely lucky not to only be able to experience such amazing performers throughout the three days but also made me realize how little Chicago is represented at Pitchfork and Lolla. The entire weekend went without one glitch, security was spot on, no noise bleeding and all the acts were spot on for the audience that came out. It was nice to finally give dance music the respect it deserved especially with the light shows and large stages they were playing in as opposed to one small area.
Would I come back to North Coast, yes. Why? Because it took a first year festival to finally give Chicago some love and tied together the loose ends Lolla and Pitchfork failed to tie. My only recommendation would be to book Cher next year.
Enjoy this video summary I took on my Digital Harinezumi, I shoot with film so “high” quality photographs will not be up until after the festival.
Chris is wrong. This is an excellent review, minus the Benny Benassi part :)
I had never seen or even heard a Green Velvet song (so I thought, I obviously had heard Perculator and probably a few others, just didn’t know they were his). I agree with every word written about him in this review. It was hands down the best set of the festival. I only wish it went the full hour because I was having a blast.
Went to the Green Velvet/Claude Van Stroke afterparty, and it was even more house heaven. I was in ridiculously poor shape after 2 days of enjoying all the merriments of the festivites, but this music fired me right back up.
You didn’t even have a chance to see holy ghost!? flying lotus? claude vonstroke? disco biscuits? which were pretty much the main reasons why everyone came. nas and damian marley was of course full of love but strictly over the top demanding everyone to come to their stage with the sheer volume of their music which could be heard from the exits( even clouding the sound from other stages) and could not help but notice that NAS looked exactly like Jay-Z with an oversized yankees cap covering his face and a white tee. Lupe was poor and noisy backed up tremendously by his hype men and mayer hawthorne (bless his talented heart) was in fact kinda boring for the rest of the festival. Bad job covering this event my boy.