That Was a Lot of Rock & Roll

Thirty hours of concerts in three days. That's a lot of rock & roll! (and chillwave and Afro-pop.)
I spent the weekend at Primavera Sound, a sprawling music festival that turns a hideous expanse of cement at the edge of Barcelona into a hipster paradise for a brief moment every year. It was fantastic. I had a blast wandering from stage to stage, catching bands I loved, bands I'd heard of, and being surprised by new music.
Now any hipster gathering is going to have some truly ridiculous (and ridiculously awesome) people there, but I'm not going to spend a post laughing at hipsters. Mocking their mustaches and bow ties is as obnoxious as those mustaches and bow ties. Besides, as someone who spent the first half of his twenties sporting dreadlocks, I have forfeited the right to criticize youth fashion. (Within reason. Poopy pants are still a crime, no matter what you have in your past.) We are all the products of our circumstances, and if asymmetrical haircuts and fuzz on one's upper lip are the current circumstances, then so be it.
In a weekend full of massive cheering crowds and stage theatrics, one highlight for me was an intimate acoustic set in a little theater on the premises. Jeff Mangum, sitting on a chair and strumming a guitar, entertained a couple thousand people with renditions of old Neutral Milk Hotel songs. I was late to the NMH party, receiving On Avery Island as a birthday gift in 2003, and discovering and falling in love with In the Airplane Over the Sea shortly thereafter, by which time the group had already disbanded with Magnum receding into seemingly permanent exile. He recently started performing again, so I was psyched to catch him in concert. He was affable and personable onstage. His voice was more powerful than on the albums, and he delivered his songs with a passion that gave me the chills that hearing Two Headed Boy sung live should. Good times.
A$AP Rocky confirmed that I just don't like modern hip hop. Various synth bands proved that, despite the nineties revival underway, the eighties will never die. I was pleasantly surprised by the enthusiastic reception given to Afrocubism, a merging of musicians from Mali and Cuba. I figured hipsters generally liked their world music delivered by preppy white guys.
Two other bands got me thinking about what greatness in music means. On Thursday I watched back to back sets by Death Cab for Cutie and Wilco. It is a given among most of my friends that Wilco is a great band, a proposition I support wholeheartedly. Yankee Hotel Foxtrot is one of my all-time favorite albums, one I return to regularly over a decade after its release. The thing is, since then, I hadn't really been into an album of theirs until last year's The Whole Love. Songs, yes - Hummingbird and You are my Face, for example, are standout tracks on albums that I will generously call mediocre. It took ten years for Wilco to make a musical statement that approaches the genius of YHF.  Holding a band up to the standards of a classic, even if it is their own, may be harsh, but it cuts two ways. I have been willing to indulge their guitar noodling, wan sentimentality or whatever turn they have taken since 2001 because I know what they are capable of.
Death Cab, on the other hand, have been turning out reliably pleasing pop albums for years. I have never loved one, but each release gets heavy rotation on the Noah Green playlist for months after I get it. Their concert was a best of that most bands would be proud to have in their catalog. But I would never consider them great.
I guess this means that the average rating of a band's oeuvre is ultimately not how I measure them. If someone reaches the peaks that Wilco has, I will patiently follow them through the valleys. I'm thankful for consistency of a band like Death Cab, and would frankly be overjoyed as a musician to equal such an even output, but my true admiration goes to the mercurial geniuses.