Cover Story: Music Midtown 2002

CL’s opinionated guide to the music

The best thing about Music Midtown isn’t the music or the Midtown vistas. It’s the people. Yes, the sweaty, stinky, drunken, sunburned and obnoxious people who you and all your friends turn into for a couple days each May. Regardless of casual annoyances or ho-hum music selections, it’s always great to feel the vibrant urban life so often lacking on the streets of Atlanta.

And if you don’t find community, at least you’ll find fun. Maybe it’s the larger commitment involved in attending Music Midtown. People have made a certain investment of time and money to be there, and they’re out to make damn sure they get their dollar’s worth.

But this potent brew of crowds, music and fun is tempered by what is too often the very un-fun, un-musical way we receive live music. Rather than viewing musicians as servants paid to entertain us, we treat them as stars whose physical presence inevitably becomes the focus of the performer/crowd transaction.

So if you find yourself standing in front of a huge stage, watching Darius Rucker strum his guitar, and it occurs to you that it isn’t particularly fun, don’t just endure it and convince yourself that you’re being entertained.

Instead, head over to the well-isolated, not-too-crowded Ford/Fox 5 Stage — not coincidentally the only stage not sponsored by a radio station, and therefore not subject to the narrowly formatted, image-driven commodities each is trying to sell you — and experience some real fun. And whether that means the down-home zydeco marathon Saturday, or the lineup of international music that’s set for Sunday, don’t go and just watch. Listen and react to what you hear. You’ll have even more fun than you expected to have, and your body will thank you later.??