I Danced to Jamie xx in the Sun and Finally Understood Bonnaroo

Photos by Joshua Mellin

All weekend, I've been hard at work trying to get to the bottom of Bonnaroo, to figure out what it is, exactly, that makes this festival so beloved to so many people. I've strolled through the campgrounds and run to as many music sets as humanly possible and let someone paint my arm glow in the dark and wandered to the light-up grove in the middle of the campground at four in the morning to see what I could find. I've drawn some conclusions; I get it, but I also haven't fully gotten into it. I've been searching for a True Bonnaroo Experience, but I've been searching so aggressively I've pretty much failed to actually give myself over to Bonnaroo in a way that might help me find one.

And then, yesterday, during Jamie xx's set, I found myself staring at one of the onstage mics used for capturing the livestream of the performance and thinking deeply about the evolution of microphone technology. I was pretty stoned. I finally got Bonnaroo.

I hadn't counted on Jamie xx's set to work out that well: He was scheduled from 6 to 7:30 PM, which hardly seemed like the optimal time to get lost in deep, heavy bass. He was up against Sturgill Simpson, Hozier, and Belle & Sebastian. Everyone I'd come with was off somewhere else. I was texting with a bunch of different people about maybe meeting up, in the hopeless way that you attempt to do when you're in the same general region as a range of people you kind of know. But finally I let go of these attempts and just started to dance, gave myself over to the anonymity of the club that had arrived here in the late afternoon in a field in Tennessee.

Jamie xx, as has been discussed extensively with the arrival of his album In Colour, makes and plays electronic music in a way that both deeply referential and appropriately postmodern. The genius of his Bonnaroo set was that it almost could slide into the middle of an eight-hour block of pure oblivion at some nameless club in Europe, but it also was deeply expressive, working in old soul samples and bursts of his own crushingly huge music, particularly “Gosh.” Blasted out to so many people, that synth line was devastating; after the show I overheard two guys excitedly recapping the moment it dropped.

On one hand, the experience of watching a DJ alone at an odd hour seems to go entirely counter to the idea of a festival like Bonnaroo, where people come with large groups of friends to have fun in the presence of even larger groups of people. But part of why we come to festivals, too, is to let go of ourselves, something that we're less inclined to do when we're surrounded by our familiar friends. We want to be in a crowd of thousands and busy having our own epiphanies to backdrop of the same music as everyone else—hence the appeal, for instance, of escaping into some private mental space by tripping. This set was my moment. All my friends were somewhere else, but I was surrounded by a few festival friends I'd made over the weekend, and I was in a space to just think about how great the whole experience was.

Suddenly, the timing of the set appeared uncannily inspired. Looking at the stage, I was lost in the club reverie Jamie xx was creating, but, looking back into the afternoon sunlight, I was reminded of how much time at the festival was still ahead. In this liminal pseudo-club, the festival had created a chance to tap into the feeling that we look to festivals to create, that sense that anything might happen in this weird, alternate world. People come to Bonnaroo because they want a True Bonnaroo Experience, and they want to revel in the possibilities of what might happen come that next set or come nightfall or come the moment that the drugs kick in. And ultimately what might happen is this: For a while, you'll be lost in the moment, and you won't worry about anything or think about much except how sweet music is, and you'll be having your True Bonnaroo Experience, and the outside world will melt away, and everything that led to it will feel 100 percent worth it.

So as I wondered what it was like to be the person who designed microphones that were able to pick up extremely loud noises crisply and what it was like to be the person who figured out the little technology tweak needed on an older, less sophisticated microphone to make that happen, I left my concerns behind. I danced shamelessly. How could you not? Jamie xx is an incredible DJ. His set is seamless. He looks so cool as he picks through the bin behind him for records or drops in a bassline and, regardless of what he's doing, does not smile. He pulled off the near-impossible feat of, rather than playing electronic music that fit the mood of the sunny afternoon, playing electronic music that brought the club, ever-so-briefly, into the world of that sunny afternoon, as though it was suspended in a bubble. And that's what we're hoping for at any festival: To be inside that bubble as it floats around and to just keep floating forever.

Kyle Kramer is at Bonnaroo. Follow him on Twitter.