Austin City Limits 2018 in fifty incredible photographs

In the 16 years since its inception, the Austin City Limits music festival has become different things to different people. To casual fans, it’s one of an assembly line’s fill of annual music festivals with vaguely familiar lineups. To unflappable dreamers, it’s a beacon that represents Austin’s title of “Live Music Capital of the World”. To jaded locals, it’s an ominous blitzkrieg of traffic, tourists, crowds, and people who threaten to move here. We live in a time where it’s difficult to experience something without the distraction of pretense, the influence of opinion. And while there’s some layer of truth to all of those angles, when push comes to shove, seemingly everyone is still willing to brush aside the static to sing along in glorious harmony to “Hey Jude”. Regarding the music, discussion around this year’s ACL lineup starts, of course, with Paul McCartney. 76 years young, the Beatle has gradually transformed himself into a broadly-adored festival act that attracts just as many millennials as Travis Scott. His set was pumped to the gills with Beatles and Wings favorites, songs that every human on the planet knows the words to. Energetic as always with a strong band behind him, McCartney’s only sign of age is a wavering voice during softer songs. The harder and louder he sings, like on “Live and Let Die”, seemingly the better his voice sounds. The entire first weekend of ACL was peppered with great music. Standouts included the lovably weird David Byrne, heavy metal forefathers Metallica, and two performers who are both almost certainly destined for future headlining status, St. Vincent and Janelle Monae. Greta Van Fleet, think what you will of them, played to a massive crowd and did an amiable job of filling the hard rock void left by Led Zeppelin. And Phoenix delivered a favorites-filled set to dancing, delirious fans. Disappointments were few. Alvvays’ soft whimsy was ill-timed for an early Friday crowd looking to dance, and The Breeders were disappointingly dull, excepting only the rare punches of fan favorites “Gigantic” and “Cannonball”. Deftones, meanwhile, were failed by faulty microphones, sadly neutering the raw power of Chino Moreno and the alt-metal veterans. When you attend a lot of music festivals, it can be hard to find new ways to describe them - mostly because they are designed to offer basically the same experience every year. That’s not meant to be an insult, it’s just the result of decades of trial and error and market research by increasingly observant conglomerates. I realize how cynical that sounds, but Corporate Entertainment can in fact trigger a visceral experience. At its heights, like Monae singing “Screwed” or Byrne leading his band through “This Must Be the Place”, ACL’s experience managed not just the visceral, but the profound.