For a moment, I thought I was witnessing the arrest of Cypress Hill.
Late Sunday afternoon, just as the scalding North Carolina sun began to retreat from a relentless three-day assault on the hard-rock bacchanalia called Carolina Rebellion, B-Real and Sen Dog exited stage left to the screams of ten thousand fans.
Their dozen-song set had been ecstatic, filled with playful banter about weed and booze and powerhouse bass that rattled the dusty campgrounds. They had sampled Nirvana and House of Pain, led profane chants, and delivered the hits"How I Could Just Kill a Man," "Insane in the Brain," "Hand on the Pump"like they were still fresh. Of course, B-Real had sparked a blunt early on, leading Sen Dog to assure the crowd that his partner was, indeed, "high as fuck."
But as soon as Cypress Hill descended the stairs of the Monster Carolina Stage, the powerhouse finale "Rock Superstar" still echoing across the field, a squad of North Carolina state troopers surrounded them in a slanted, broken circle. Coming around a corner, I paused, swallowed hard, and waited for what was next.
Back slaps and big grins, it turns out; the squadron of all white troopers had craned their necks to see most of the set, and now they wanted to meet Cypress Hill. Some shook hands and others mugged for photos, ostensibly fulfilling high school fantasies of hanging out with the Los Angelinos who loved to rap about weed. The duo kept the encounter brief, but I swear I saw a trace of nervousness beneath Sen Dog's smile.
Cypress Hill did not get arrested at Carolina Rebellion.
Any anxietyparticularly in North Carolina, particularly right nowwould have been understandable. As the rest of the country continues to legalize weed and recognize gay marriage, the South's formerly progressive paragon continues to slip into a pit of regressive legislation. The new House Bill 2, colloquially known as "The Bathroom Bill," has made targets of the state's LGBTQ communities, but they weren't the first and they're not likely to be the last. From restricted voting rights to the women's healthcare upheaval, North Carolina has become a crucible of American political polarization. The situation is fragile, the nerves raw, the stakes highly personal. I worried that Cypress Hill had arrived in North Carolina for a payday only to be led out, in cuffs, with its problems. I was happy to be wrong.
In fact, last weekend, as I trekked between the righteously loud Carolina Rebellion near Charlotte and the jazz-and-soul-centric Art of Cool Festival in Durham, I was proved wrong frequently. Given the rancor in the state and the embarrassment inherent in being the punchline of international headlines, I'd expected the almost exclusively white Carolina Rebellion and the proudly urban, black Art of Cool to feel somewhat tense, much like the times themselves. What I found, instead, were two scenes of near complete concord within one very confused state, both using the perfect springtime weather as a platform for partying away the worrynot for pardoning themselves or one another, necessarily, but at least temporarily dispatching the turmoil of it all.
Scorpions' Rudolf Schenker onstage at Carolina Rebellion
Carolina Rebellion seems designed to spark unrest. Look no further than the name, a not-so-subtle reflection of historic mantras and mindsets below the Mason-Dixon. Or look at the lineup, a revolving door of perennial hell-raisers, such as Korn and Godsmack, Limp Bizkit and Marilyn Manson, Slipknot and Slayer.
The sixth edition swung between the classic (Scorpions, Lynyrd Skynrd, Alice Cooper) and the contemporary (Five Finger Death Punch, Disturbed, Babymetal), with a deep vein of '90s nostalgia serving as the throughline between the two. Artists and audiences shared the rather intimate quarters of a campground wedged between several racetracks and shopping centers, 20 minutes outside the state's biggest city.
There were, as one might expect, several uneasy instances during the three-day event. Less than five minutes after I'd arrived, for instance, a vendor of bootleg T-shirts insisted, multiple times, that I was gay and had AIDS. In the campgrounds, Confederate flags fluttered above pick-up trucks and pop-up tents every hundred feet or so. Lamentably, Lynyrd Skynyrd swore from the stage that the South would rise again and, ridiculously, that the prospect was one of heritage, not hate. Yelawolf sampled Garth Brooks, spoke of Johnny Cash, and went crowd-surfing, treating his rapid-fire rap verses more as an excuse for professional pandering to fellow country folks than anything else.
This year's Carolina Rebellion pulled a record high crowd of 80,000 attendees.
Crystina Pagea 37-year-old single mother and traveling beverage vendorproudly flew Tea Party and 3 Percenter flags over her coolers of Powerade and Monster. A man in camouflage cutoffs grinned when asked about his "Black Rifles Matter" shirt, while one roving posse had coordinated its wardrobe with black Ts that insisted, "All Lives Matter (Except ISIS)."
These moments were astonishingly infrequent, though, especially given the festival-record attendance of 80,000 fans, coexisting for three hot days on a wicked cocktail of Monster, marijuana, canned domestics, and Jack Daniels mixers. I didn't see one fight. I didn't see one arrest. When Filter frontman Richard Patrick, who has a long history in North Carolina and even wrote "Hey Man, Nice Shot" at his parents' house along the coastline, brought out American and rainbow flags late in his band's set, I didn't hear a single jeer.
"I was hoping for the best and expecting for the worst," he confessed to me later near his tour bus. He clutched two bottles of imported beer that weren't available to the crowd. "Every time we get a little further ahead, something sets us back. I'm prepared to lose fans over this to say what I think."
Views from Carolina Rebellion 2016.
Even the massive mosh pitsfueled especially by the big-beat blasts and blood-curdling growls of Hellyeah on Friday afternoon and the theatric aplomb and bottom-heavy grooves of Rob Zombie on Sunday nightseemed friendly. At each of the four stages, a tall metal barrier bisected the crowd, creating a catwalk of sorts between the bands and the soundboard in the distance. Smiling, sweating security guards would catch each reveler as they passed over the railing, set them down gingerly, and point them back into the crowd. It was, effectively, a DMZ, a requisite escape hatch for those who had gone too hard or gotten too high.
Carolina Rebellion sometimes felt merely like a colony of obsidian, obscene T-shirts. They reflected the gore and darkness of headliners like Zombie or Disturbed en masse, boasted the mantras of metal standbys (the ever-popular "Jesus is a Cunt," courtesy of Cradle of Filth), and proclaimed military might. Teenagers roamed the grounds dressed as various villains and criminals; at one point, I saw an impressively coordinated pack of Slipknot fans, decked out in matching "6 (sic) 6" jumpsuits.
Maybe it was the sunlight or the impending, inevitable charm of Babymetal's otherwise thin gimmick. Maybe it was the ample booze or the jolly security guards, sets that began on time or sound systems that really thundered, but for those three brutal, surreally beautiful days, Carolina Rebellion delivered a largely positive expulsion of negative energya paradox that was bigger and better than the state's twisted, transitional politics.
Rob Zombie inciting terror at Carolina Rebellion.
Two hours to the east, in the smaller but no less booming city of Durham, the three-year-old Art of Cool Festival offered an affirmation of that exact feeling from a very different perspective. If you gathered every Art of Cool attendee from the festival's history, it would be enough to fill one Carolina Rebellion side stage. And if you inverted the racial mix of both musicians and fans at Carolina Rebellion, you'd at least approximate that at Art of Cool, an event that prides itself in part on its ability to retain an African-American cultural foothold in a rapidly gentrifying Southern city.
This year, the lineupthe best in the festival's historyexplored that boundary between past and present in vital ways. There were jazz leaders like Kamasi Washington and Terence Blanchard, hip-hop producers like Pete Rock and 9th Wonder. Anderson .Paak, The Internet, J*Davey, and Moonchild tested those edges, breaking them at every opportunity. Art of Cool unapologetically embraces tradition, then makes weighty demands of those who dare challenge it.
The Internet representing for the young folks at Art of Cool Fest.
On Saturday night, the rooms were sweaty, the feeling electric. In a makeshift venue above a Peruvian restaurant, Chantae Cann purred perfectly soft soul. In the town's grand old theater, Syd tha Kid leaned into the groups of youngsters in the front row that rapped and sang every word she delivered, offering high fives and hand claps. Donniea gay soul singer who treats every song with the conviction of a gospel choirsqueezed eight people onto the tiny stage of a small rock club and took everyone within earshot to secular church. When local rapper and Kendrick Lamar collaborator Rapsody snuck to the stage to deliver a dense verse over Thundercat's booming bass, the packed crowd erupted, the convergence of jazz and hip-hop arriving with ultimate force during the festival's final set.
There was, at least in every set I saw, no explicit political talk, but every moment felt like a defiant statement. It was all a stark musical reminder of the political, social, and cultural forces that have, for so many decades, helped push North Carolina into progress. If Carolina Rebellion was darkness bending back toward the light, Art of Cool was light offered as a defense against the dark, glowing outward from the dim clubs of downtown Durham.
Chantae Cann at Art of Cool Fest
During the early Sunday morning trek back to Charlotte, I pondered the differences between the sets, sounds, and sights of both my weekend stops. One festival was a corporate powerhouse, with big sponsors and VIP tents and elaborate backstage catering. The other was an intimate indoor experience that functions on a shoestring budget, scrapping for public attention in a newly bustling town. Only the next day did it become clear just how complementary they were, like conjoined pieces of a puzzle that seems to make little visual sense.
Maybe it's strange to go to music festivals and leave with more than a hangover, a suntan, or a pair of branded sunglassesto leave with renewed hope that people can coexist within borders but without them, too. But, hey, watching a bunch of cops giddily take selfies with a possibly stoned Cypress Hill is strange, too, and I swear, over the weekend, it happened in North Carolina.