Major NY metro area Festivals This Weekend

EDC, Bamboozle, GoogaMooga

In the area? Attending any? What’s going down?

EDC, the electronic mega-fest has come to Met Life Stadium via one of the industry’s leaders, Pasquale Rotella and his company Insomniac. The beats-laden lineup features a huge roster of DJs from Aarmin Van Buuren to Avicii to Basnnectar. EDC’s main show is in Las Vegas and now has expanded into New York and Puerto Rico.

Here’s a link to the full EDC artist schedule and set times (click)

GoogaMooga in prospect park, Brooklyn, NY is a food-centered festival with tastes from some of the areas best restaurants and a music lineup to go along with it. 75 food vendors, from Dinosaur BBQ to Souvlaki GR and artists ranging from The Roots to Fitz and the Tantrums.

Check out the food vendors and music lineup

Bamboozle is a multi-genre festival featuring Skrillex, Foo Fighters, Incubus and Bon Jovi. The event is located in Ashbury Park, NJ – a famed boardwalk-based venue.

check out the lineup here.

‘Roo – The (Beach) Boys are Back in Town

New Contributor: Eis of the World

Had the Beach Boys retired in 1964, they still would be remembered as a very good band in a very narrow genre.   At the time, they’d established themselves as a surf rock act, whose songs featured jangly guitars, prominent vocal harmonies, and lyrics about, well . . . surfing, mostly (e.g., “Surfin’ USA,” “Surfin’ Safari”), and sometimes about cars (“Little Deuce Coupe” and “Don’t Worry Baby” both come to mind).   But the reason that the Beach Boys remain a household name over 50 years after their inception, and the reason that their reunion is newsworthy, is that, close on the heels of their surf-rock stardom, they made some of the most important pop music of the rock n’ roll era.

The Beach Boys’ history has been extensively documented and need not be recounted here.  (A search for “the Beach Boys” in Amazon’s Biographies & Memoirs section yields 2,289 results; their Wikipedia page contains 89 footnotes.)  The story is an interesting one—replete with drugs, nervous breakdowns, and lawsuits—and worth investigating further if you have the time.

The most famous, and arguably most influential, album the Beach Boys released was 1965’s Pet Sounds.  Influenced by the Beatles’ Rubber Soul, Brian Wilson—Beach Boys bassist and de facto band leader at the time—penned songs that were more complex than those the band had previously released.   The lush harmonies and light feel that were the hallmarks of their early sound continued to remain focal points, but the lyrics were no longer all surf’s up and sunshine:   Brian Wilson enlisted lyricist Tony Asher to help with that process.  Songs like “I Just Wasn’t Made for These Times” showcase a more serious, more sensitive side of the band.