Volume 3 Issue 1 Preview: The Depravity of Vegandale
A waxing gibbous moon floated sentinel over a clear, dying orange and ocean sky while two train cars with strobing windows paraded past each other. The faraway vibrations rippled from the decayed metal supports, took root under my feet on Lot F outside Citi Field. Someone knocked into me while exiting a port-a-potty. After exchanging courtesies of a passing apology, I took in a deep whiff and smelled the burning rubber of the Whitestone Expressway seasoned by the low tide of a nearby marina, sporadically interrupted by wafts of spicy cauliflower and falafel, mingling with the staid baseline of feces and urine. On a purple and pink stage, the rapper Jaewon Phillips mumbled his latest single, and I thought aloud, So…this is Vegandale. A woman heard me, laughed, and confirmed we were indeed at Vegandale. My wife V., her sisters, their friends, and myself had driven two hours and twenty-five miles to come to this. To partake in a spectacle flying under the veneered banner of veganism. I was one of ten thousand stooges. However—in a masochistic way—I’m grateful I witnessed such a vapid exercise. It was like a preview of things to come: An End of the World’s Fair.
Vegandale is a nine-city festival tour highlighting vegan vendors, often headlined by well-known musical acts. When V. asked if I wanted to come along, I was in the middle of an eco-conscious spiral, which usually happens every summer after ingesting reports about [insert year] being the hottest summer on record. I get self-righteous and spew intolerable talking points as if I’m some ivory-tower intellectual. During this annual cycle, I proclaim we have no respect for the planet and make half-baked pledges to rearrange my life. So, while looking up compost dumps I’d never drive to, ethical brands I’d never purchase, effective recycling, and fantasizing about what it would be like to drive an electric vehicle (let alone afford one), I thought attending a vegan music festival was a swell idea. I was naïve, but it was an opportunity to boost my ego, cope with my powerlessness against the death knell for the human race, plus I wouldn’t have to do anything except show up. My presence was some vague endorsement of sustainability. Also, Quavo and GloRilla were on the marquee. I probably wouldn’t get another chance to see them together in a lineup at such a good price. Maybe I’ll tell my grandchildren about the time I saw them perform while flood waters brim to our roof and rescue choppers fly past us.
Vegandale’s tagline reads: Where major musical artists, interactive art, hundreds of vendors, and thousands of people come together to realize a world without animal exploitation.
Being on the peripherals of the no-meat, no-animal-testing community, I wanted to embed myself in a mass gathering of these people because I simply hadn’t been around many vegans before. I had questions as to how they bypassed the Big Food industry, which only recently began catering to their market. Additionally, music festivals bring out this courteous, communal, and caregiving sentiment. A vibe where we’re all dirty and a little dizzy, so we might as well be kind. They aren’t perfect and there’s no shortage of horror stories like Astroworld or Woodstock ’99, but I find them (overall) to be a safe space where everyone cosplays artsy or hedonistic personae to distract themselves from stocking shelves, tending bar, office jobs, driving assholes from A to B. I certainly indulged as a single twenty-something fast food cashier. But now, being a husband in his thirties, I was interested in the prospect of awakening a long-desiccated vessel. Without getting into too much detail, I was rather feral in my behavior at these events, where my willingness to experience a pulsating sonic medley was only matched by my enthusiasm to alter my state of mind. My wife never got to see me activate this buffoonery except when we attended a Sean Kingston concert where I acted the drunken fool, mainlining 2007 nostalgia. She still hasn’t seen this exhibitionist festival gremlin come out to play because the primary ingredient for such an activation is joy, something Vegandale grievously lacked. Call that pretension, snootiness, or maturity, the bare fact is Vegandale fucking sucks. I should’ve suspected this when my wife told me Quavo bowed out, and we were left with Memphis’s twelfth most famous rapper.
GloRilla is a torch-bearing, unapologetic representative of the hip-hop ratchet mentality injected with a cavalier sensuality bordering on provocateur. Her music is fun but lacks substance, yet it carries this energy of I’m-doing-this-anyway-so-fight-me. I also appreciate the sexual muck of her persona, shaking anything and everything, because that is more a genuine reflection of our ethos as opposed to the Barbie-doll aesthetics of Taylor Swift’s pink bedroom cultism. The machinations behind American music enact a selectively paradoxical libido that often manufactures the historically underserved into the limelight and calls it inclusion because it gives the stilted and privileged license to be who we want without exoticizing ourselves—a venue to counteract our Puritan DNA with little consequence. Some label that hypocritical and classist. I call it a culture’s structure reflecting decline. And this is no indictment on GloRilla or any artist like her (see Cardi B, Megan Thee Stallion, Amber Rose, Sexyy Redd). They reflect the subconscious finality of death we all try to avoid by using convenient vehicles for distraction, which is the point of most commercial art. It just so happens to be within a generation where our self-made end is tangible and looming.
Vegandale’s social media is expertly curated. Scrolling through previous iterations, it looked vibrant. Filtered sunshine and bubbliness as if the photos themselves had dimples. Grassy fields, a canopy of tents, plant-based food drizzled with hummus in checkered containers you get at the state fair. Festivalgoers in jean vests, short shorts, tank tops, laurels resting upon frizzy hair. During the drive, we all expressed our willingness to walk into the festival with an open mind because we, admittedly, had lampooned the vegan lifestyle. Vegandale was an opportunity for us to interrogate our consumer habits. On the surface, there was also reason to be excited. The tickets were cheap, and there would be live music. If anything, we would make it a fun experience as a group. When we finally parked our car by a marina overlooking the rusted docks of Flushing Bay, my sister-in-law and I smoked what was left of a roach. We then walked by Citi Field and saw a line of glamorous outfits—Cartier bags and YSL clutches. A molten saturation of good posture, adjusted lapels, and low busts. We found out that Vegandale was in Lot F, while the event taking place in the stadium itself was the NYC Fine Wine Festival. The glitzy and well-groomed sauntered into an evening of rosé and merlot, chardonnay at sunset, while in the parking lot was this pig pen of the budgeted underbelly, hazy swarms of us shuffling into an asphalt tent city. I thought the wine festival looked pearl-clutched, and I pitied them probably the same way they felt sorry for us, watching hundreds blindly follow the booming stereo, reeking of summer afternoon and weed. We approached silos of huddled masses forming serpentine queues. I heard the alien warble of security wands, the TSA tone of ushers waving people through.
While signs by the entrance read NO OUTSIDE FOOD OR DRINK, people dragged and wheeled in coolers of Hennyladas (a piña colada with Hennessey), rolling papers, dime bags of whatever. I don’t know how they got in with all that contraband, whereas my sister-in-law got pressed by some rent-a-bouncer wearing a faux-Kevlar vest for holding a water bottle. After two minutes of back-and-forth, we were rustled onto the festival grounds. The advertised color and expressiveness of Vegandale was a trick of the algorithm. Lot F resembled a cracked frying pan. 4:00p.m. sunlight with no shade, no sitting area except on the margins near the hoofing 7 Train bridge. Every surface appeared stained, weathered. I didn’t fall upon any art installations or performers. Just some haphazardly placed arches—scuffed white and green and indigo pillars—with VEGANDALE branded on chipped wood. This was where people could take photos for social media but had to crop out their disappointment, perform for their co-dependent following how they were here, and there was no other place they would rather be, except for maybe that beach or that yacht or that vineyard an acquaintance from high school just posted about. The most colorful area of the festival was the neon purple rows of porta-potties.
We navigated through the crowd. Couples slurping from large sippy cups, their pores exuding a sugary dew. Two long rows of tents, primarily food vendors touting all-vegan selections. Behind the tablefronts were deep fryers, grills, portable stoves, and aproned bodies glistening with grease, calling out orders. In my experience with music festivals, I normally would feel the bipolarity of anxiety and giddy anticipation where the festival grounds appear so vast, so new. That this enclosed asphalt meadow is now a playground to explore, and I’d feel a little sad for not having the time or money to dabble in every experience offered. Not so with Vegandale. Here, I only received the anxiety, the sensation of confinement, the stereo rumble a carnival storm ready to engulf us all. I felt trapped, then assuaged when V. grabbed my hand. Smiling, she told me under her breath that it smelled like a lingering fart.
Matt Gillick is the Managing Editor and a co-founder of Cult. Magazine. He is from Northern Virginia and received his B.A. from Providence College. He currently lives in Connecticut. Recent work found in EGG+FROG, Twelve Winters Journal, and BRUISER. Find more of his published work on mattgillick.com.