After three years of attending the institution that is Fuji Rock, we decided to take the plunge and do both of the Japanese big boys back to back: Fuji Rock in July and Summer Sonic in August. The two festivals have much in common, with both geared toward the hyper-fashionable indie music fan. While the majority of both lineups are foreign artists, the organisers do programme their share of indigenous acts as well. Both steer away from hip hop, and in its pastoral setting, Fuji leans more toward roots music. Beyond similar tastes, though, a side-by-side comparison of the two festivals draws out some marked contrasts, and a Darwinian future outlook for the survival of the modern music fest.
FUJI ROCK:
Where: Naeba, Nigata
Length: 3 days, plus Bon-odoro
Tickets: 3-day pass for US$380, 1-day pass for US$160, campsite pass for US$27
Japan’s first outdoor music festival, Fuji Rock (and its organisers, SMASH) celebrated their 10th anniversary in 2007. They’ve come a long way since their disastrous first year, when a typhoon rolled in and battered the ill-prepared festival goers and organisers. Now held in the ski resort of Naeba (in the Nigata prefecture), the cool mountain air is the perfect balm to the oppressive summer heat that envelops the rest of Japan. Fuji is all art and heart – SMASH consistently meld big headliners on massive rigs with small, exciting, unsigned bands playing on tiny impromptu stages in the most beautiful of settings. This year’s acts included My Bloody Valentine, Underworld, CSS, Grandmaster Flash, and Gogol Bordello.
The festival was founded and is run and maintained by people who care, first and foremost. That message comes across loud and clear wherever you look, from the A-Seed volunteers (pictured above) smiling, laughing and dancing in the trash bins (whilst directing your rubbish to its proper place), to the glitter balls strung up across boardwalks that wend through the trees.
Check out the Fuji Rockers going nuts for Gogol Bordello:
Lest we forget this all takes place in lovely Japan, RYUKYUDISKO:
Summer Sonic
Where: Tokyo and Osaka
Length: 2 days in both cities
Tickets: 2-day pass for US$236, 1-day pass for US$132
A different proposition entirely. Functional and efficient, Summer Sonic is held on two sites concurrently, in Tokyo and Osaka. We didn’t attend the Osaka bit, so we can only speak for the experience in Tokyo, where the festival is held annually at the Makuhari Messe and the Chiba Marine Stadium. Makuhari Messe is similar to most other Messe exhibition centres around the world: a series of huge, bare halls housed in grey, homogeneous structures. Three large stages exist in three of these rooms, with concessions, sponsors and quirk in halls between. Across the main road from these halls, the main stage is situated within the slightly kitsch blue Chiba Marines baseball stadium. In the carpark outside there is a further stage and a short walk away is Summer Sonic’s only nod to nature, the grossly underused Beach Stage. The recently-wrapped ’08 festival featured Coldplay, the Prodigy, Late of the Pier, The Ting Tings, Los Campesinos! and MGMT.
Here’s a sampling of the SS action. Gotta love the silent disco:
And a short clip of Santogold. Even from a distance, you can tell she’s got some moves:
So, where is the problem? Surely there are enough Japanese music lovers to populate both festivals; but there is a gap between the two festivals that’s been widening in the three years that we’ve been going to Japan. Summer Sonic happens in similar surroundings in both Tokyo and Osaka and the lineup exchanges, with Tokyo’s Saturday bands playing Osaka on Sunday and vice versa. Thus capacities are a conservative double of those at Fuji Rock’s four-day affair (FR officially lasts for three days, but in another great touch, part of the festival site is open to all on the Thursday night free of charge in celebration of the Bon-odoro festival). We speculate that the running costs of Fuji Rock must be double that of Summer Sonic – FR not only programs for three days to SS’s two, but it has additional costs of securing the site (the river and mountains help with some natural barricading), servicing the campsite, providing additional toilets, 24-hour security etc.
Without being privy to budgets, we’d wager that what extra SS makes (through huge extra numbers and massively lower production costs), they plough into offers for bands. Herein lies the major problem – the strength and depth of the Summer Sonic lineup was better than that of Fuji, and the disparity seems to be getting more severe every year. At a time where the talent pool of big, headlining bands is declining, the ability to pay the extra money means securing the bigger artists, who, in an era of shrinking record sales will by and large go where the money is.
For a kid from Tokyo, the additional costs of the Shinkansen train add to an already expensive weekend to see a less glossy lineup with the possibility of rain and, gasp, camping. It’s easy to see how one would be swayed toward Summer Sonic. There are of course those who favour art and are prepared to “suffer” for it. Personally, we don’t even see a choice: Once you’ve sampled Fuji and the love that goes with it, everything else pales. Still, we are aware of the limitations of the model in a worsening global economy. Many festivals were born since the last global slowdown and have enjoyed unbroken consumer confidence and therefore spending. In fact, Glastonbury is the only one we can think of that existed before 1989, and even it was forced to close for several years when times were bad. In this brave new world only the fittest will survive and the most beautiful is rarely the fittest.