Sunday Culture: Hello from Hopscotch & Adam's Top 10 of YouTube
This week, James Watson unpacks the art of the setlist after spending the weekend at Hopscotch. Meanwhile, Adam Coil gifts us with a Top 10 List of the best YouTube videos.
Adam
James
A dispatch from Raleigh: What makes a great setlist
Greetings from Hopscotch Music Festival here in Raleigh, NC, only a few miles from the original Wake Forest campus. The festival is an annual feature of the state, but this year is different. Pavement, Alvvays, Japanese Breakfast, Soccer Mommy, Denzel Curry and many more are headlining this year’s festivities. By my count, one of the highest profile Hopscotches on record.
Pavement, one of my favorite bands of all time and arguably one of the finest American bands to ever do it, took the stage Thursday night in the heart of downtown. Pavement has such a vast mythos and catalogue that I spent the hours leading up to the performance buzzing about what b-sides they could whip out or how they would pair the hits in the set. Having watched their tour from afar for years, seeing the sets they'd come up with, I was eager to dive in.
I am not a musician or performer, but the creation and strategy of forming a great set list is not lost on me. It’s a fascinating process. Fans should not, under any circumstances, ever dictate the creative processes of a group, but this is a rare instance when the artist has to give the people what they want. Folks have strong feelings about this stuff! You’ll recall fans who saw Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour this summer excitedly theorized nightly what songs Swift would surprise the concertgoers with.
The art of setlisting, to me, is about balance. A crowd pleaser here, a sicko-only b-side of a b-side there. There’s an awareness of the audience and venue that’s important too. Recently, Pavement did a two-show stint at Brooklyn Steel. Clearly, a run meant for the hardcore Pavement heads, and the set lists reflect it.
Hopscotch is gonna be a little different from Brooklyn Steel. The crowd, Pavement probably guessed, will skew more on the Zoomer side than Old Guard. This estimation isn’t false, BUT I don’t think that means they needed to tone down the weird stuff. The crowd was all in — probably to their surprise. Being unsure of the vibe, they played their hand a bit toward the hits.
But I don’t care. Pavement’s set was phenomenal. They even worked in two versions of “The Hexx” albeit accidentally. And to see the guys be their ’90s slacker selves all these years later? Unbelievable.
Later in the night (or morning by this point), Saturday Night Live comedian Sarah Sherman performed a stand-up set in which the Pavement jokes were aplenty.
“THEY DIDN'T EVEN PLAY RANGE LIFE”, Sherman lamented.
Except they did, she just left early. Sherman was devastated to learn this.
Sherman later asked mockingly for audience members to put their hands up if they owned a copy of Wilco’s album “Yankee Hotel Foxtrot” on vinyl. I obliged.
— James & Adam