What happens when the curatorial drive of the local alt-weekly grows beyond its physical pages? The nation’s largest music festival, for one, South by Southwest, is run by the Austin Chronicle; the Village Voice’s Siren Festival is a New York City mainstay; and now, Raleigh has Hopscotch, brainchild of the Triangle’s Independent Weekly.
Hopscotch is slated for the weekend of Sept. 9 to 11, with shows spread out over 10 different venues in downtown Raleigh. Headlining the festival will be two shows in City Plaza: on Friday, Baltimore experimentalist Panda Bear, Toronto indie-collective Broken Social Scene and Raleigh act the Rosebuds; and on Saturday, legendary NYC hip-hop group Public Enemy, Los Angeles-based No Age and Raleigh’s the Love Language.
Two Indy staffers—Hopscotch Director Greg Lowenhagen, who also works as the paper’s marketing director, and Music Editor Grayson Currin, who serves as Hopscotch’s curator—played the main role in filling out Hopscotch with actual musicians, venues and the more deliberate minutiae that come tied to a production of this size. Lowenhagen conceived the idea for Hopscotch shortly after coming to the Independent in the summer of 2009.
“It was Greg, really,” Currin said. “I believe he joined the staff in, June, I think? And very quickly he looked at the paper and thought that one of the things that was missing was us using our place in the Triangle, as sort of a cultural voice... We’re the only alt-weekly here, and we weren’t really using that brand to have events that could feed back into the image of the paper [or] using the image of the paper to feed into these exciting events.”
From there, Lowenhagen brought the idea of a festival to the Indy’s owner Steve Schewel and the publisher Sioux Watson and then to Currin, who was instructed to come up with a “fantasy list” of bands he’d like to see play the weekend.
What resulted is a line-up that, though naturally not identical to Currin’s initial brainstorming, contains a diverse group of bands in both location and genre: noise and Pacific Northwest, pop and the South, hip-hop and New England, and a significant portion of homegrown Triangle outfits—120 in total.
The number includes the aforementioned headliners, as well as buzz bands like Atlas Sound, Best Coast, F***** Up and Harlem. Then there’s the more esoteric, unusual acts, the ones Currin sought out in the corners of the world and invited to North Carolina, many for the first time: He mentioned Portland doom-metal act Ocean, Iceland-by-way-of-Australia avant-garde composer Ben Frost, radical saxophonist Ned Rothenberger and Toronto pop band First Rate People.
“The one thing that I want to emphasize about this festival, that I’m really proud of, is that—it’s kind of weird,” Currin said. “There’s no one sound, no one theme.”
All of the bands involved were approved by both Currin and Lowenhagen, and they shared the goal that drove them through the initial stages of booking, planning and convincing agents and musicians that Hopscotch was a legitimate effort.
“We thought that there was a certain part of the population in the Triangle, really from D.C. to Atlanta, [for whom] there wasn’t really anything like this,” Lowenhagen said. “And that if we could pull it off by getting the clubs involved, getting this city get on board, getting the City Plaza space, that we were going to be able to get a list of bands that a certain segment of the population would be super-excited about immediately… Because of that, we were able to sell some tickets right off the bat.”
Currin, in his role as curator, took on an interesting set of duties beyond his usual tasks as editor of the Independent’s music section. He’s not worried, however, about his picking bands to play the festival as being a job that might interfere with his journalistic responsibilities to the paper.
“It’s, to me, if I have to write a somewhat negative thing about a band that’s playing Hopscotch, that’s what it is,” Currin said. “It’s the same as any band getting mad at me in any bar, any night of the week, for not writing about their band or for picking on their band.”
From the initial ticket sales, which began as soon as Currin and Lowenhagen chose the core line-up, Hopscotch has grown into more than just the concerts at night. Additional programming includes free parties during the day hosted by local businesses and bands—featuring one by Durham’s Troika Music Festival—and the Edward McKay Artists and Authors Series, which will take three in-depth, critical looks at the contexts in which many of the Hopscotch artists work (one talk is entitled “Hip-Hop Planet: Music and Its Work in the World”).
Lowenhagen said the bands are just as excited for the festival as the Indy is, and at least for the Love Language’s frontman, Stuart McLamb, this seemed to be the case—his headlining spot will likely be the most important show of his band’s career.
“As we all know, this music scene is just exploding right now,” McLamb said. “I love that the guys, Grayson and Greg, sort of rolled the dice booking acts that they truly believed in… There’s not one act that’s going to let you down.”
Hopscotch Music Festival will be taking place in downtown Raleigh from Sept. 9 to 11. A variety of different passes for the festival can be purchased on Hopscotch’s website: hopscotchmusicfest.com/tickets.
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