Cole Bennett founded local hip-hop blog Lyrical Lemonade almost five years ago, and on Sunday it hosted its first outdoor festival, the Summer Smash, in Douglas Park. Bennett and the site’s editor, Elliot Montanez, planned the event in the spring and announced it last month. Chicago had more than enough festivals already, but the Summer Smash justified its existence with a distinctive 25-act bill that leaned heavily on young rappers who’ve made their names on the Internet, including Joey Badass, Trippie Redd, Lil Skies, and Vic Mensa. Three Reader writers—Leor Galil, Matt Harvey, and Tyra Triche—were curious enough about it to spend another warm weekend day in another public park, watching live music behind fences. They had this conversation about the festival the next day.
Leor: Wow, Matt, you found other people my age? It’s funny, the fest really did show the division of fan bases within hip-hop, which isn’t something that gets a lot of oxygen in the press. We tend to talk about hip-hop in eras or waves, and whichever is the “latest” gets talked about as if it’s the only thing that exists. But the truth is far more complex than that, and seeing it play out at this festival was fascinating.
If anybody has made Soundcloud rap into an identifiable community (and commodity), it’s Cole Bennett. As a video director, he’s provided those artists with an animated flair, and his early collaborations with Dex helped make them both famous. While I waited in line for food—appallingly, the fest had only five food vendors for around 10,000 fans, so that took me literally two hours—I heard Dex scream, “I own this motherfucking city! I created a wave!”
Leor: And I wonder what those messages are doing to the audiences receiving them. I mean, we’ve said it before, but the crowd was old enough to figure out how to sneak beer out of the house but too young to be able to hold their liquor. I saw several people vomiting or having trouble standing up or being carted away by medical personnel—it was just as bad as Lollapalooza. To be clear, I have no emotional stake in Lolla, but I’m more invested in Summer Smash—I feel more positive about what it could end up being. They just need to figure out (among other things) how to get people through the gates quicker and not run out of bottled water. Final thoughts from y’all?
