Outdoor music festivals tend to wear out their own fans. There’s only so much hot sun, crowd congestion, and spider-infested porta-potties you can take before you ask yourself, “What the hell am I doing here?” If a fest runs three days, as Riot Fest has for several years now, by the third nearly everyone will have reached that point. Even the teenagers will be dragging. But there were plenty of reasons to trek to Douglas Park for the last day of Riot Fest 2018. Run the Jewels played a transformative headlining set (I’m now a superfan, at least), and Sunday’s schedule also included two iconic bands that emerged on opposite ends of the country during the first wave of American punk: the Avengers and Blondie.
Riot Fest often gets dismissed as a nostalgia trip, and it’s true that a large proportion of its acts are associated with earlier eras. But by the time the Avengers plunged into their final song, “The American in Me”—a jagged takedown of the powers that be—they’d left absolutely no question that their message and music are as relevant today as four decades ago.
