Everything is bigger in Texas, even the music festivals. I kicked off my annual Fall Break trip to visit my family in Houston a little differently this year. I took a three-day detour to attend weekend two of the Austin City Limits (ACL) music festival with my friend, Catherine Phillips ’26. Decked out in cowboy boots and outfits that will give my mother a scare, we tapped our little wristbands and walked wide-eyed and bushy-tailed into Zilker Park, the home of ACL for the last 50 years.
Immediately we were suffocated by the heat and dust as we began to get the lay of the land. But then, in the far distance, I could hear The Maria’s. All was forgotten. Fuelled by ice cream for lunch and dinner, we sang till we lost our voices and danced till we earned some gnarly blisters. At the end of night three, after we showered a desert’s worth of dust down the drain and tried to rehydrate before we packed up, Catherine looked over at me and said “Tyler, the Creator’s set was unreal.” And she was right. I agreed that his set was the best performance I had ever seen. But looking back, I think something a lot more complex was at play. Of all the sets we had seen, including stellar ones by Chappell Roan, Chris Stapleton and Remi Wolf, Tyler, the Creator’s felt like we were in a different world.
I am not saying that just because we were dehydrated, developing smoker’s lungs from the air quality and adjusting to a sudden rise in temperature following our chilly week of midterms in Poughkeepsie. This reflection occurred after getting a good night’s sleep and filling my belly with steaming hot rice and home-cooked chicken curry. After three days in the Lone Star State’s bustling city of Austin listening to live music and restraining myself from buying overpriced merchandise, I must pretentiously say that ACL made me think of Jean Baudrillard and his theory of hyperreality.
Before I explain my train of thought, let me preface this by saying this reflection is tied closely to the version of this abstract theory that I oversimplified for my comprehension so I could write papers for my Media Theory class. So in short, when you read this spiel on Baudrillard, know you are reading Yaksha’s understanding of his work, which is in no way a legitimate and qualified source. It is what I learned in the short amount of time I studied him. Feel free to read the “Simulacra” and derive your understanding of hyperreality. Here is mine and here is why it popped back into my brain months after a music festival.
In his book “Simulacra and Simulation,” Jean Baudrillard proposes the idea that a simulation is when something attempts to be a copy of reality. But in our world, everything has been copied so many times over, that we have strayed so far from reality that we now exist in hyperreality. If I were to take a picture of an apple and present it to you as real, that would be a simulation. If I were to take the picture and repurpose it so many times over, like maybe editing it or photocopying it, it would not really even be tied to the apple. At most, it could be tied to the third or maybe fourth version of the picture of the apple. The end product that we now have, the over-photocopied apple, is a hyperreality, constructed based on prior media that roots it in media, not reality. Hope that helped! Now why did I think about this after ACL?
Like most 20-year-olds, I have artists that I love and I have social media accounts. Whether it is the all-knowing “algorithm” or just having mainstream music taste, my feed is filled with content regarding the artists I love. And I do not mean just TikTok edits, memes and articles. I am suggested clips of their live performances, even if it is just them saying something controversial or funny. This led me to become an avid watcher of recorded live performances. I have watched grainy clips of Queen at Wembley Stadium and Fleetwood Mac on their iconic 1997 “The Dance” tour more times than I can count. And while your experience with watching recorded performances may not be as obsessive as mine (I watched RAYE’s whole Oscar performance four times in the airport with my phone on 10%), I am sure you have similarly seen clips of musicians, either your favorites or just very popular ones, performing on your social media accounts. You have a certain idea of how they perform.
Going into Tyler’s set, I had watched so many videos of him, I knew what his set design was going to look like, that he would lovingly berate the crowd and that he would roll his eyes back till we could only see the whites before rapping some of his most difficult to perform lyrics. I was seeing Tyler, the Creator live for the first time, and I was already well versed in what his artistry is like live. Standing in that crowd, I saw a copy of many productions of Tyler’s performances from before. And that has to do with his unique style and genius, but it also does have to do with how much of it I had already seen and he had already performed. Watching his live performances in my dorm room while putting away my laundry was a simulation of seeing him live. Seeing him live after years of watching and hearing him recorded, live, and otherwise felt like hyperreality. Not to mention all the edits, remixes and even AI imitations of his work I have consumed.
This may sound like an insult, as though I thought this experience fell flat of my expectations. That is not the case at all! Witnessing Tyler perform, in a crowd of people shouting the lyrics back at him, and watching him dance and match our energy was a beautiful experience. It just made me think about how the advent of video recording has changed that beautiful experience. Baudrillard says that simulation, which itself is a copy of reality, in today’s world has become, “the generation by models of a real without origin or reality: a hyperreal.” He makes the case that the evolution of technology and how humans utilize it has done away with reality, creating untraceable simulations that form a hyperreality.
I cannot help but wonder if the relatively novel, highly accessible recordings of live performances have changed live music in general. After all of this exposure to recorded performances, can we still go to a concert and be sure that we are enjoying the reality of the art we love? Or is it the excitement that comes from already knowing Tyler is incredible that pushes me to go see him and feel satisfied with that achievement? Who knows. Maybe if Baudrillard could hear “SORRY NOT SORRY” live, he would take it all back. I bet he would pull out his phone and record a bit, just to live in the simulation a bit longer.