Outside Lands 2025 brought grooves and smiles to the Bay

Before a single note was played, San Francisco city officials were tabulating estimates that leaked into the press on how much the Zoomers would bring in this weekend. Before one expletive was shouted from any stage about the United States’ new-fangled fascism and billionaires attempting (and kind of succeeding at the present moment) to rule the world, SF Mayor Daniel Lurie was predicting the 17th edition of the Outside Lands Festival would generate about $70 million in economic impact to San Francisco. See Dead & Company’s three-night stand from the previous weekend in that old money-maker of an ecosphere, Golden Gate Park, drew over 180,000 paying attendants who city officials calculated would generate around $150 million in local economic activity.

That’s a lot of Sugar Magnolia, two weekends in a row, right?

So, even before headliner Tyler The Creator would play a condensed and streamlined set in comparison to his multifaceted, other performances around the country for his new album Don’t Tap the Glass, before Doechii, rapping in a catholic school girl mini-skirt put on a headliner-type hip-hop performance while dancing and spitting bars ingeniously, before Beck performed a hit-or-miss performance with the Berkeley symphony depending on your mileage, and even before Anderson. Paak & The Free Nationals brought out Bay-Area legend E-40 and requested in front of thousands of music fans live that they should do an album together soon, while closing out the three-day music event Sunday eve… Yes, before all of that, it was the non-performers who seemed to be cutting up the cake. Drooling over the final projections of money. Most times in those situations, when you’re counting before considering the main reason everyone is attending, aka The Music, it can turn out to be a subpar result. But performers don’t think that way; they come to play.

Listen, traffic can be a pain all weekend throughout the city, especially on Fulton, which borders the park. But despite all that, how about this for a question: Would this year’s edition of the festival be any good? Just to give context, about 60 percent of Coachella attendees this year paid for it via a layaway program established by promoters; it’s a big jump from 2009, when only about 18 percent of attendees utilized such plans. Times are tight.

As giddy Zoomers, not the dusty Boomers who paid a hefty price of admission for past glory the previous weekend, entered the Land’s End area Friday afternoon, factories of weed smoke billowed steadily, like an old-school train blowing out steam in front of the stage.

That’s where the Philadelphia-based band Mannequin Pussy, who teeters fluidly between indie, emo, punk, thrash, and so much more, who used to sell a butterfly black thong with a mid-rise fit for $20 on their website a while back, was holding court. They let everyone know right away—they may have been booked to play songs from their new album I Got Heaven at a music festival, but they showed up to start some shit. Holding our government and other autocratic regimes accountable, by firing off serious rallycore Gilman St. vibes. This band—three-quarters women, with Kaleen Reading on drums, Maxine Steen on lead guitar, plus singer Marisa Dabice (and bassist Colins Regisford—did what punk is supposed to do: Get loud, raise awareness, fuck shit up, and rally hellaciously at the big bad until people are incensed to burn this mother down.

Dabice, before launching into a Heartrock’s version of “Ok, Ok, Ok,” put out the band’s memo: “As Americans, we are ashamed at the treatment of the Palestinian People and for fucking what? So the pieces of shit Trump and Netanyahu can build another golf course or a condo? It’s fucking murder of innocent people, of children of women, of men, and it’s happening in our name with our money, so free Palestine, fuck antisemitism, and anybody who uses that to be antisemitic, go fuck yourself too.”

As fans cheered the statement, it became clear, this festival had legs, teeth, tits, asses, brains, brawn, smarts, and perspective. The hippie hugs were gone. 20-somethings were here to see their…well, maybe hang out with other scantily clad friends too, but this show was driven and designed for a different demo.

As this band put racism, homophobia, sexism, basically all the -isms roasted under fire during their just over an hour set of hellfire punk, Moms stood with their teen sons, Dads stood next to their teenage daughters, and the whole family shook their hands in unison to the punishing hardcore punk and its message being driven home. Sometimes a hand or finger went in the ear when it was way too loud, but their support was visible to all.

Thundercat, aka Stephen “Thundercat” Bruner, played at the Land’s End stage on Friday. As has become trademark, he started with that extraterrestrial night-flight of “Great Scott / 22-26,” the first track from Thundercat’s Grammy-winning album It Is What It Is. With his trademark Ibanez six-string bass guitar, backed by Dennis Hamm on keys and Justin Brown on drums, sending laser-like bass solos throughout the packed field with signature “funk-face” position of zen, running down math-rock-fusion-jazz-EDM or any old thing in his track bag, he immediately held the crowd’s attention. He, along with Kamasi Washington and Robert Glasper, are some of the few artists who can play mainstream summer music festivals and still keep the Zoomers’ attention through all the pop hits and deep dive jazz zingers he and his trio lift off with. 

Maybe it’s the time he spent in Suicidal Tendencies that keeps his speed of light jazz-rock expeditions at his fingertips. Whatever. He said he quit drinking, and everything got weird. But his call and command of the bass is better than ever. And surprise, he announced that he’s working on a new album and played several tracks, that of course I cannot identify, but they feel like scorching jazz-hybrids to go along with his repertoire.

Closing up with “Them Changes,” giving the audience the sing-along song they desperately needed after the fusion instrumentals started to become just a little stale, Thundercat, featuring that unmistakable falsetto, paved his weird pop lane, which swerves all around improvisational music. He’s still an original, and the fans love it.

Booking it across from the main stage—passing through all the microclimates that make this festival for sure unique—Grasslands, Winelands, you feel the effect of Karl The Fog making that temperature dip about 15 degrees over 5 hours. You start to feel for all the adventurous folks who dress for the image of the sun being out all day. Booty shorts serve a purpose for about 90 minutes in the sun, and then that idea just turns to all types of bad, but don’t get me wrong: I am not telling anyone how to dress.

Which is why I’m heading to the Soma stage to catch UK producer Floating Points aka Sam Shepherd, an artist I’ve never heard DJ live, but have been buying and purchasing his records ever since the plinky, intergalactic tech-house groove of “Vaccum Boogie” entered my life in 2009. As YouTube comments always stay undefeated, one in particular, “I’m not religious at all, but when I took shrooms and listened to this track, I saw god,” sounds about right. I figure a little movement will keep folks warm as the daytime transitions into fogtime, which eventually becomes night-fogtime.

As I get over to Soma, I start to recognize the field and realize it’s Marx Meadow field, the site of a friend’s birthday BBQ I attended in late June, now it’s an outdoor stage for house and techno. There are about 2,000 attendees just ramping it up, having a blast to the highly audible live drum sounds running through DJ Bonobo’s set. He’s tossing dubplate-type heat, while some in the crowd goes in on interpretive break dancing, always a staple when the the bros get a little elevated on whatever they could smuggle in. All that wonky, wobbly goodness hits people differently. Then a smaller gent in a peach sweatshirt, wearing glasses, appears, on the other set of decks on stage, while Bonobo finishes off his breakbeat set that has him jumping around from deck to deck like a Zumba instructor.

As Floating Points opens his set, it’s pretty straightforward tech-house builders to establish a foundation that the crowd can trust, and the crowd is going along with it. It’s cool. Then Shepherd, who has a Ph.D. in neuroscience and epigenetics, at least seems like he’s gonna head into some of the soulful tech-house tracks from his deep repertoire, but the kids are very slowly leaving. The soccer Moms, who could be drum and bass ravers from another lifetime, are still out there, shakin’ it, and have not lost their moves or timing at all. But Shepherd, who said he had been opening for Jamie xx on tour for a year and a half a while back, in big room stadiums, shaped his sound for making his version of big box EDM. Which, unlike Steve Aoki’s cake-throwing ass, means it’s full of lush fizzy bleets, broken chords, oceanic washes of sound, a hyperreal coding.

So, realizing this younger generation, full of ADD, ADHD kids, weaned on TikTok and Twitch, who need a constant flow of disruption to keep their attention, he goes directly to those big ravey tunes with the washed-out acid lines and the grumbly bass lines, and it kills. For about 45 minutes, he’s just dropping tune after tune, with the big drop, full of pulsating throb, discordant disruptions, similar to selections found on his dancefloor-moving album from last year, Cascade.

He’s identified that these kids need to be knocked upside the head with obnoxious bass, soulful vocals, and or droney synth wash every two and a half minutes, and that’s exactly what he does. It’s a masterclass on reading a crowd and finding what keeps them. Eventually, he goes into his disco-jazz-soul edits, which I imagine were the crux of all those magical nights at his famous party back in the day, Plastic People.

As I’m walking to catch the shuttle back to Civic Center, and I run through in my mind how so many different looking people, from ladies in pink satin dresses to cats who, erm, look like they just woke up from that Dead & Company show last week, to even a security-roadie dude who was hanging out on the side near the speakers, one-moment eating what looked like corm on top of mashed potatoes for a snack, and then next clipping a plastic flower to my hat after my yelling in support of ole Sam’s song selection—all these people for about 90 minutes all in, er some type of rhythm, all grooving and all smiles, and not one of the ism’s at work.

Outside Lands, you did your job.

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