Moved On

Movin' On has come and gone, and after another year with middling attendance and a lot of complaints about the lineup, I just can't help but wonder what the future holds for the festival.

I've looked back at past lineups and wondered what happened. Don't get me wrong — Phantom Planet was awesome; Piebald put on a great, fun show; Authority Zero had people going insane; and Lemonsoul, a local band, got one of the best receptions of any bands on the lawn.

But maybe that's just the problem. Not to take anything away from Lemonsoul, but when there are nine bands from out of town being paid to play a show and a local band outshines six of them, something is very wrong.

I've looked back at past shows and wondered how we got to this point. In 2003, before I came to Penn State, the headliner of Movin' On was Wilco. The band had just released Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, one of the top ten albums of this decade. Apparently, Penn State had no idea, because after that year, Movin' On took a new direction with its booking and progressed towards more "popular" acts. Judging from the crowd at the HUB lawn Saturday night, it's not working very well. Since Wilco, the festival has featured Bowling For Soup (so bad it's offensive), Rusted Root (an over-the-hill Rusted Root, mind you), Talib Kweli (awesome, but as evidenced by Kidz in the Hall's reception Saturday, State College ain't a hip-hop town), and Phantom Planet. Movin' On is a very necessary event for Penn State, but the receptions over the years just go to show that you can't possibly please everyone. Sometimes, it seems, you can't please anyone.

Let's face it: there are 40,000 students here, only some of which really care about who plays Movin' On. State College is a football town, not a music town. If you're going to put on a concert, you can't try to please casual music fans. You've gotta get four or five bands that appeal to the most fervent music fans out there.