Milwaukee, WI

Apparently, not everyone feels the same way as me when in comes to the music lineup for Summerfest. Ciara, T-Pain, and Chris Brown are already scheduled to perform. Yesterday, the heavy-hitting Ludacris was announced as a headliner for the Marcus Ampitheater on July 1st. Good idea? Dan of WISN-AM certainly doesn’t think so. In fact, he made his own logo for that day of Summerfest - a frowning face with a bullet in the head.

Am I the only one who finds this the slightest bit racist? Dan doesn’t hide his unfamiliarity with Ludacris. He watched one music video and made his assumptions that someone is going to get shot that day. What did Dan see? Not much except a black man throwing rhymes in a club. Sure the song can be offensive, but all Dan’s attitude says is that when black people get together, someone is going to die.

Ludacris is just the kind of act that Summerfest needs. I already gave my praises to the powers that be for bringing some modern rock and punk bands to the stage. Why should rap be excluded? Because black people might show up for the festivities? Before you make assumptions about a community of people, make sure you know something about them. You may not like someone’s choice of music, fashion, or dialogue, but that doesn’t make it wrong - just different.

I have a confession that may sound downright heretical. I don’t like Summerfest.

I tried to enjoy it. For many years in fact. But try as I may, I simply never understood the appeal. It’s not like Summerfest is a bazaar of strange goods and unique delicacies that appears on the outskirts of a backwoods town. It’s smack dab in the middle of Milwaukee, where I can travel 5 minutes in any direction and buy better pizza, colder beer, and real works of art for half the price. All this without having to go into a bathroom where I have to pretend that the liquid on the floor is water.

What about the music?

I like rock ‘n’ roll, but you won’t find the classics of Lynyrd Skynyrd, Alice Cooper, or John Mellencamp anywhere near my CD player. Go ahead and call me close-minded, but I’m 26 years old. To put it in perspective, how many of you over the age of 40 listen to Cole Porter, Benny Goodman, or Johnny Mercer? Summerfest always has a huge selection of music to choose from, but 95% of it isn’t relevant to my generation. As for the other 5%, most of them are either kitschy flavor of the month acts, or out of my budget and playing in the Ampitheater.

With Summerfest barely two months away, I was prepared to chalk it up as another missed event. Then a friend to told me this morning to check out the Summerfest website. Someone out there must finally be listening to the cries of angsty teens and jaded twenty-somethings. Sure we still get the likes of Styx and Foreigner, but we also get Wolfmother, Shiny Toy Guns, Built to Spill, Social Distortion, Augustana, and my favorite, Rise Against. The best part is that these aren’t even the Marcus Ampitheater performers. Toss some hip-hop, folk rock, and classic rock acts into the mix, and this is shaping up to be the first Summerfest that truly does have something for everyone.