Rothbury Music Festival

This weekend over 50,000 hippies will invade the small town of Rothbury MI, for the beginning of a week-long music festival headlined by big name acts like Dave Matthews Band and John Mayer as well as several other musicians whom feature the "crunchy groove" sound that so greatly appeals to the unwashed masses. Free loving spirits from across the country have hit up their lawyer dads for gas money, charged $250 a ticket to their mom's credit card and loaded up their Jetta's to make the trek to the sleepy western Michigan town for a once in a lifetime chance to spend a weekend camping, dancing in place with their arms swaying wildly, trying to score with girls wearing long skirts, (all of whom feel the need to argue, with no one really, that Jose Ortega y Gasset is the most underrated American philosopher when you really just want to scream "To bad he's from Spain you dumb, pretentious harpy" but you want to see her boobs so bad that you just nod your head in agreement. Yes, I may be talking from personal experience here) and praying their AT&T wi-fi connect cards get service out in the woods because they need to update their blog so all their co-op farmer friends in Boise can read about how "organic" the festival is even though its located on the same land as a resort golf course and a family friendly indoor water park. Local officials estimate the scent of patchouli and pretense will more than likely suffocate the local population and may be smelled at distances as far away as Lansing, Ludington and Grand Rapids. Lucky for those of you, like myself, who are to busy selling your soul to faceless corporations or going to law school to get a degree in fascist pig-ism and don't feel like spending your Fourth of July weekend spending a couple of hundred bucks to lay in a hammock and eat rice the Detroit News has sent their music writer Adam Graham to cover the festivities for you.

O.k. maybe I'm being pretty harsh on these festival goers....maybe. To each their own, right? Sure, it might be fun to get a group of friends together, travel around the country and hit up various festivals, especially if you are really into music, which I'm not (I'm pretty sure buying Grave Dancer's Union by Soul Asylum in fifth grade pretty much disqualified me from ever reaching music aficionado status, but I digress). For example my idea of a dream road trip would be to head out with some friends and hit up as many major league baseball stadiums as we could, which if you don't like sports probably sounds like a colossal waste of money and time. So before I judge these festival goers to harshly and paint all of those in attendence to broadly with the same brush let me read what the first report from Rothbury has to say. Oh no.
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"The first-year factor was also part of the allure for Nathan Straight, who came to Rothbury with four friends from Winchester, Va. "
We're breaking it in for everyone," says Straight, 19, while his friend Chelsea Witte cooked a pot of rice over a portable grill. "We're pioneers, really. Like Thomas Jefferson or something.'"

Fuck. You.

Seriously. Hold on, I have to go walk around the room to calm down about this

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O.k. I'm back but I'm still angry. Maybe I shouldn't be though. Maybe this kid is just joking or he's mentally handicapped or he's just been misquoted or something. However there is probably something like a fifty percent chance he is being dead serious and I, relatively anonymous blogger and defender of Thomas Jefferson's honor, just can't let him get away with that. Why? Because I dealt with too many assholes in my history classes at MSU, namely guys who wore ponchos with sandals, drank coffee from the same moldy ass Beaner's mug everyday, treated completing the State News crossword puzzle as if they had just done the Sunday New York Times Puzzle, described everything as "pragmatic" and took contrarian bullshit stances against the professor just for the sake of being non-conformist to not call this kid on it. Since this is post is getting much longer than I anticipated I'm going to give an abbreviated list of everything Thomas Jefferson accomplished in his 83 years.

-Delegate to Continental Congress
-Drafted Declaration of Independence, which could have led to him being executed for treason.
-State Legislator
-Governor of Virginia
-Founder of the University of Virginia
-Minister to France
-Secretary of State
-Vice President
-2-Term President
-Father to dozens of slave children...o.k. maybe this last item isn't so great but impressive nonetheless.

Noticeably absent from this list. Attending music festivals. I don't know though because Jefferson did take a year off from politics in 1794, which he very well could've spent backpacking across Europe with Ben Franklin and John Jay hitting up music festivals, experimenting with his sexuality and just fucking finding himself....man.

I don't think our friend Nicholas used the word pioneer correctly either. Jefferson was a political pioneer and I don't think the Rothbury Festival is breaking any kind of new political ground. I don't think Widespread Panic are going to introduce a new form of government in between 20 minute long jam sessions and Jefferson was way to cosmopolitan to be one of those soil of the earth American pioneers like Daniel Boone or som.........you know what this is stupid. If I wrote a blog post about every stupid uninformed hippie opinion that gets published in a paper I would be here all fucking day. So if you'll excuse me I'm going to get back to selling out.

Seriously though, this bar exam review shit is killing me. I'll post whenever I have time again.