Hopscotch Music Festival | Thursday, Sep. 9–Saturday, Sep. 11, $79–$299 | Downtown Raleigh
Read up on the INDY’s 2021 Hopscotch picks here.
Throwing a music festival is as much about small details as booking cool acts. Right now, those details are proving to be difficult.
Nathan Price—director of the Hopscotch Music Festival, which returns to downtown Raleigh this week after losing last year to COVID-19—tended to one of the myriad little difficulties, as he spoke to INDY Week seven days before the event.
Normally, organizers go to the state’s Alcohol Beverage Control Commission to talk with someone and secure necessary permits. This year, due to pandemic protocols, Price had to drop off forms without a consultation. They were mailed back with a small error that he had to fix and then drive back.
It’s a small inconvenience. But large festivals contain many moving parts, and small inconveniences add up, especially for Hopscotch, which got by this year with Price as the only full-time employee, plus some contract workers.
“There’s some other things, extra hoops and stuff like that you have to jump through this year,” Price says, “which we’re happy to do, but sometimes they come out of nowhere.”
Of course, not all the obstacles to bringing Hopscotch back for an 11th outing were so small. For the sake of public health, the typically club-heavy festival will take place entirely outdoors, straining to present the prismatic selection of musical styles attendees expect while cutting out the 10 indoor venues it utilized in 2019, programming solely on a pair of open-air stages.
As a result, this year’s Hopscotch is reduced to just 28 acts. The last one had 137.
August 20 brought a further complication. With COVID-19 cases surging and the Delta variant threatening, Hopscotch announced a requirement for attendees to show proof of vaccination or a negative test within 72 hours, which meant figuring out more new logistics with 20 days to plan and implement them.
Given all this, it’s impressive how much ground this year’s lineup manages to cover. There are lofty indie acts and ascending pop artists, hip-hop innovators, and Americana enliven-ers. And, for a festival happening entirely on big outdoor stages, a surprising number of wild-eyed experimentalists.
Metal and other heavy music are the only perennial Hopscotch hallmark not on the menu. Price explains that such extreme sounds were hard to make work with this year’s format.
“You don’t really want to put like a crazy noise artist in front of kids and stuff like that,” he says. “But I think that we still were able to touch on a lot of different genres and get a little bit of everything out there.”
Hopscotch’s variety will be enriched by downtown’s many clubs, which will host the expected unofficial day parties, as well as evening shows in the absence of official indoor offerings. While they didn’t program these bills, Price says organizers communicated with the venues about their safety plans, and that most were already prioritizing public health with protocols for attendees and holding performances outside where possible.
Karly Hartzman sings and plays guitar in Wednesday, a rising indie rock band out of Asheville that plays the festival for a second time. She says maintaining the day party and evening club presence is crucial to her expectation that Hopscotch will still feel like Hopscotch. But, she says, while the opportunity to perform is meaningful, Hopscotch enacting its recent public health protocols was crucial to her feeling okay about participating.
“I think it’s important to keep playing shows when we feel comfortable, especially if they’re outside,” she says. “Shows have been the setting I’ve seen people the happiest in the past few months. Shows definitely just create so many therapeutic moments. For both the bands and the audience.”
lesthegenius, a Raleigh rapper playing his first Hopscotch, doesn’t think hip-hop is “as equally represented” as it has been in years past. But he grants this has a lot to do with the smaller number of acts overall, and he’s grateful for the opportunity.
“It’s cool to be out here and represent and put on a good show,” he says. “And just be carrying that torch forward.”
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