Hopscotch’s Shifting Identity

Hopscotch Music Festival | Thursday, Sep. 8–Saturday, Sep. 10  |  Various Venues, Downtown Raleigh

Hopscotch Music Festival looks a little different these days.

Launched in 2010, the festival has long been one of the most far-ranging and adventurous music festivals in the Southeast, expanding from an indie rock core to touch on metal, hip-hop, noise, and a variety of other experimental flavors across kaleidoscopic lineups that have surpassed 100 acts. At least one industry expert, though, sees it as something more typical.

“[It’s] a festival that increasingly feels more like a point along the curve of the festival circuit,” says Alex Maiolo, explaining that, from his vantage, Hopscotch has become an event that’s increasingly filled with acts that are routing through various festivals rather than charting its own bold course, as it once did.

Maiolo admits this isn’t a problem for everyone. A Chapel Hill-based musician and festival consultant, he advises and works with numerous big events, from South by Southwest in Austin to Roskilde Festival in Denmark and Tallinn Music Week in Estonia, and he frequently travels the globe to play or write about various others, including Hopscotch.

This experience causes him to feel keenly about the way Hopscotch has changed, he says.

“If [these artists] come to your town and you’re not the type of person who can travel for music, that’s really fucking cool,” Maiolo reasons, “but, at the same time, it does mean that it’s it’s a point-along-the-curve festival rather than something that has the potential to stand out.”

Not everyone sees the way Hopscotch has changed in this light. INDY Week spoke to Maiolo and three others—the current festival director, a local artist playing this year who has also played several times in the past, and one of the event’s co-founders—about the festival’s shift in identity. All expressed different views, and all agreed that the pandemic is a significant factor in Hopscotch’s changing personality.

It’s the reason there wasn’t a Hopscotch in 2020 and it’s the main reason the downtown Raleigh event has featured far fewer acts and indoor venues than it has in years past.

The festival, which has long relied on bars and clubs to host the majority of its stages, featured 10 indoor venues when it celebrated its 10th annual edition in 2019. Last year, it had none. This year, it has two: Slim’s and Pour House.

As with last year, most of this year’s acts will play in two outdoor spaces—Hopscotch’s traditional headlining stage in City Plaza and a second main stage set up in Moore Square. The last pre-pandemic festival in 2019 featured 137 acts. This year, when Hopscotch returns September 8–10, it will do so with 46 acts, surpassing last year’s mark of 28 by virtue of adding back two previously perennial club spaces.

Adding back more than two clubs was just too uncertain a bet, given the lingering possibility that a surge in COVID-19 could have forced Hopscotch to nix its indoor programming, explains festival director Nathan Price.

“It’s just hard to say for sure we should go and spend all of our money in the clubs knowing that there’s at least a small chance it could end up backfiring,” he says.

Price emphasizes that he still thinks Hopscotch has offered compelling programming in 2021 and 2022 and that it has still managed to stay voracious—pointing to this year’s lineup featuring the slanted-and-enchanted rock of Courtney Barnett, Afrobeat royal Seun Kuti and the Egypt 80, and wide-screen country crooner Charley Crockett among its headliners.

But he admits that programming mostly on daytime outdoor stages has curtailed some of Hopscotch’s wilder tendencies—though he offers the presence of Lightning Bolt’s punishingly energetic noise rock in Moore Square as proof that Hopscotch still pushes the envelope. And while COVID was the big driver in pushing Hopscotch into its current format, Price says the pandemic isn’t the only thing keeping the festival from reclaiming its club-based variety.

“There’s just not that many clubs in Raleigh right now,” he says. “We have Slim’s, Pour House, Lincoln Theatre—which those three combined are like maybe 1,200 capacity together—and then Kings is doing shows, but that wasn’t a for-sure thing when we were planning stuff …. So you know, the other thing was just, like, where do we put these shows? Even if everything goes perfect, and nothing bad happens, what rooms are we booking actually here?”

Surpassing the number of regularly available spaces in downtown Raleigh is nothing new for Hopscotch, and all of the interviewees the INDY spoke with agreed that it’s a challenge that could hold the festival back, going forward.

Throughout its run, Hopscotch has transformed a Chinese restaurant, a modern art museum, and the basement of a convention center into venues.

But success has become an enemy of such ingenuity, Price explains.

“When we launched originally, that was possible because, you know, bands were a little bit more forgiving about the spaces they’re playing in,” he says. “One of the reasons we don’t do certain spaces anymore that don’t have a stage or production is it just costs so much to get a band, even midsized bands, into the spaces because of their rider requirements, and just the shows have gotten so much more sophisticated. It’s not really a thing where you can, like, throw up a PA; you have to have a lighting package. It’s just gotten expensive.”

Grayson Haver Currin, who co-founded the festival back when he edited INDY Week’s music section, zeroes in on Hopscotch’s relationship with its home when explaining his outlook on the way the festival has changed.

“Raleigh is faceless,” he says. “I think Hopscotch is quickly trying to become faceless too.”

Currin points to the rising cost of living in or near downtown as a factor curtailing the creative energy that once fueled Hopscotch’s ever-veering creative compass. He exited the festival in 2014 and credits Price with keeping Hopscotch going after cofounder Greg Lowenhagen also departed in 2016, a year after the festival was sold to Etix founder Travis Janovich.

But Currin questions the extent to which the new owner’s desire to streamline costs has begun to stymie the festival’s other ambitions. Admittedly, some of Hopscotch’s more adventurous swings were expensive—flying in the acclaimed noise artist Merzbow from Tokyo to be the festival’s improviser-in-residence in 2013, for instance—and Currin says that during his four years with the festival, it played jump rope with the line between making and losing money.

Maintaining the festival’s ethos, he argues, requires a willingness to shoulder these costs.

“Hopscotch was aspiring to be, from the start, a festival that did not exist,” Currin says. “And the idea of that festival was to mix wildly experimental music, some indie music, and hip-hop bordering or even getting to the mainstream … with local music and to celebrate and to put them on as equal footings as we could.”

“Hopscotch at this point, is not that kind of festival,” he adds. “And that’s fine. It’s different, but it’s fine.”

Alex Riggs, a mercurial Durham-based singer-songwriter who will play their final show under the al Riggs moniker in City Plaza this year, says that while Hopscotch has changed, and the number of acts and styles it can highlight on the local landscape has diminished, Hopscotch’s new configuration provides more opportunities to highlight local music on its biggest stages. They add that the festival balances its reduced local numbers by continuing to embrace the many free day parties that always pop up around the event and that feature a “shit ton” of Triangle artists. (This year, there are more than three dozen day parties.) Club shows are also free to the public this year.

With COVID still lingering and many of the venues Hopscotch has previously used being unavailable, Riggs says the festival can’t really do much more for local artists right now.

“Expecting it to be like what it was right away is unreasonable,” they say.

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