Quote:
Originally Posted by DownInFlames
What’s your issue, exactly? Too mainstream? Not mainstream enough?
The biggest problem I have with Sled is me being too old and out of shape to make it to see all the bands I want to. The friends I usually go with have kids now and don’t want to go, and my social anxiety makes going solo really tough.
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I don't know if I'm erudite enough to pin the reason down in a satisfying manner beyond just that I'm completely apathetic about the vast majority of the selections. It's certainly fair to call age a factor but I wouldn't say I'm picking up on contemporary acts noticeably less than I have in previous years and in any case Sled's never been shy about bringing in, let's call them, "legacy" selections.
The general scaling-back of the festival over the past several years hasn't helped with the feeling either. The Olympic Plaza sets are gone, a number of the old anchor venues are gone (outside of SI's control, to be fair), the free Luke's Drug Mart hype-up show is gone, some of the annual side events I liked to attend outside of the strict scope of the music programming are gone. It's starting to feel less like a legitimate all-encompassing multidisciplinary event and more like a chained series of small-to-smallish scale concerts any larger city could put on any given weekend purely incidentally, if that makes any sense.