Festival tinnitus ringing through your head, waking up at the ass crack of dawn, with yesterday’s narcotics still dripping into your dry, stale throat from abused sinuses, rolling over on the hard ground, as the dawn sun turns your tent into a sauna, hardly inspires the desire to go to the gym. But that just shows you how much festivals have changed since I last went to them.
Typically, I would lose about 20 kilos in weight over the period of a normal music festival. Zero water and food intake would pair with 8+ hours of dancing to pounding techno music. Pairing this with the ingestion of weapons-grade chemicals would leave me looking like The Machinist. I had no need to hit the gym at a music festival; the event was a workout enough.
But, Tomorrowland has become quite the talking point as images emerge of a full-blown gym on the music festival site. “From early morning workouts to pre-set pump-ups, the Tomorrowland fitness zone proves the festival life is about balance too,” a post on Instagram states.
KIDS THESE DAYS
There has been a dialogue about the gentrification of music festivals of late. As ticket prices get more expensive and they begin catering to a different class of people, the crowd is changing. Now, the people at places like Tomorrowland or Glastonbury have to fork out a fortune.
This means that the kinds of folks going aren’t the people who invited the music festival scene in the first place. Now, it’s the wealthy tech bros, middle-class parents, and trust fund babies getting dirty in the fields. Except they’re not getting dirty, they’re going to a gym at a music festival for the love of god.
For me, a music festival was a period of around four days when my life outside of the music fields was forgotten. No work, no phones, no worries. Just incredible amounts of music, and dancing with people I fell in love with only moments before until the sun came up.
There was certainly never any need for a gym at the music festival. Who has space for that kind of vanity when you’re sleeping on a hard floor in a discount pop-up tent stinking of stale beer?