Noted Panty Concern Sponsors Metallica-Sized Music Stage Next To Student Union

…for a single guy with two laptops. And about 200 ululating undergrads. Here’s a blurry picture:

People say music as a set of industries is going down the tubes. This might be true. But corporations like Victoria’s Secret dropping six-figures to use music as a brand-awareness mini-festival for chick-skivvies proves that music’s still good for something. Like turning Dunn Meadow into Jake’s Nightclub-cum-Glastonbury for an evening, complete with toilet-paper cannons, rain (luckily, no massive spitball fight), a crane-camera and two massive video monitors on either side. Here are our Jumbotronned Vicky Seeky Overlords, who introduced each act (I only came for GT, the last performer) by giggling, pointing at the crowd, and saying how cool IU is:

I’ve written my pink thong off about Girl Talk in the past, so I’ve only one thing to add here about last night’s performance: He’s really, really adamant about performatively defining himself now, more or less against the sort of confines that geeks like this want to put him inside. For about 15 minutes of his set, he took advantage of the 75,000-foot tall (est.) LCD screen behind him to broadcast, Leni Riefenstahl-as-Hipster-Runoff-style, the message that he is “Not A DJ.” Other animations would ask “Are You A DJ?” before declaiming something on the order of “What I’m Doing Is Much Sweeter.” Okay sure, good for him. Here’s the “NOT”:

I mentioned Jake’s Nightclub above–for those non-Bloomingtonians out there, it’s the club in town that regularly does this sort of thing (an actual pic) (or used to, at least). Hence: the possibility was surely there, what with the drizzling rain and all, for a full-on, thousand-strong slimy grindfest in the mud. Now that, I wouldn’t be opposed to. And perhaps that’s what actually happened at other places in the crowd. My section, though, was marred by that other demographic of Big Ten universities, tailor made for an underwear-sponsored party with “Knuck if You Buck” blasting at 100 db: Pre-partied douchebags, jamming the fuck out to the same music they’d hear when they grunt and paw at each other at Jake’s, down the street. Perhaps predictably, a mini-West Side Story broke out in front of me, started by one exceedingly drunk dickhead who was raging after another ragingly inebriated asswipe. It kept going and going and going, gradually involving more Bro-Magnons from both camps, until one dude got the original dude in a headlock, and the headlocked dude’s bro actually threw punches. Hard. Like, super hard. Right at his jaw, three times bam-bam-bam. To the strains of “Juicy/Tiny Dancer.”