This morning, the Pitchfork Music Festival announced its lineup for 2021, which includes most of the acts scheduled to play in 2020—with some notable exceptions. Erykah Badu replaces the National as the headliner of the festival’s closing night, St. Vincent takes the Saturday-night headlining slot previously held by Run the Jewels (who are playing at this year’s Riot Fest instead), and Phoebe Bridgers wraps up Friday night instead of the Yeah Yeah Yeahs. Further down the bill, exciting new acts include Drew Daniel’s project Soft Pink Truth, rapper Jay Electronica, and D.C. indie-rock phenom Bartees Strange. The fest has booked six acts that could reasonably be considered locals, down from nine on the 2020 bill—since last year, Femdot, Kaina, the Hecks, Twin Peaks, and Dustin Laurenzi’s Snaketime have been dropped, and R&B star Jamila Woods and recent Matador signees Horsegirl have been added. DJ Nate, Divino Niño, KeiyaA, and Dehd appear on both lineups.
After 15 months of the COVID-19 pandemic, which many of us spent social distancing or completely isolating, the prospect of cramming a season’s worth of festivals into a few weeks feels like stumbling onto a treadmill that’s already running at 20 miles per hour. The CDC’s guidelines continue to be confusing and ill-considered, so that many Americans have little idea how much danger the virus still presents to them. Pandemic-related deaths are on the decline—last week Chicago was downgraded from “very high risk” for COVID-19 infection to “high risk”—but the news about vaccinations is mixed. The Illinois Department of Public Health says 37.6 percent of the state is fully vaccinated, but the state’s daily vaccination rate declined steeply during the last three weeks of April—a trend that could endanger the department’s projection that 75 percent of Illinois will be immunized at some point this summer. And festivals can of course affect public health, as last summer’s Sturgis rally demonstrated. They’re often huge tourist magnets, encouraging travel—according to a 2013 press release from the mayor’s office, 80 percent of 2012’s Lollapalooza crowd was from outside Chicago.
