OutKast Is Playing Splash and I’m Already There in My Head

Somewhere around June, when the days start staying light too long and the air gets that particular quality of barely-contained restlessness, festival season stops being an abstraction and becomes a physical need. The body wants loud music and inconvenient sleeping arrangements and strangers who seem like they might be important.

I was heading to Splash that Friday—Germany’s longest-running hip-hop festival, held on an island in a flooded quarry in Saxony, which already sounds like a hallucination. The lineup that year was the kind that makes you feel briefly okay about the state of music: M.I.A. doing whatever unpredictable thing M.I.A. does live, Angel Haze who at that point felt like she was about to explode into something enormous, and OutKast on their reunion tour, playing every major festival that summer, which should have felt like oversaturation but somehow didn’t because it’s OutKast.

I’ve never entirely understood the logic of festivals—the mud, the queues, the aggressive proximity to strangers’ body heat—but I keep going. There’s something about hearing a song you love in a field with ten thousand other people that does something to the song, changes its molecular structure in a way that stays with you. You carry that version home and it sits inside the original from then on.