Lollapalooza lands on the ghost of a runway

Lollapalooza started in 1991 as Perry Farrell’s traveling American circus—post-punk theater that eventually settled into a permanent home in Chicago’s Grant Park. The Berlin edition launched in September 2015 at Tempelhof Airport, which is a setting with enough history to make anything held there feel loaded. The airfield was built in the 1930s as a monument to Nazi ambition, decommissioned in 2008, and converted into a public park where Berliners now fly kites and cycle past terminal buildings designed to be imposing from altitude. Hosting a pop festival on those runways is either a bold act of reclamation or an act of spectacular obliviousness, and probably both.

The lineup was solid on paper: Muse headlining, The Libertines stumbling back through their own mythology somewhere on the bill, Seeed representing Berlin’s reggae-dancehall scene, Macklemore & Ryan Lewis if you needed your festival moment to feel purposeful. The kind of bill that works for a debut—recognizable names spread across multiple generations of taste, something for everyone in the way that festivals always promise and rarely fully deliver.

What interests me about Tempelhof as a concert space isn’t the history, exactly, but the scale. That airfield is vast in a way that resists intimacy, and certain kinds of music—the theatrical, the bombastic, the already somewhat mythologized—gain something from being performed against that much sky. Muse in a park the size of a small city feels more honest than Muse in an arena. You’re already outside; the grandeur has somewhere to go.