The Depravity of Vegandale
A waxing gibbous moon floated sentinel over a clear, dying orange and ocean sky while two train cars with strobing windows paraded past each other. The faraway vibrations rippled from the decayed metal supports, took root under my feet on Lot F outside Citi Field. Someone knocked into me while exiting a port-a-potty. After exchanging courtesies of a passing apology, I took in a deep whiff and smelled the burning rubber of the Whitestone Expressway seasoned by the low tide of a nearby marina, sporadically interrupted by wafts of spicy cauliflower and falafel, mingling with the staid baseline of feces and urine. On a purple and pink stage, the rapper Jaewon Phillips mumbled his latest single, and I thought aloud, So…this is Vegandale. A woman heard me, laughed, and confirmed we were indeed at Vegandale. My wife V., her sisters, their friends, and myself had driven two hours and twenty-five miles to come to this. To partake in a spectacle flying under the veneered banner of veganism. I was one of ten thousand stooges. However—in a masochistic way—I’m grateful I witnessed such a vapid exercise. It was like a preview of things to come: An End of the World’s Fair.
Vegandale is a nine-city festival tour highlighting vegan vendors, often headlined by well-known musical acts. When V. asked if I wanted to come along, I was in the middle of an eco-conscious spiral, which usually happens every summer after ingesting reports about [insert year] being the hottest summer on record. I get self-righteous and spew intolerable talking points as if I’m some ivory-tower intellectual. During this annual cycle, I proclaim we have no respect for the planet and make half-baked pledges to rearrange my life. So, while looking up compost dumps I’d never drive to, ethical brands I’d never purchase, effective recycling, and fantasizing about what it would be like to drive an electric vehicle (let alone afford one), I thought attending a vegan music festival was a swell idea. I was naïve, but it was an opportunity to boost my ego, cope with my powerlessness against the death knell for the human race, plus I wouldn’t have to do anything except show up. My presence was some vague endorsement of sustainability. Also, Quavo and GloRilla were on the marquee. I probably wouldn’t get another chance to see them together in a lineup at such a good price. Maybe I’ll tell my grandchildren about the time I saw them perform while flood waters brim to our roof and rescue choppers fly past us.
Vegandale’s tagline reads: Where major musical artists, interactive art, hundreds of vendors, and thousands of people come together to realize a world without animal exploitation.
Being on the peripherals of the no-meat, no-animal-testing community, I wanted to embed myself in a mass gathering of these people because I simply hadn’t been around many vegans before. I had questions as to how they bypassed the Big Food industry, which only recently began catering to their market. Additionally, music festivals bring out this courteous, communal, and caregiving sentiment. A vibe where we’re all dirty and a little dizzy, so we might as well be kind. They aren’t perfect and there’s no shortage of horror stories like Astroworld or Woodstock ’99, but I find them (overall) to be a safe space where everyone cosplays artsy or hedonistic personae to distract themselves from stocking shelves, tending bar, office jobs, driving assholes from A to B. I certainly indulged as a single twenty-something fast food cashier. But now, being a husband in his thirties, I was interested in the prospect of awakening a long-desiccated vessel. Without getting into too much detail, I was rather feral in my behavior at these events, where my willingness to experience a pulsating sonic medley was only matched by my enthusiasm to alter my state of mind. My wife never got to see me activate this buffoonery except when we attended a Sean Kingston concert where I acted the drunken fool, mainlining 2007 nostalgia. She still hasn’t seen this exhibitionist festival gremlin come out to play because the primary ingredient for such an activation is joy, something Vegandale grievously lacked. Call that pretension, snootiness, or maturity, the bare fact is Vegandale fucking sucks. I should’ve suspected this when my wife told me Quavo bowed out, and we were left with Memphis’s twelfth most famous rapper.
GloRilla is a torch-bearing, unapologetic representative of the hip-hop ratchet mentality injected with a cavalier sensuality bordering on provocateur. Her music is fun but lacks substance, yet it carries this energy of I’m-doing-this-anyway-so-fight-me. I also appreciate the sexual muck of her persona, shaking anything and everything, because that is more a genuine reflection of our ethos as opposed to the Barbie-doll aesthetics of Taylor Swift’s pink bedroom cultism. The machinations behind American music enact a selectively paradoxical libido that often manufactures the historically underserved into the limelight and calls it inclusion because it gives the stilted and privileged license to be who we want without exoticizing ourselves—a venue to counteract our Puritan DNA with little consequence. Some label that hypocritical and classist. I call it a culture’s structure reflecting decline. And this is no indictment on GloRilla or any artist like her (see Cardi B, Megan Thee Stallion, Amber Rose, Sexyy Redd). They reflect the subconscious finality of death we all try to avoid by using convenient vehicles for distraction, which is the point of most commercial art. It just so happens to be within a generation where our self-made end is tangible and looming.
Vegandale’s social media is expertly curated. Scrolling through previous iterations, it looked vibrant. Filtered sunshine and bubbliness as if the photos themselves had dimples. Grassy fields, a canopy of tents, plant-based food drizzled with hummus in checkered containers you get at the state fair. Festivalgoers in jean vests, short shorts, tank tops, laurels resting upon frizzy hair. During the drive, we all expressed our willingness to walk into the festival with an open mind because we, admittedly, had lampooned the vegan lifestyle. Vegandale was an opportunity for us to interrogate our consumer habits. On the surface, there was also reason to be excited. The tickets were cheap, and there would be live music. If anything, we would make it a fun experience as a group. When we finally parked our car by a marina overlooking the rusted docks of Flushing Bay, my sister-in-law and I smoked what was left of a roach. We then walked by Citi Field and saw a line of glamorous outfits—Cartier bags and YSL clutches. A molten saturation of good posture, adjusted lapels, and low busts. We found out that Vegandale was in Lot F, while the event taking place in the stadium itself was the NYC Fine Wine Festival. The glitzy and well-groomed sauntered into an evening of rosé and merlot, chardonnay at sunset, while in the parking lot was this pig pen of the budgeted underbelly, hazy swarms of us shuffling into an asphalt tent city. I thought the wine festival looked pearl-clutched, and I pitied them probably the same way they felt sorry for us, watching hundreds blindly follow the booming stereo, reeking of summer afternoon and weed. We approached silos of huddled masses forming serpentine queues. I heard the alien warble of security wands, the TSA tone of ushers waving people through.
While signs by the entrance read NO OUTSIDE FOOD OR DRINK, people dragged and wheeled in coolers of Hennyladas (a piña colada with Hennessey), rolling papers, dime bags of whatever. I don’t know how they got in with all that contraband, whereas my sister-in-law got pressed by some rent-a-bouncer wearing a faux-Kevlar vest for holding a water bottle. After two minutes of back-and-forth, we were rustled onto the festival grounds. The advertised color and expressiveness of Vegandale was a trick of the algorithm. Lot F resembled a cracked frying pan. 4:00p.m. sunlight with no shade, no sitting area except on the margins near the hoofing 7 Train bridge. Every surface appeared stained, weathered. I didn’t fall upon any art installations or performers. Just some haphazardly placed arches—scuffed white and green and indigo pillars—with VEGANDALE branded on chipped wood. This was where people could take photos for social media but had to crop out their disappointment, perform for their co-dependent following how they were here, and there was no other place they would rather be, except for maybe that beach or that yacht or that vineyard an acquaintance from high school just posted about. The most colorful area of the festival was the neon purple rows of porta-potties.
We navigated through the crowd. Couples slurping from large sippy cups, their pores exuding a sugary dew. Two long rows of tents, primarily food vendors touting all-vegan selections. Behind the tablefronts were deep fryers, grills, portable stoves, and aproned bodies glistening with grease, calling out orders. In my experience with music festivals, I normally would feel the bipolarity of anxiety and giddy anticipation where the festival grounds appear so vast, so new. That this enclosed asphalt meadow is now a playground to explore, and I’d feel a little sad for not having the time or money to dabble in every experience offered. Not so with Vegandale. Here, I only received the anxiety, the sensation of confinement, the stereo rumble a carnival storm ready to engulf us all. I felt trapped, then assuaged when V. grabbed my hand. Smiling, she told me under her breath that it smelled like a lingering fart.
Starved after driving through the shit-hell that is New York traffic, we saw a sign for wings. V. is a connoisseur of the tailgate meat stick, a sommelier for buffalo sauce and garlic parmesan, an obsessive for the staple of American glut. If there was any chance she’d expand her palette for a flat end of the faux-meat variety, this was the moment. Waiting in line, I observed the preparation of these vegan chicken wings that did not contain chicken but were supposed to taste like chicken. You paid $18—before taxes—for these blackened, hard clumps of over-fried falafel. A man behind me asked if they were dressing these so-called wings with grocery store BBQ sauce. Sighing, I confirmed this was the case. He stepped out of line, and I should’ve followed suit, but we’d been there for twenty minutes already. My other sister-in-law caught up with us and complained about a jerk sandwich she bought from another tent. Twenty dollars, she said, for wet mushroom stuff. We all ate on a curb in silence, not ready to admit how we’d been duped.
Our stomachs now full, I skipped over to the beer tent, expecting a selection of ethically packaged microbrews and ciders. The reality: Coors, Heineken, Simply Spiked, Corona, White Claw. I exhausted my drink tickets on two double-fists of Twisted Tea. After slogging those down within twenty minutes, our group hailed one of the bootleggers and bought two Hennyladas, a gram of sativa, and a bag of edibles. I immediately popped one after handing over the cash. I then noticed a security guard and two NYPDs staring at me during the transaction. They did nothing. This was clearly against festival policy given my sister-in-law’s previous encounter. The vendor (a woman with copper hair matted to her forehead, faded tattoos on fingers counting my money) said there was nothing to worry about. They’re not doing shit. We’re the least of their problems. Now, I am unsure of whether it was the weed, the alcohol, or some combination, but seeing these cops look directly at me without any reaction and just go on their way made me uneasy. My paranoia rested in their presence within the festival population. Pairs of them walked among us and did not interact, did not engage, nor did they question people. There was no enforcement. They were not there to hinder any illegal activity. A message to everyone present that they could be activated at any moment if we decided to go outside the parameters of their ball pit. They did not seem to care what happened beneath the surface as long as it remained contained. Maybe this tangential reverie was just a product of my being a Connecticut Yankee in New York. In the five boroughs, the masses cry out to the void of metropolitan noise yet become increasingly anonymized, so there is leniency to partake in illicit debauchery because their status in the pecking order does not meet priority, but this is only an illusion because for that city to operate without becoming a skyscraped wasteland, an enforcement class with military-level funding must garrison among the civilians, ready at a moment’s notice to surveil and neutralize. Again, I do not know if I was just too in-my-head, but I felt like I was in a departmental experiment. To see how the public would react by having groups of law enforcement peppered throughout. Crowds moved away from them like rustlers trotting through the herd with a familiar lasso and branding iron.
I started to sweat, jerked my head around, thought we were being followed. Another Twisted Tea only allowed for more irrational thoughts to creep in, but instead of letting the thread reach a logical conclusion of dystopic misery, the alcohol snipped it, leaving only emotion and more distilled unease. Then came the sulfuric rank of smoke—something burning. Many paused, looked around, each made a drooped frown of median disgust but eventually flowed back into the rhythm of a bachata, a free-wheeling rendition of the foxtrot. Some laughing, even. But I kept looking around. What was that, and why was no one else concerned? Had they not read the reports? Was this the great blaze finally cresting over the horizon to snuff us out? This was the hottest summer of our lifetime (so far), and we were dancing? Yet soon later, I found myself arrhythmically bobbing my head along to the music, getting used to the smell.
Being in a slightly altered state, at some point, you choose the festival persona you want to adopt, and the result hinges upon a binary of mental extremes. Either you fully accept how small you are and admire what is in front of you: harmony between strangers outside in an open area, giving people the sense they can go anywhere, maybe because it strums our evolutionary memory back to when we danced naked under the moon, ran around the maypole, jumped over the raging bonfire while drums played, drank wine with swollen stomachs, giving noxious praise to Dionysius. We become this conflagration of goodwill (sometimes) aided by drugs and alcohol. The potential for us to reach such a state warmed me but then came another proposition lurking at the other end of the bit string: how quickly this could all descend into bedlam. The line between the two is so fragile that we realize nothing is stopping any one of us from causing a crushing chain reaction—a stampede with nowhere to go.
V. tapped me on the shoulder, gave me a squeeze. Asked if I was okay, and I said I was fine, having a blast. She took that as sarcasm and started cackling. She asked if this was anything like when I saw The Who or Kendrick Lamar. In both instances, I felt genuinely swept out of time, caught in this euphoric ascension where the event extended deference to the audience. A dual transaction in which the currency was joy exchanged for a well-earned dollar. She tapped me on the shoulder and brought me back again. You talk about those concerts all the time, she said. So, how does it compare? Not even close, I answered. Near the main stage, there was this fenced-off area with a separate crowd. I asked why we weren’t getting closer. She informed me that access point was for VIP holders only. We were at least five hundred feet from the stage. With the sun fading, I imagined what the glitzed and glammed winos were saying about us, observing from the stadium’s bird’s eye landing. Were they laughing or envious of us: these microscopic particles fissuring and bouncing, embracing the id while they were stuck with hollow conversation and overpriced Tuscan red? For me, it was at this very moment, sandwiched between two premium membership populations, that I finally understood. While organizations can come up with as much flash and dazzle to feign quality, if there is no substance at the heart of any initiative, particularly art, then everyone sees past the fog for the empty thing it really is. But there are varying degrees of whether we accept such an epiphany in the moment, and sometimes we just take another drag.
The sun departed the Manhattan skyline, taking any veil of color or blush with it. GloRilla was ninety minutes late for her set. The DJ—after running out of intermittent commentary about chilling, vibing, mobbing, rocking, bumping, bussing, and feeling it every thirty seconds—stopped curating a playlist of hypnotic Caribbean dancehall and Afrobeats to ask how everyone was doing. They started chanting Glo! Glo! Glo! The DJ proclaimed they understood, but we needed to wait a little longer. In the meantime, put your hands together for…Jaewon Phillips. Ya’ll better recognize, they said. This is the legendary Jadakiss’s son! which received elementary, if not confused, applause. I couldn’t tell if he was any good because I could not see him well enough to get a sense of his stage presence, nor could I appreciate his lyrics. The stereo system was so bass-heavy that any enunciation or demonstration of poetics resulted in a tinny, garage-band quality. I then realized I needed to go to the bathroom.
On my walk to the neon purple quadrant, I saw people lazing around, folks strolling from one tent to the other. Pods of band T-shirts, graphic tees, thrifted plaid, repurposed schoolboy and schoolgirl outfits. I saw drag Buzz Lightyear and Woody, a group of men laughing hysterically as they ran amok in banana suits, hopscotching the scattered trash. Beer cans fell from every surface, toppled from the late summer wind. Tumbleweeds of plastic bags clipped onto my feet. Overturned food containers splattered with half-eaten cauliflower dripping sriracha. Trench-coated goths demonstrated their contempt. Genuine or performative, they had more in common with everyone else who seemed to be looking for a fun time but to no avail. Their faces confused and scowling—not at each other—but at the aura of Vegandale. People pointed to the stage, shrugged, uncertain what to make of this whole affair. I entered a porta-potty to do my business, breathed through my mouth so as not to experience the odor. Once finished, I went back outside. Looking up a waxing gibbous moon floated sentinel over a clear, dying orange and ocean sky…
Being on the margins of the festival activity, I gained further clarity. Before, I had not come to any conclusion besides knowing Vegandale was disingenuous based on the half-assed organization and the quality of the performers. I then noticed the trash. Waste everywhere like a burgeoning landfill. Seeing so much garbage strewn about made me take a deeper look at the vegan philosophy. With there being no official slogan for veganism, there is still a general interpretation of principles associated with veganism.
I expect most vegans profess that through their individual efforts, humanity comes one step closer to a more symbiotic relationship with the planet. With fewer animals dying from factory farming, the world will be better for it, and humans will thrive in such a dynamic. The jumbotron at the back of the mainstage projected a montage of happy animals. Chickens nestling peacefully in the dirt, a pair of penguins clasping fins, untagged cows and bulls running across open plains, a sun-spackled dolphin, horses shaking their manes at dawn. Correct or not, like it or not, veganism has parallels with sustainability. So, when coming out of a plastic pod after relieving myself into a literal shithole, only to observe plastic wrappings, plastic cups, nonrecyclable containers, no recycling bins, discarded food the birds wouldn’t eat, and beer cans littered about the entire area, I was disgusted but then my outrage ebbed into complacency because Vegandale’s mission statement ticked across my memory.
Our mission is to demonstrate the moral imperative of a world free from animal exploitation, challenging stereotypes by showing that a vegan world looks remarkably similar—just without the use of animals.
If veganism is supposed to change folks’ perspective on how we make the planet a more harmonious entity, Vegandale indicates that it truly doesn’t matter. In the eyes of the Molochian owl funding this charade, veganism is merely a vehicle to give the superficially conscious the satisfaction they did some good—as long as they do not examine further. Vegandale is not wholly disingenuous but genuine in its misdirection. A vegan world looks remarkably similar. When disrupting the status quo does not substantially do anything to disrupt that status quo, shouldn’t that be concerning? For Vegandale, the world is and always will be as it is: doomed at the hands of the dominant species, so bite into that falafel while we still have it. The Earth is just the same, where we strangle oceans by clogging them with plastic islands the size of Texas, pile upon landfills that seep into our water supply and give children cancer, but at least some cows and chickens won’t be slaughtered.
I returned to my group just in time for GlorRilla. Being so far away from the stage, I could barely see the five-foot-nothing multi-platinum artist and her twerkish marionette dancers. From what I make out on the jumbotron, Glo wore dark blue sweatpants with a cream sports bra. Her dancers wore ripped daisy dukes and white tank tops. They were a cadre of empowered, liberated women gyrating in this celebration of the urban lotharia. Glo’s lyrics switch up the misogynistic gender dynamics of hip-hop, where she takes control of her feminine draw and weaponizes the male gaze against itself, all the while not being preachy or corporatized feminist. The energy was synaptic, even among us serfs relegated behind the barrier. Bodies bumped into each other, folks ran through the crowd, hopping from one splash of people to another, occasionally stopping to engage in drunken dance. Her chorus bumped, exclaiming how it’s seven p.m., ninety-five degrees outside, and no one can hold her down because she’s about to bust her ass out and steal your man and there is nothing you can do about it. She screamed it, anthemized it, letting the adulating fans recite her coda. But the mystique and momentum faltered. After the initial shockwave of her presence, I could tell she was on autopilot, letting the track do most of the work, adlibbing about how all her haters (myself included) could kiss her ass. She walked around and encouraged her dancers to carry the energy while she hovered and occasionally jumped into verse marginally off-beat. The performance simply was not good enough to make me forget what I witnessed. For an artist to show up nearly two hours past her slot, rap over her track, and play for barely thirty minutes, there instills a cynical bitterness, and it checked me out where I was more concerned with my surroundings than the low-budget bullshit happening onstage.
I had to laugh. We were cooped up, gathered, penned, enclosed in this barren land, dropping waste and sewage throughout this enclave. Lot F: a place utterly devoid of the vegetative utopian concept Vegandale purports. While the result was no different from other wasteful exercises like Coachella, Vegandale’s philosophical stance as the foundation of this cash grab made me think I was on a different planet entirely. Who would think to mastermind such depravity and trick moronic consumer cattle like me into attending something that falsely endorses a lifestyle unless they were truly an evil and inhumane force? But such notions were soon dispelled because we were, in fact, on Earth and we weren’t going anywhere. Earth is dying whether we eat meat or not. And here at Vegandale, we are the meat gathered and enclosed. Was this the origin of the festival? A sick, ironic twist lying at the heart of this cloaked hedonism, where now we know what it must feel like to be the doomed calf looking up at the sky one last time before being led into a dark room?
Matt Gillick is the Managing Editor and a co-founder of Cult. Magazine. He is from Northern Virginia and received his B.A. from Providence College. He currently lives in Connecticut. Recent work found in EGG+FROG, Twelve Winters Journal, and BRUISER. Find more of his published work on mattgillick.com.