For almost everyone who attended the FORMAT Festival this past weekend, the first introduction to the venue came via bus. Unless you paid four figures to glamp in a yurt on the grounds, or braved a bike trail the organizers deemed suitable for “advanced riders only,” or got an Uber ride to a drop point 0.4 miles from the action, here’s what you probably did: Drive to a big parking lot at a Walmart property near the interstate and stand in a line with other supposed weirdos trying to get to this party. From there, it was a 15-ish-minute ride to a 250-acre pasture set in a valley north of Bentonville wreathed with low hills and trees. Step off the bus, head through a TSA-style metal detector, submit to a backpack search, swipe the RFID on your wristband, and boom, you’re in a big field, near a merch tent. When the wind picked up just right, the air smelled decidedly of farm.
The overall effect was a bit like deboarding a cruise ship once you’ve landed on a foreign shore where only a few locals with permits get to sell you coconut water. Many of the visitors who descended on Northwest Arkansas for the festival will later tell their friends they’ve been to Bentonville — on Sunday I did overhear a dude in an American flag hoodie say he’d been to the Crystal Rivers museum, sic — but whatever FORMAT was, and what it turns into, won’t be synonymous with Bentonville, exactly, even if it was a truckload of Walton money that manifested it. Audiences paused at such shout-outs as came from London-based performers Jungle — “Bentonville! How you feeling?” — because there just weren’t a ton of self-identified Bentonville residents among the assembled out-of-staters, transplants, and other Arkansans who still haven’t decided how to feel about Bentonville’s bougie turn of the past decade.
Credit where it’s due, though. Sam’s millennial grandkids Steuart and Tom Walton, and their OZ Brands venture, pulled off an event that was at once completely novel, psychically unmoored from any known reality, and yet could have only existed in Northwest Arkansas, where middle-of-the-road curatorial tastes meet Mariana Trench-deep pockets. Great music (especially if you like indie rock), amazing production kits (lasers, projectors, top-flight lighting design, immaculate sound quality), 20 large-scale art displays and installations, $9 PBR tallboys at the bar tent, freakin’ gorgeous late summer weather. For about a hundred bucks a day, audiences got to see what sort of toys real money can buy.
(A quick aside: Really, though, “FORMAT”? “For music, art, and technology”? Huh? Clearly the branding here isn’t aiming for the nouveau hippie vibe of Coachella and Bonnaroo and Lollapalooza. Fine. But this festival sounds so much like an iPad named it, the thing practically begs for a nickname. Barning Man? Wal-apalooza? Ozfest would’ve been a natural, surely, had not the Osbournes already made Ozzfest a longtime headbanger rite, the Prince of Darkness strikes again.)
Inside, the vibes were cheery, as if the early adopters who skipped watching the Razorbacks game and braved the multi-stage commute felt like they’d already beaten crowds certain to arrive in the coming years. The Waltons have overtly courted Texans, particularly Austinites, to see northwest Arkansas as a downshift to the cost and hassle of the 512. Anyone who’d attended the sort of sprawling urban festival FORMAT emulated — such as Austin City Limits, where 400,000+ people flock in October, or Lollapalooza, which stacks 100,000 people a day into the 300-acre confines of Chicago’s Grant Park — felt a great sense of calm wandering the grounds. FORMAT organizers told the Wall Street Journal in April that they were shooting for about 17,000 people at their shindig; the festival said afterward attendance was 10,000. To put it in more familiar Northwest Arkansas gathering terms: That’s about half a Bud Walton Arena’s worth of folks wandering through a half-dozen stages sprawled across the valley, plus food trucks and art installations and a trippy hot air balloon and a smattering of lil shops.
The result was as comfy an experience as you could reasonably expect with the (formidable) lineup of musicians on display. You want to get close enough to Thundercat to see his fingers move at banjo-picking speed along the six strings of his surfboard-length bass? You could do that without even being a dick about it. Just wander up and say excuse me over and over, and wriggle toward the stage. People simply weren’t packed in tightly enough to get proprietary over their space. For anyone who spent their teens and twenties smashed nose-to-shoulder against other sweaty fans in bigger festivals, this was outdoor music on easy mode, for better or worse. You could bring your kids, for free, and lots of people did. No one was moshing or losing shoes or getting the air smooshed out of their lungs as they surged toward the stage to get a closer look at the Flaming Lips. It was, in that regard, a space that let pretty much anyone with a ticket wander around and enjoy themselves, a sort of musical dim sum joint, perfect for a promiscuous art lover who didn’t need to clamber through a sweaty human mass in order to feel they’d earned such a great vantage of Elle King or Beach House or Khruangbin. You might not have felt as much, but at least you could easily find a spot from which to see.
Thing is, though: A shaggy, smelly, sunburnt yard party — a rollicking shit circus of humanity bandanna’ed up against the dust or mud-streaked and dancing face-up to the storm clouds or just pressed so claustrophobically tight to strangers that your glasses fog over — is also a goal worth chasing, at least in measured doses. Oddly at FORMAT the moment that most felt like an event where something bad might happen at any minute to you, yes YOU, came at Fatboy Slim’s late-Friday DJ set inside a faux red barn so stuffed with people that security let you in only after someone else staggered out. There were amusing touches — such as when the DJ tossed what looked like throw pillows into the crowd, prompting people in turn to, well, throw pillows — on the way to his gathering finale (“Praise You,” “Right Here, Right Now,” “The Rockafeller Skank”) for which the couple of hundred or so folks in the barn bounced in time. Underfoot the floorboards bowed and sank, a bizarre feeling, as if the building were being held up, barely, by an enormous, swooning trampoline. Nothing was breaking. But maybe it … could? Should we all … find out? RIGHT HERE? RIGHT NOW? RIGHT HERE RIGHT NOW RIGHT HERE RIGHT NOW, and on until your calves and knees cry no más.
No doubt the braintrust that assembled the festival will have a series of postmortems before they decide what to do for 2023. You could ding the festival on a number of fronts: an almost total lack of hip-hop (or, hell, country for that matter), data deserts that made coordinating with friends (or tweeting, or anything else) impossible, camping options that ranged between $$$ and $$$$. Maybe FORMAT decides to get weirder, bigger, sloppier, more epic. Or maybe FORMAT stays true to its roots and remains polite, boutique, manicured, approachable. All I know, as a person who spends way too much money going to shows, is the Friday night set that Phoenix played on the main stage was one of the most gobsmacking audio-visual shows I’ve ever seen, and it alone would’ve been worth the ticket price. Instead, though, once it wound down after 10 p.m., I got to wander in, around, and through enough art and dance spaces — including a brilliantly lit glade where a huge disco ball splattered light on the surrounding trees — that I felt like I was clubbing in Miami Beach. And when it was time to leave, the line for the bus was mercifully short.