Sandbox

New York City’s Electric Zoo music festival is more aptly-titled than the creators might have intended. What started as a two-day, multi-venue Mecca for techno music fans quickly devolved into a maelstrom of poor organization. For one, even getting into the concert venue on Randall’s Island was nearly impossible because there were about 40,000 people attempting to funnel through what looked like ten feet of open space.

By about 2 p.m. Saturday, the overwhelmed gate workers acknowledged their irrelevance and were conducting security checks with such little interest that someone could easily have passed off a loaded semi-automatic as a CamelBak and strolled through the entrance unhindered. It was a bottleneck that made tollbooths on the New Jersey Turnpike feel like the Autobahn.

After over an hour spent squirming in a sea of thousands of other hopeful fans, we made it inside only to find that they had set up an appallingly inadequate number of port-o-johns—say, enough for a typical Duke tailgate. Which would have been fine if we were actually at a Duke tailgate and not one of the largest electronic music festivals in the world. We knew that our bladders wouldn’t survive the half-hour wait for the bathroom, especially while shouldering a dozen eight-dollar beers, so we did what had to be done. We went elsewhere.

And we certainly were not the only ones with the idea. By the end of the night there were people using almost every surface in the place as a urinal. Girls—well, they were out of luck. So to call it a “Zoo” was accurate to a tee: a bunch of sweaty, colorful animals stuffed into an unnaturally small cage that spent most of their time drinking and going to the bathroom in public. Oh, and there was some music, too.