Shaky Knees Music Festival began as a modest two-day event at Atlanta’s Masquerade (an iconic venue now set for demolition) and has grown into a full-on festival drawing patrons and bands from all over the world. Descending upon Atlanta’s Centennial Olympic Park, this marks the festival’s fourth location in four years of operation, making it hard to get too bogged down with bummer logistical issues like stage distance and easier to remain hopeful that the bones of the festival —the attention to the lineup from top to bottom, the diverse age groups in attendance, the convenience of the fest to in-town Atlanta — are the aspects of the weekend that are here to stay.
As big corporations like Goldenvoice and Live Nation (or, in this case, Live Nation subsidiary C3) continue to gobble up independent festivals, it might be time to shake the doom-and-gloom stance on the acquisition of fests and look at the way an event can maintain its identity even with a big company behind the scenes.
Photo by Carlo Cavaluzzi
In this increasingly corporatized festival landscape, Shaky Knees is a hopeful sign that a festival can still have a distinct hometown vibe, and music lovers would be wise to watch fests of this size and situation closely to see where the industry as a whole is headed. Shaky Knees’ distinct identity has a lot to do with founder and longtime Atlanta promoter Tim Sweetwood’s continued role at the helm: You could hear it in the personal thank-yous from artists on the stage, many of whom played this festival in one band or another over the last three years. You saw it in the festival stages themselves, which continued to be named after iconic Atlanta streets rather than big-name sponsors. Most of all, you felt it in the pride taken in the bottom of the bill, where the investment in young talent was made obvious by the fact that up-and-comers like Hop Along and Day Wave played the same stages as headline-rivals Walk the Moon and The 1975.
While we can’t help but hope that next year the fest returns to the shady, easy-to-navigate green goodness of last year’s location at Atlanta’s Central Park, Shaky Knees 2016 held plenty of memorable performances. Here are the 35 sets we made it to this weekend, from worst to best.
–Dacey Orr
Contributing Writer
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