Last Saturday I was lucky enough to attend Ultra music fest in Miami (for journalistic purposes of course). It’s the largest gathering of trance/techno/house/dance DJ’s in the world. If you’ve never been, I’d recommend it to anyone as it’s the most ridiculous experience you’ll ever have in your life. You’ll see people who you can only imagine only come out in the sunlight once a year just for this music festival, and even if you aren’t really into the music, by the time it’s over it’s all you’ll want to listen to.
There are five different stages with DJ’s all performing at the same time throughout the day starting at 12 p.m. going through the whole day to 12 p.m. With so many different stages playing music at once you can literally stand anywhere in the park and feel the bass going through your body.
Scattered around the park were a bunch of food vendors with anything they could throw together and charge a ridiculous amount of money for. Regardless you basically get pound of raw fat covered in oil for $10 and if you wanted water with that it would cost you another $5. With prices that high you would have to be on drugs to actually pay that! (Oh wait…) It should be illegal to charge such a high price for water when (spoiler alert) around 95% of the people there are on ecstasy, and a water could literally save their life! That’s like a government charging high prices for medicine that sick people need to live! (Good thing that’s never happened.)
Throughout the day, I spent most of my time at the main stage which is where the bigger name DJ’s would perform and tens of thousands of people would be in the crowd watching. Basically, the crowd was broken down by the closer you were to the stage equals the crazier you were.
Holding down the back of the crowd was more of the college students staying in Miami for the weekend who haven’t really been to a music fest before getting pretty wasted and just shouting “Yeah Ultra!” every few minutes. As you approach the stage you see less and less shirts on people, and more glow sticks randomly attached to people’s bodies somehow. These are the people who are less interested in the music and more interested in the visual effects because they’ve all realized today that, “neon lights are the coolest thing in the world” and literally look like they’re all in a trance with the music.
Ahead of that group are the diehard fans who have decided they need to get as close to the stage as possible as if their life depended on it. The fans who are thinking, “I’ll punch a girl in the face to get as close to Deadmau5 as possible.” and figured the more space they take up while dancing, the better the music is. The kind of dancing where they need at least a five foot perimeter to safely do their back flips to the beat. But still, there’s one group of people ahead of them literally right in front of the stage.
The people who are so wacked out of their mind they don’t realize they’re at a concert anymore. You’ll see a grown man dressed in a full body Pikachu outfit with neon lights in his mouth doing jumping jacks screaming “I have to keep dancing or they won’t let me into heaven!” The kind of people who haven’t blinked in the last two hours and don’t understand when the music stops playing, they just keep dancing. And their dancing looks as if they’re in an intense fist fight with an invisible enemy, but they can never win so they just try even harder until they eventually pass out.
All of this is going on in the crowd while the DJ on stage is by far having the most fun out of anyone. I’ve never seen an artist more energetic and excited about their own music than the DJ’s at Ultra. Nobody else in the world is so proud of their own work and willing to openly show their enjoyment more than anyone else. It’s like if you gave a PowerPoint presentation in class than clapped for yourself louder than anyone in the class after you finished.
The more DJ’s that performed and the later it got in the night, the more the whole area looked like a war zone, except instead of scattered shell cases it was glow sticks and neon head bands. I walked by more than one person in the fetal position in the middle of the park just shaking but you can’t tell if they’re in need of medical attention because all their friends are sitting around them as if nothing’s wrong, but there’s no use in trying to have a conversation there with anyone you don’t know.
“Hey your friend’s been shaking on the ground with her eyes closed, is she ok?”
“Yeah she’s fine, she’s just dancing, she loves this song.”
“I walked by her a half hour ago and she was shaking like this, are you sure she’s ok?”
“Yeah I have some if you want to buy it…Wait, what did you ask me?”
As the show ended 100,000 people filed out into downtown Miami which looked like the strangest invasion I’d ever seen. As everybody tried to find a way to get home, we decided to take the metro back to the apartment along with thousands of other people from the music festival.
It was an interesting ride back as the same person who was having the most fun at the concert was now just some guy in pink spandex leggings and an American flag wife beater awkwardly standing on a train. It’s truly a great music festival when someone can go from being completely normal to strange in a matter of minutes.
John Jacobs can be reached at jjacobs@ut.edu.
good description of people rolling on e!!!! i thought armin was great