save the ugly music festival ‘22

san francisco, california | **warning explicit language below

January 8, 2022 | written by @musicfordinosours

The first act we see is this rapper named Kahj wearing a black-on-black Supreme hat and a very fresh-looking green hoody—Hanes maybe—her black hair streaming out of her hat half way down to her waist. Before her first song she apologizes to any families present, that she will do her best to keep things clean. We are in an alley in San Francisco’s Chinatown and when the first track drops from her DJ I go slack jawed for how good the sound is in this alley that is only thirty feet wide and the stretch of a short city block. I stay slack jawed for how good Kahj is, who flows dexterously and with staccato, her hooks catching smoothly in my ear. The whole set she effortlessly draws smiles from everyone in the crowd by the effort of her own, mischievous and winking, making a joke right away of her promise to keep everything clean:

Yeah I ain’t no cocksucker
I’m spreading legs like they butter
I’m fruitier than Smuckers
I’m so fucking tight, like I’m a fucking dyke.

For a little I’m transported back to New York because how her flow is classically inclined, and the samples are too; maybe I also go there because I am with my friend Julie who I know from New York. When we lived there we would see shows like this all summer, tiny festivals in small parks and outside pizza restaurants, twenty-four year-olds making our own concert venues out of unused parking lots and not charging any money because none of us had any, drinking Tecates in the street, riding the music’s energy all the way from the first set to the rooftops after the last set, to the sweaty bars after the rooftops, and from there to our beds, but better, to someone else’s, no matter that we’ve lost half our motor skills.

As Kahj closes the set, her friends shout out Big Body, Big Body and she goes off triumphantly, having well-earned the name.

In the interlude between sets, as the smiles stay sustained in the crowd, Julie and I go to figure out what this is all about. We’d come because I’d seen a hand-drawn flyer on a community board and I liked the sound of it: The Save the Ugly Festival. Aside from the name, we know nothing. On either side of the alley, there are vendors selling the regular festival fare: shirts, sweaters, stickers, pins, jewelry, prints. We find one table where a young woman runs a raffle and we ask her what this is all about. She points to a man in a dark hat with a yellow patch on it. That guy just walked across the country from Virginia Beach and this is his welcome party. In no world could I have anticipated that and the fact of its unexpectedness infuses me with warmth as herbal tea does on a cold day like this.

Julie and I go over and issue our congratulations to the walker whose name is Chauncey. 299 days and just today is the last, walking his way up to this very moment with his friend Noah who MCs the event. He says the mission of the walk and this festival is to raise our eco-awareness and to organize community around it. He tells us that along his route he picked up something like 30,000 pieces of trash and even this morning organized a beach clean-up. He says more than a welcome party, the festival is a fundraiser so he and his friends and allies can incorporate as a non-profit: We. Grow. Eco. who will link community-building with environmental action. I am transported back from New York now, where the festivals I went to had so much of the first part, and not enough of the second.

Julie and I buy pins and join the mailing list, we grab beer from Red’s Place, the bar next door. We walk back up for the next set as the band comes on, a four-piece called For Your Pleasure who tells us they are new and this is the largest crowd they’ve played for; we cheer for them and for us. With a surf guitar and a vocalist who Julie says sounds like Jenny Lewis but I think is closer to Sharon Van Etten, they run through a perfect indie set, beginning with a song called Teardown:

Our people are our people,
No matter what the man says
No matter how he beats them.
Listen to our people,
Listen to their hopes
And let them all be leaders.
In the fight for freedom,
We need all those that are silenced to become believers.
You don’t want to wait,
You don’t want to wait,
You don’t want to wait,
To tear shit down.

It is good to listen to music with belief in it put on by people who believe in something. It is good also to see a singer dressed in all red play guitar in a red alley next to a bar named Red’s Place; behind her and the band is a fire escape where red Chinese lanterns are hanging beneath a red roof; on our way out one of the organizers gives me a red postcard he’d drawn odd characters on and a caption that reads:

when i was younger, i thought unvetted adults turned into monsters.

I look around and think, maybe it wouldn’t be so bad to be a monster if all the other people here were the kinds of monsters who would be with me. I leave, convinced for the first time in a long while, that if we make leaders of the right people, the world may turn out alright.