Brad Nelson

The parents' tent at Warped Tour.

The Reverse Daycare tent at the Vans Warped Tour resembles nothing so much as a really relaxed waiting room. While away the hours in a bazaar armchair while your daughter (always a daughter) treks from stage to stage, occasionally texting you or stopping by the air-conditioned tent and asking the security guard stationed outside to poke his head in and call for you. (She's not allowed inside.) Read one of the provided magazines (Vogue, Allure, Lucky, In Style, Women's Health, Runner's World); watch a movie; doze off (intentionally or otherwise). It's a minor but crucial element of a tour that, as Reverse Daycare Tent Manager Shilpa Hareesh pointedly noted to me, is now older than many of its attendees.

On Saturday at Nassau Coliseum, Warped Tour first-timer Denise—who spent most of her time in the tent catching up on a backlog of Crain's New York Business—told me that the tent was the deciding factor in her 14-year-old daughter's Warped attendance, after a plan for her to go to the festival with a group of older kids was nixed. (Last names and kids' names and ages, where provided, were volunteered by parents.) Denise's daughter researched the Reverse Daycare Tent and presented her case, recruiting her mother as a chaperone for her and her friends. This is a common narrative, Hareesh told me, and a cursory online search for "reverse daycare" bears that out. Several other parents who had planned for Reverse Daycare also brought their own reading material, whether a Grisham mass-market or Fifty Shades Darker on an e-reader.

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Tomorrow night at the Lehman Center, hundreds of electro-pop fans will gleefully inhabit the alternate universe in which freestyle got its due when the Miami singer Stevie B (above, singing "Girl I Am Searching For You") headlines Forever Freestyle 6, a revue of icons from the underheralded style's turn-of-the-1990s golden era. The sixth iteration of a throwback festival hardly seems like the type of event about which to wax rhapsodic, but no amount of purple prose feels like overstatement when fighting for the recognition and reputation of freestyle.

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To supplement this year's Pazz & Jop launch, Sound of the City asked a few critics to expand on the reasonings behind their voting. This is from Nick Minichino, who voted specifically for Funkmaster Flex's premiere of Jay-Z and Kanye West's "Otis" this summer.

That was the driving force of it—to create that moment of unwrapping the CD and listening to it for the first time. It was a very old-school way for things to happen. People really were anticipating an album on a certain day and everyone got to experience it simultaneously.

—anonymous Roc Nation executive about Watch The Throne's tight leak policy

Before Watch the Throne, music-industry talk about the "album experience" always felt like code for BUY THE ALBUM and especially DON'T STEAL THE ALBUM, especially since, in practice, no one really seemed all that interested in preventing leaks. The external-hard-drives-in-locked-briefcases mystique of Steven J. Horowitz's Billboard story (from which the above quote is sourced) merely revealed that, prior to this album, basic data protection was a skill music-biz folks had yet to learn.

And yet. Despite disheartening leaks Jay-Z and Kanye West had experienced in the past (the article cites My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy tracks, but there are plenty of other examples at least as far back as The Black Album in 2003) the "old-school" motivation rings true, thanks to plenty of other elements of the album's release. Of course, having actually exerted control over who will hear one's album before its release enabled quite a bit of the hoopla, and allowed the artists to make an event—complete with pop-up shop—out of the release. Having the money and power to ensure a release date before the release of a single allowed them to use the single's hype to goose album excitement (and vice versa)—a ploy only a handful of other rappers would be able to replicate. And the "listening party" allowed them, however briefly, to re-inscribe critics as gatekeepers.

That said, the crucial element of the old-school presentation was the premiere of "Otis." There was enormous incentive to determine the best possible venue and timing to release the first "real" single, especially after "H.A.M." debuted and sank. Jay-Z and Kanye West could have put the song anywhere online at any time, held it for the video and had an MTV premiere (which they got anyway), or made it an event in any number of other ways. Instead they premiered the song, relatively unannounced, on a Wednesday evening over terrestrial radio in New York City.

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Weezer/Flaming Lips w/Yeasayer
PNC Bank Arts Center
Thursday, July 28

Better than: Not seeing Bush at the Bowery Ballroom.

It's extremely easy to forget the advantages of an large-scale concert if you've gone, say, a decade eschewing such shows. Massive venues with lawn seating (and ticket checkpoints at every intersection, of which there are about 20) lose their luster once the intimacy (and relative lack of expense) of club shows becomes an expectation rather than merely an appeal, and the performative transition involved in scaling up often changes the nature of a band's performance.

Last night's Weezer/Flaming Lips double bill at the PNC Bank Arts Center was a rejoinder to that sometimes-prevailing attitude. Here was a show that could only have worked in this sort of venue, playing to the strengths of the setup and even benefiting from its drawbacks.

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