MANCHESTER, Tenn. â€" Saturday at Bonnaroo started with the explosive and recondite and opened out gradually, over about twelve hours, into open, cool-headed, mass sing-alongs. At 2:15 the hip-hop band Death Grips, from Sacramento, Calif., obscure and assaultive in word and sound, appeared on one of the smaller stages without its drummer, Zach Hill, which seemed at first like a problem: he’s a pure energy driver, a combustion expert. (He’s busy working on a film, for which the band will be making soundtrack music.) But the rapper Stefan Burnett and Andy Borin on keyboards and samples pulled it off impressively on their own. Mr. Burnett has the rampaging intensity of an early punk singer â€" he seems like he’s inventing new ways to make music challenge and disobey â€" and the voice of a drill sergeant; he never let up, barking and chanting short and dark and dense lines, rocking back and forth from the waist. Performers at Bonnaroo are often flattering thir audiencesâ€"it’s both a mainstream-pop festival and one that’s built on smaller, more obsessive passions â€" but he would flatter nobody.
Bjork, her head encased in something that looked like a ski mask made of dandelion fluff, sang a greatest-hits set at sundown with a group that was both maximal and minimal: only a laptop manipulator and an electronic drummer, but also a 14-woman choir. For a main-stage set, much of it stayed fairly light and twinkly, not the heavier, instant-anthem sound she’s used before at outdoor festival shows. And yet with strong melodies, flashes of ’90s drum-and-bass rhythm, and her usual stage presence â€" playful and casual but determined body language, full-throated singing â€" it reached this audience quite directly. There was singing along, but much of it quiet: in general, people didn’t want to disturb the performance art in progress.
After nightfall, Jack Johnson, the blue-chip sing-along artist, filled in for the last-minute cancellation of Mumford & Sons, which I’m told is the first main-stage cancellation since Bonnaroo started in 2002. Later, R. Kelly encouraged constant participation through a 45-minute string of abridged hits (and then spent a few minutes singing about how he needed a towel to wipe the sweat off his face). And at 12:30 another edition of the festival’s regular Superjam feature began, this one almost the opposite in affect of the Death Grips set. It was giant-sized classicism, engineered to reward the audience members’ consensual taste in rock and ’60s soul, giving them songs they knew the words to.
It brought together, among many others, the Meters’ drummer Zigaboo Modeliste, Jim James from My Morning Jacket, Brittany Howard from Alabama Shakes, the percussionist Cyro Baptista, the singer Bilal, and members of the Preservation Hall Jazz Band; John Oates, the singer and guitarist from Hall and Oates, served as musical director. And it was about songs a bit more than about jamming; tightly run, with an almost miraculously good sound-mix, it included the Meters’ “Hey Pocky Way,†Curtis Mayfield’s “Keep On Pushing,†John Lennon’s “Instant Karma,†and, with R. Kelly joining the assembly, Sam Cooke’s “A Change Is Gonna Come.â€
