music festivals

Of all the music festivals I have covered in the past few years as Hip-Hop Editor at Uproxx, 88rising’s Head In The Clouds Festival has been my favorite. That was true of last year’s edition of the fest, which I both streamed online and attended in person, and remained true of this year’s iteration, which returned to the Rose Bowl in Pasadena for another two days and nights highlighting global Asian talent from across a wide spectrum of genres.

Now, there’s no disrespect intended to Coachella or Rolling Loud, which both put on great shows in 2022 and 2023, respectively. But there are three areas which I consider pretty much essential to the music festival experience and Head In The Clouds has just consistently delivered in all of them both years I attended. From the music to presentation to the vibes of the crowd, Head In The Clouds LA offers one of the best music experiences around, despite its lower profile — or maybe even because of it.

After all, one of the main complaints you hear from festival-goers these days is how “corporate” so many of them have gotten. Sometimes, it can feel like the sponsorships have overridden the focus on the music. Plus, since music discovery is so driven by algorithms and streaming, oftentimes, it can seem as though the booking agents for the bigger fests are just continually grabbing from the same overcrowded pool of talent, resulting in a lot of lineups that share a lot of the same names.

Because Head In The Clouds has a focus on the artists signed to 88rising and a specific, mostly untapped niche, its lineups often present a variety of fresh acts — many of whom are performing in the US for the first time. This means that the potential to discover something truly new is higher than the clouds, as acts from Korea and Japan share their excitement to perform for a whole new set of fans. On Sunday, I learned about Korean R&B singers Yerin Baek and Zion.T and Japanese girl-pop group XG, whose unique takes on familiar grooves perked up my ears and prompted frantic Google sessions.

Meanwhile, being on the fringes of US mainstream awareness gives many of these artists room to experiment. To put it bluntly, anyone with eyes and ears can see how quickly most mainstream popular artists are pigeonholed due to their ethnic background. While the lines between genres have blurred in recent years, you can still see how Black artists in rock are considered novelties, white R&B singers are shunted into a generic “pop” title, and artists who start in one place stylistically can find it nearly impossible to shake off a genre tag no matter how drastically that style shifts over multiple projects.

But because Asian acts are so overlooked by the American mainstream (to the American mainstream’s detriment, I might add) and folks of Chinese, Filipino, Korean, Japanese, Malaysian, Thai, or dozens of other origins don’t fall so easily into the reductive American racial binary, the artists highlighted at Head In The Clouds get to proudly draw influences from across a wide spectrum without judgment or expectation. This leads to stuff like Zior Park’s inventive blend of operatic pop and hip-hop, Eyedress’ nihilistic take on punk and folk, and NIKI being able to coolly swing back and forth between a T Swift-esque form of soft guitar pop to upbeat R&B.

And while it’d be nice to see artists like Filipino-American Lyn Lapid become huge stars, you also get the impression that without the pressure of appealing to a massive, four-quadrant audience, they get to just be themselves and make the music they want to make, which ultimately is more interesting than even the most innovative and experimental alt-pop stuff currently fighting for space on the airwaves lately.

Of course, the festival’s execution makes all this discovery possible, and that’s where Head In The Clouds shines for me. While Brookside at the Rose Bowl is relatively small, it still feels almost too large for this fest. It’s both cozy and roomy at the same time; where other, sprawling fests can make you walk up to a half-mile between the acts you want to see, feeling like a sardine in a can the whole time, the two stages (and the dance music tent) here are all just a couple of minutes’ walk from each other. While sitting by the golf course’s adorable water hazard to catch some shade, we could actually clearly hear both stages — which wasn’t a problem, since few enough of the acts overlapped.

Meanwhile, the grounds themselves are pretty (although the super warm weather lately made this year’s fest a lot dustier than last year’s), with glowing cloud installations dotted throughout the golf course. Each, of course, had a lengthy line of festival-goers looking to take a photo to remember their day. There’s also an animated cloud mascot — a combination of a mechanical gizmo and a projected face — atop the main stage, and its facial expressions often reflect the mood of the music (any time an artist mentioned “tears,” it would cry, which was just about the cutest thing I’ve ever seen).

Also, the food is the greatest combination of items I’ve ever seen. My girl and I devoured a pair of pork belly bao … tacos, I guess … blending all kinds of different Asian cuisines, like a comestible metaphor for Head In The Clouds itself. Food trucks offered a variety of options — we went with garlic chili noodles from a truck called, fittingly, Noods — and even got our photo taken by an appreciative vendor of boba drinks and mochinuts (if you haven’t had mochi donuts, you’re missing out).

What made Head In The Clouds such a positive experience, though, was the vibe of the crowd. As much as some festivals are all about getting the audience to turn up and rage out, that can be an exhausting and anxiety-inducing experience. Not to sound like too much of a square, but watching folks get way too high and pass out or throw up from the hot sun and tightly-packed crowds isn’t something I usually walk away from feeling energized about. But the crowd at Head In The Clouds is there for the music, for the solidarity, to appreciate sharing in common a similar — but not monolithic — experience of existing in society in the paradoxical state of conspicuous and invisible at the same time. I can’t say I know it on the same level, but I can certainly relate.

There are still ways this fest can improve. While the experience inside the grounds is top notch, the parking situation is still a little nerve-wracking due to large chunks of the drive up to the parking area being unattended with few signs or landmarks to follow. At one point, I found myself driving through a residential neighborhood just hoping I was headed in the right direction. And while efforts were made to provide shade, those efforts could have been stronger (I get giving concertgoers more incentive to invest in VIP, where tables with umbrellas were set up, or buy umbrellas from the general store, but maybe put people over profit a little).

But these are minor quibbles against a sea of positive impressions. Give me a dozen festivals like Heads In The Clouds — niche, small fests dedicated to shared interest and a mellow good time — and, like the second stage at 88rising’s unique festival, I will have double happiness.

Some artists covered here are Warner Music artists. Uproxx is an independent subsidiary of Warner Music Group.