Outside Lands: Mighty M.I.A., pale Dead Weather, peppy Matt and Kim, and more

Pub date August 31, 2009
SectionNoise

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M.I.A. All photos by Kimberly Chun.

By Kimberly Chun

Outside Lands — here and now gone. A final dispatch from the dusty, green groves.

Sunday, Aug. 30

Keeping your expectations low is key to smorgasbord fests. Still, I expected a sparser crowd today, the day of the canceled Beastie Boys appearance due to Adam Yauch’s cancer diagnosis, and those expectations were fulfilled. There was definitely less of a mob today: not quite as many specially propped-up cleavages and fewer well-heeled, supertanned oldsters (acolytes of George Hamilton?) than yesterday. What can you say? Dave Matthews definitely skewed the demographic toward the middle-aged, if not outright white-haired.

I don’t know how gramps and grammy would have felt about the fence-jumpers, but they were definitely hopping today as well: I spied about a dozen crash over the fence en masse near the Presidio stage mid-afternoon to the sound of congratulatory whoops from bystanders on the inside. Outside a few agile types peered in at the Sutro stage from the trees on the other side of the barrier. Low-key in comparison to last year’s gang fence-vaulting.

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Matt and Kim.