’90s alt-rock welcomes you to the Indiana State Fair!

Previously on Midlife Crisis Crossover:

It’s that time again! The Indiana State Fair is an annual celebration of Hoosier pride, farming, food, and 4-H, with amusement park rides, cooking demos, concerts by musicians either nearly or formerly popular, and farm animals competing for cash prizes without their knowledge. My wife Anne and I attend each year as a date-day to seek new forms of creativity and imagination within a local context…

This year’s State Fair theme was “The Soundtrack of Summer”, by which they mean “The Year of Music”. Summer is a time to listen to music while on vacation and/or while frolicking in the sun! Music is often written about summer! If music and summer were a couple, their celebrity name would be “Mummer”! I’m not sure if that should rhyme with either “bummer” or “boomer”!

The most noticeable expression of this theme was the fairground P.A. system, which they turned into an ’80s radio station (alas, no DJ) that was a pleasant addition to our surroundings whenever it wasn’t drowned out by the growls of the shuttle tractors riding their circular routes. Also supporting this theme, the Harvest Pavilion was devoted to one large exhibition called “Vinyl Revival: The Art of Music Experience”, filled with tributes to the art of album covers curated in partnership with Indy CD & Vinyl, that stalwart record shop in Broad Ripple that I’ve visited maybe once ever, because I’m only in their neighborhood once every five years or so.

I understand album covers used to be one of the perks of buying 12-inch records back in the late 20th century. Those covers aren’t quite the same objet d’art at the size of a cassette, CD, iPod menu, or music-app thumbnail. They mean even less in a culture where the music-consuming majority seems to have swung their support more toward individual singles they can toss into a 5,000-file digital folder than to full-length albums containing eight to twenty songs by the same artist and taking up shelves and crates in their home. I hate vinyl and vinyl hates me (long story), but I can recall times spent in my youth rifling through the bins at the major department stores that used to carry them, and just staring at the art that could sometimes be cooler than the tunes inside. I appreciated the chance to dive into the joy of physical media and its package design, which had to serve the dual purpose of buyer aesthetics and product advertising, as one placard acknowledged in a conscious effort to “keep it real”, as we used to say, though sometimes we Gen-X-ers were just being ironic.

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