Austin City Limits Music Festival is finally over. While it was a real blast watching bands and people and stuff happen in relation to a music festival, ACL is overrated. Here’s a few reasons we are so glad these two weekends of hell on Earth are finished.
1. Barton Springs Road is finally open. Ever notice how the strongest Chuy’s cravings occur during the onslaught of ACL? It’s absolute torture knowing that Barton Springs, between Mopac to Lamar Boulevard, is a solid mass of music-festival patrons. Now that weekend two of ACL is over, normal traffic will resume and Austinites can wander over to Barton Springs without fear of being forever lost in the ACL masses.
2. All of those clueless out-of-towners have gone home. One weekend full of perpetually confused tourists is hard enough to deal with. Two weekends of those goofballs pushes the limits of even the friendliest Austinite’s psyche. I think we can all agree that if one more person asks where Zilker Park is, we all just might collectively lose it.
3. The concentration of idiots and goobers in the Austin metropolitan area is diluting as I write. The days of having to watch every self-important moron with an object mounted on a flagpole or staff of some sort shout on the phone to an acquaintance to “just look for the inflatable pig on a stick” are through. And innocent eyes will no longer be exposed to the moves and grooves of festival dancers, which are both fascinating and cringe-inducing.
4. Phones will receive all of the texts and phone calls they would have received while we were in Austin’s premier cell service black hole, also known as Zilker Park. Trying to get in touch with anyone at ACL is darn near impossible, but it’ll be nice to finally get all of those pictures your friend took of The Cure to prove that it was a bad decision to skip them and see Kings of Leon instead.
5. No more ACL crowd means no more being forced to stand shoulder to shoulder with a stinky bunch of high school kids. Unchaperoned minors run rampant during ACL. Some of them can pass for college kiddos, but tell-tale signs usually include over-zealous face paint, one too many flower crowns and uttering the phrase, “My mom is picking us up at 10.”
6. The cloud of marijuana smoke hanging over Zilker Park will dissipate. ACL attracts its fair amount of stank from both people and narcotics, and it’s about time all of that wafted back into the air vapors above.
7. No more bandanas, aviator sunglasses or perpetually barefoot feet. Over the last few years, fashion at ACL has evolved to near-Coachella levels of obnoxious pseudo-hippies and hipster-wannabes. As weekend two came to a close, the people of Austin could sleep a little sounder knowing that they wouldn’t have to watch painfully self-unaware fashion emergencies gallivant through Zilker Park for a whole year.
8. All can safely walk around the Barton Springs area without having to wade through crashing sonic waves of nondescript indie rock. Or at least not until South By Southwest. Give those ears a rest for the next five months.
