Why the Glastonbury Spectacle Feels Like an Exhausting National Obligation

Every June (aside from the fallow years), the British press and public whip themselves into an annual frenzy over Glastonbury, as if the festival’s existence is an act of public service and national pride. If you spend even half an hour on any social media platform, you can’t escape the barrage of predictable commentary, performative outrage, and forced nostalgia, all masquerading as cultural discourse. Where once it was a pilgrimage for music obsessives and outliers with more affinity for mud and music than Instagram aesthetics, Glastonbury has become a spectacle so bloated by hot takes and hollowed-out symbolism that the music now serves as background noise to a self-perpetuating conversation about everything except the thing the festival was supposedly founded on. This year, the stories around Kneecap, The 1975, Bob Vylan and Rod Stewart only served to spotlight how little anyone seems to care about what is happening on stage, and how quick we are to hijack the moment for a fresh round of polarised soapboxing. Glastonbury is now a ritual everyone feels obliged to have an opinion on, even when the honest truth is this: the discourse is more tedious than the rain that always turns Worthy Farm into […]

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