Bonnaroo Friday: Janelle Monae, Vampire Weekend, Neutral Milk Hotel, Mastodon, Dr. Dog, Diarrhea Planet, Danny Brown and More

Blame it on Friday the 13th. Blame it on

. Blame it on the gloomy skies, muddy earth and intermittent rain that plagued the day. Whatever it was, weird vibes haunted Bonnaroo on Friday, and while there were both bright and surprising moments along the way — from Diarrhea Planet blowing up the On Tap Lounge with their heavy-riffin’ party punk to generally strong sets from the likes of Neutral Milk Hotel, Dr. Dog, Danny Brown and more — the highlight of our day, performance-wise, was unmistakable: Janelle Goddamn Monae at What Stage.

The sun-scorched What Stage field in late afternoon is a difficult slot for any artist, but as soon as Janelle Monae’s backing band appeared — looking like old-timey sanitarium employees in white suits and black ties — to the tune of Strauss’ “Also sprach Zarathustra” (aka the 2001 song), we were reminded that going big is Monae’s m.o.

After being wheeled out on a dolly by a pair of whitecoats while wearing a straitjacket, Monae exploded into a high-energy flurry of note-perfect vocals and equally impressive dance moves — we’ve seen sugar-high 5-year-olds with less energy. With the ground-shaking impact of the 50-foot-woman crammed into a 5-foot package, Monae jumped, bounced and honest-to-God moonwalked her way through a set of psychedelic retro-soul burners like “Dance Apocalyptic,” “QUEEN” and “Electric Lady,” seamlessly cuing her band and pantomiming mowing down the whitecoats with gunfire. Not all artists make the outsized-persona thing work, but Monae championed equal rights and positive energy in her banter and went big on every single song without missing a beat — basically a surefire formula for carrying the biggest stage on the grounds, and good, good shit.

Earlier that day, barely 10 minutes had passed during The Orwells’ set at the New Music On Tap Lounge — the latest name for the Miller Lite-sponsored micro-tent at the center of the festival — before the crowd started to destroy it. Booked at a stage way too small with a crowd of fans predisposed for rowdiness on a scale that security was utterly unprepared for, The Orwells put on the most memorable, anarchistic show in recent Bonnaroo memory. As the Chicago roots punks raged through tunes off Disgraceland, the crowd jockeyed for position by freeing up space occupied by furniture. First they crowd-surfed out the beanbag chairs. Then came the massive Miller-branded wooden chairs. And then, fans climbed the lighting scaffolding to get a better view.

“I don't think this stage can handle all you motherfuckers,” screamed singer (not the former governor of New York) Mario Cuomo, wild-eyed and stating the obvious. “We're gonna need a bigger stage. I think we should have Jake Bugg's stage!" Oh, how right he was. Not long after the first stage-dive from the lighting scaffolding, the band's power was cut, allowing a squadron of security guards to disperse the fans perched atop the lighting rig and reinforce the barricades with brute strength. After 10 minutes radio silence — and a chant that cycled between “Orwells,” “Sound Guy,” “Fuck Miller Lite” and finally, “Coors Lite” — their power was turned back on. Three songs later, including a rad cover of “Cheap Beer” by FIDLAR, they were done for good, shut down by the man.

The ones who suffered perhaps the most due to The Orwells’ carnage were locals Fly Golden Eagle, who were scheduled to play next on the On Tap stage. Forced to start nearly 20 minutes late, FGE rocked best they could through their catchy, dance-along psych-soul as a crew of nearly a dozen guys erected a second barricade in front of the stage, using noisy power tools to fasten together clanging aluminum panels. Anyway, wildly obnoxious and distracting as that was, tunes from the band’s Swagger sounded excellent with contributions from saxophonist Chris Murray, and we were pleased to see a solid grip of folks in the crowd singing along with every word of “Psyche’s Dagger.”

The Spin was running on fumes by the time Diarrhea Planet took the very same stage many hours later. But that’s OK. Because if there’s any live act that’s capable of giving you a dose of pure adrenaline just when you need it the most, it’s our hometown heroes of Poop World. Diarrhea Planet is one of the hardest working touring acts anywhere right now, and while The Spin has seen them live more times than we can possibly count, it was definitely a pleasure to catch them delivering to a massive crowd trying to force its way inside the On Tap Lounge. There were loads of Nashville faces amid the throngs squeezing near the stage — fans crowd-surfed, frontman Jordan Smith crowd-surfed, and a man dressed as a banana nearly made his way onto the scaffolding where folks had been sitting during The Orwells. During crowd favorite “Kids” from last year’s I’m Rich Beyond Your Wildest Dreams, the crowd seethed and swayed together, chanting “We’re just kids!”

The story behind Birmingham soul men St. Paul and the Broken Bones is at least one documented case of the Internet doing something good for us: It's helped them break through the noise and make "St. Paul" Janeway available to sing his ass off instead of working a day job in a bank or, as he told us between throat-tearing shouts, working security at Bonnaroo: He was part of crowd control during Jay Z's 2010 headline set, when some ultra-unkind bro whipped out his little bro and … well, he baptized St. Paul. Friday, however, made it all worth it: Janeway and his razor-sharp band played to a packed crowd that cheered every James Brown stage move, every desperate James Carr wail, every Wilson Pickett shout, and every Otis Redding plea like he just won a gold medal in the Soul Olympics.

Setup was running behind at That Tent — not a big surprise, considering that every act appearing there Saturday came from a different part of the world, in many cases using non-standard instruments, and everyone has a different way of signaling that they need more in their monitor. Still, this is the third year that globalFEST has curated a day of world music on the stage, and you might think these kinks would be worked out by now.

No matter: Seun Kuti and band were worth every second of the wait. The youngest son of Afrobeat legend Fela Kuti is very deferential to his father, but Egypt 80 is clearly Seun's band, as it has been since he was just 14 years old. Three-quarters of the players have been part of the unit since Fela's time, and when they get underway, there's no stopping them. They opened the set with "V.I.P. (Vagabonds in Power)," a prime Fela piece — 20 minutes of dance/opera/sermon/town-hall meeting in which rich polyrhythmic groove and condemning corruption become a unified whole. Seun-penned originals that filled out the set, especially "IMF" and "African Smoke," also lived up to the hype, calling both body and conscience into motion.

Fresh-faced, golden-voiced British neo-R&B balladeer and superstar in the making Sam Smith's midday Other Tent set was a highlight. With a backing band of bearded, be-tatted bros who looked like they could've just as easily been in an NYC hardcore troupe, Smith had a fully stoked crowd that spilled well beyond the tent boundaries shuffling along in unison to down-tempo, dreamy, creamy pop like "Stay With Me" — a gem that just maybe cops a melody or two from Tom Petty's "Won't Back Down." What was most impressive, though, was when Smith hit the high notes on his Disclosure collab "Latch," the crowd hit 'em too.

We moved in close to Which Stage for the tail end of Dr. Dog’s set just as a light rain was scaring off a good 20 percent of the crowd. Bad call on their part, as the precipitation never amounted to much more than a light, mildly refreshing drizzle, and Philadelphia’s established DIY indie rockers were just diving into “The Way the Lazy Do” from 2007’s We All Belong. The Spin was hoping to catch a taste of anything from 2005’s phenomenal Easy Beat, and while that didn’t appear to be in the cards, they did bop along to their longtime set staple “Heart It Races,” an Architecture in Helsinki cover that we always thought worked a whole lot better in Dr. Dog’s hands. Co-frontman Toby Leaman set down his bass and took the mic for set-closer “Lonesome,” sprinting down the catwalk to high-five fans and snatch up someone’s homemade “Beware of Dr. Dog” sign. Those guys — still out there earning their keep.

Unfazed by Day 2 hangovers and fatigue, fans turned up in droves to The Other Tent for Detroit's resident partier Danny Brown. DB brought the ruckus, emceeing what was essentially an hourlong hip-hop dance party. With his unique sound that combines EDM, trap, hip-hop and house with a raw punk energy, Brown had little trouble breaking the crowd into pure pandemonium — we’re talking layers and layers of bodies here. People scaled the rafters as concert security pulled a revolving door of crowd-surfers out of the audience. Danny played through all of his hits, with nary a break or pause, and for the most part, the audience matched him step for step. The crowd showed slight signs of exhaustion toward set’s end, but chemical-induced enthusiasm was more than enough to keep the bulk of the crowd rowdy.

Prodigious English singer-songwriter Jake Bugg was put on this Earth to force hungover music journalists to come up with basically any adjective except “Dylan-esque.” He doesn't make it easy. Strumming an acoustic guitar and backed by a basic two-piece rhythm section, the 20-year-old's nasal croon and folky stomp were bringin' it back home (Side 2 style) at This Tent Friday afternoon. Mind you, Bugg's music has a particularly English slant — “Donovan-esque” might be more apropos. The Spin didn't realize we were so damn familiar with the man's music. Bugg's set was front-loaded with familiar tunes, capping that off with last year's infectious "fuck-off" anthem "Two Fingers.”

We had our annual "Where the hell are you guys?" moment waiting for the Master Musicians of Jajouka to get rolling — the tent was maybe one-third full — but what we got to see of the set was an ear-opener. Only one of the other Master Musicians made the trip with Bachir Attar, but the pair led the expedition, their reed pipes and drums astride a loping beast made up of drummer Martin, bassist Ismaily, guitarist Ribot and DJ Logic, riding into the part of the desert where you start seeing visions. More than soupy noodlers, the accompanying group is made up of masters of improvisation who know how to compose on the spot based on what their bandmates are doing, and the fit with the Master Musicians was hand in glove. Martin filled the space left by the absent drummers while adding the occasional dose of funk; Ribot shifted between soloing ecstatically like another piper and howling like the desert wind; DJ Logic brought vocal samples in from the void; Ismaily kept contact with the ground, building a foundation on one note for what felt like half an hour until the first leg of the journey was finished.

When everything came to a halt for a few seconds, we checked the clock on our phone — about the only thing it's good for during a festival — and saw it was time to bob and weave our way through the fox tails and tie dye for Andrew Bird and the Hands of Glory. His group was mostly the same as when he dropped in at Grimey's last year — Tift Merritt on harmony vocals and guitar, Eric Heywood on pedal steel, Alan Hampton on bass and Kevin O'Donnell on drums — but they've dropped the bluegrassy gather-round-one-mic conceit for a full-on, mostly acoustic rock band production, complete with giant spinning speaker and a light rig that resembled giant daisies. With Bird's trademark whistle echoing into the sunset, the band roamed all over his catalog, from revamped Bowl of Fire songs to cuts from last fall's I Want to See Pulaski at Night EP to a tender take on The Handsome Family's "Frogs." You could probably lump the sound in with Americana, but everything from the writing to the arrangements to the performance is more adventurous than what you're likely to find just by browsing the genre; it's a small combo playing amped-up, folk-based songs, but the presentation is elegantly symphonic.

As the sun began to set on Bonnaroo, Vampire Weekend took What Stage while clad in their signature ivy-league-chic apparel. Frontman Ezra Koenig strode to the center of a stage decorated in baroque styling with segments of Corinthian columns hung from the rafters, and with cool poise, he launched into a rousing version of “Diane Young” from the band’s recent album Modern Vampires of the City. As the sun sank lower, the band played selections from their prior two records to a crowd that just kept growing, both in number and excitement. VW’s set list wove fan favorites like “Oxford Comma” and “Campus” seamlessly with newer, more outsized tracks like “Ya Hey” and “Step,” finally closing with an after-sunset “Walcott.”

Glasgow's CHVRCHES did us an incredible courtesy by blasting their singles straight out of the gate — sweet and breezy electro-pop served over a heavy club-style thump. Their tunes don’t bump quite as hard as contemporaries like Phantogram, but they pack way more of a contemporary punch than their obvious heroes Cocteau Twins. Their set's second half drifted into some late-Kate Bush snoozer territory — or at least didn't lift us up where we belonged, which was at that point a place a little less sleepy and slightly more in the here-and-now, because all that Red Bull wasn't helping a damn bit.

We're not entirely certain that the whole of Bonnaroo understood the enormity of Neutral Milk Hotel performing at a festival attended by tens of thousands of sweaty, dirt-caked revelers. Jeff Mangum's reclusiveness has been perhaps over-exaggerated throughout the years, but even then, a place where you're never more than 10 steps away from someone dressed like a cat doesn't seem like it would ever be the providence of indie rock's most beloved hermit.

But if the entirety of the festival didn't get it, the people crammed into This Tent sure did. Beloved songs like “Two-Headed Boy” and “Holland 1945” turned into raucous, cathartic sing-alongs, the kind that only happens after 14 years in hiding. The show wasn't all that different from their Ryman gig in February — right down to support from Elf Power members Andrew Rieger and Laura Carter — but seeing Neutral Milk Hotel live still feels like glimpsing a unicorn, even if it's a unicorn we've seen before in a place with air conditioning.

For the third time in six years, French popsmiths Phoenix played Bonnaroo. And save for visual enhancement of a stage-spanning, floor-to-ceiling video screen flashing in bright Technicolor, the dandy band played pretty much same solid-but-predictable set they gave Bonnaroovians in 2009 and 2010 — now with songs from the band's 2013 sleeper Bankrupt! That's OK though. Phoenix is a band that has obvious standouts in their repertoire, and they know exactly what they are. From Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix faves like "Lisztomania," "Lasso," "Rome" and "1901," to older cuts like "Consolation Prizes" and "If I Ever Feel Better," the band hit all their musical marks.

Despite being stuck with a slot less than an hour before Kanye West's (just 30 minutes, given the band went on a bit late) Road to Bonnaroo winners Blank Range still managed to attract a respectable-sized crowd. They opened with the short and sweet Beatles burner "The End" — an odd choice considering it's but a 30-second number, half of which consists of a drum solo. But hey, it got everyone's attention. From there, the band's amalgam of Americana and classic power-pop was a more-than-easy pill to swallow.

As the meandering hoards made their exodus from Kanye’s negativity zone, a radically different scene was going down over at the Headbangers Ball — i.e., Mastodon’s set at This Tent. The Atlanta behemoths’ proggy, larger-than-life, heavy-metal thunder had sternums rattling as the unwashed masses of heshers churned, moshed and held devil horns and invisible oranges aloft. The band offered barely any between-song banter whatsoever, though they did come up for air for a brief moment midset, when guitarist and co-vocalist Brent Hinds thanked the crowd for being fun, adding, “Fuck Kanye, right? Fuck that guy.” Amid the flurry of hair and triplets and bellowing howls, we managed to pick out a couple of the recently released singles from Mastodon’s forthcoming Once More Round the Sun — strong stuff, and on par with the rest of the band’s wildly technically proficient, mind-shredding back catalog.

After Kanye West's headlining endurance test, we were in the mood for something less ... challenging. Enter Ice Cube, who gave us essentially the exact same show he brought to Marathon Music Works last year. There's a stark difference between West and Cube — one that could be oversimplified as a difference between an artist and an entertainer. If Ice Cube has lofty ideas about fame and fashion, he sure didn't voice them, opting instead to keep Which Stage gangsta with an all-killer, no-filler party. Hearing “Natural Born Killaz,” “Check Ya Self” and “Straight Outta Compton” (among hit after hit after hit) was exactly what we needed to pick us up for the rest of the night.

A wise friend once remarked to us that there's never going to be a time people won't want to hear some soul music, and Friday night’s Superjam slot was no exception. Hannibal Burress was also exactly the right guy to intro the set, which he did with an a capella sing-along to "I Believe I Can Fly." Allman Brothers guitarist Derek Trucks packed the first SuperJam of the weekend with an all-star group of soul, blues and funk players, including his wife and guitar-dueling partner Susan Tedeschi (more on them tomorrow); Los Lobos' David Hidalgo; Nigel Hall, Ryan Zoidis and Eric Krasno of keepers of the funky flame Lettuce and Soulive; and a couple of legendary sidemen who deserve a big share of the spotlight, namely master drummer James Gadson, whose studio credits cover Marvin Gaye to Beck and everything in between, and Willie Weeks, beloved bass player for George Harrison, Eric Clapton, and perhaps most famously Donny Hathaway (go ahead and listen to Weeks' legendary solo on "Voices Inside" if you haven't already). Just seeing a band with these two in it was an event worth running the gauntlet of Aggressive Sweaty Rolling Guys, and that was only the beginning. There are a lot of obvious choices for material in a set like this; though some of them made an appearance, the players made them fresh, and the unlikely picks were home runs. One highlight among many: Chaka Khan, a soul singer so gifted that Stevie Wonder gave her "Tell Me Something Good" in recognition of her talent, out-Planted Robert Plant on "What Is and What Never Should Be." Following that one, we didn't even mind shouldering our way upstream through the masses assembling for Chance the Rapper.

Proving once and for all that Bonnaroo is more interested in weirdo rap and blockbuster EDM than progressive black metal, Deafheaven raged for the few people not siphoned off by Die Antwoord and Skrillex on the other side of the farm. Undaunted by the lackluster turnout, vocalist George Clarke stalked around the stage like Nosferatu in corpse paint, conducting the small crowd at the front between fits of shrieks and growls. Their guttural, louder than a bomb metal may not have fit in with the cool kids, we sure as shit dug it.

Sitting high atop a pyramid armed with LED panels, alien heads and flashing lights, dance music's most infamous haircut, Skrillex, burned through highlights of his latest, Recess, before transitioning in to the wobbly, squealing synths of "Bangarang" and "Make It Burn Dem,” two tracks that easily laid out the blueprint for dubstep to come. The rest is a blur of familiar remixes, pretty lights, humping bodies and flying glow sticks that lasted till nearly 4 a.m. If there were any surprises, The Spin was likely too consumed with sub-bass vibrations and party favors to notice, but if anyone is capable of keeping a crowd that size in various states of apeshit for that long, it's the guy up there with the haircut — the guy making that divisive kind of noise some characterize less as art and more as a source of nostalgia- and zeitgeist-mining pan-sensory stimulation for youngsters in various states of intoxication.

Rap fans that we are, we were still hankering to see a hip-hop show where something amusing might actually go down. Didn't happen. However, in old-school Kanye fashion, the scummy South African duo Die Antwoord came onstage late, taking to The Other Tent well after 2 a.m. But that's forgivable; we were still partying. Maybe the Zef-style hip-hop duo's horror-core-ish, juvenile, aggro what-have-you has lost its luster over the years, but there was just nothing shocking about art-mulleted, Munchkin-voiced furry Yo-Landi Vi$$er and dick-swinging pioneer of the Miley cut Ninja's decidedly subversive cacophony of lame beats and dumb lyrics. We left after 20 minutes, so maybe we missed Ninja rapping into a microphone attached to his cock again, but even that would have been predictable. Ninja dickishly kicked several people in the photo pit in the face during a crowd-surf, so that was something unpredictable, we suppose.

As the Skrill-ship took of on the Which Stage around 2:30 in the morning, 21-year-old Chance the Rapper took the stage at That Tent to rap his ass off. Backed up by a live band (The Social Experiment, which is also the name of his tour), Chance looked like he was having the time of his life, tripping on thousands of people turning out to see him do his thing. Can you blame him? Just a year ago, he was an unknown kid in Chicago, putting out mixtapes on Dat Piff for a tiny group of in-the-know Midwest rap fans. Now, he's universally lauded by everyone from Pitchfork to XXL. And for good reason — Chance can rap. Confident yet thrilling in its rawness, Chance's psychedelic acid rap hit the late-night crowd right in its trippy sweet spot, closing down Friday on a high note.