The Gold Report: Hangout Festival 2014 [OutKast, The Black Keys, Diarrhea Planet and More]

For those among you still mourning the death of HBO’s Eastbound and Down, rest assured that Kenny Powers lives on in the hearts, IQ scores and hot-pink tank tops of tens of thousands of young Americans who descended on Gulf Shores, Ala., for Hangout Festival last weekend.

I came to see the likes of OutKast, Queens of the Stone Age and Diarrhea Planet, but the entertainment started long before my travel companions and I made it into the festival, which is situated right on the beach, besieged by a tourist trap of tacky sun-wear outlets and karaoke bars and surrounded by miles of houses on stilts and cheap high-rise condos with waterfront views. We loaded up on liquor at a store next to the Flip Flop Deli Shop. “Dude, she’s not gonna kiss the Fireball,” was among one of the more colorful statements I overheard before the sun went down — I shudder to imagine the greater context.

The people-watching was amazing — like a director’s cut of Spring Breakers on an endless loop. All down the strip leading to the festival, bros and Barbie dolls abounded, Solo cups in hand and looking like they’d been cast straight out of a vintage Girls Gone Wild video. Dudes who weren’t already topless wore neon board shorts and neon tanks, while girls who weren’t already dressed down in bikinis wore, like their male counterparts, novelty tees with illustrations of open-mouthed alligators along with the caption “Oh snap!”

These fine folks — along with the garden-variety festivalgoer fare of hippies, free-hug harbingers, teenagers, recent college grads on a last-ditch mission to make magical summer memories, LED-toy-wielding raver kids and music lovers of all stripes looking for good vibes and a good time — would partake in a four-day, five-stage musical punch bowl of reunited headliners, old-guard party bands and hotly tipped hip-hop acts, spiked with EDM DJs and indie stars on the rise, all going down on one big-ass beach and brought to you by the likes of Pizza Hut, Chevrolet, MTV and Red Bull. What an ideal setting to see The Black Keys circa 2014.

More well-heeled revelers would enjoy such festivities from the comfort of the VIP and “Super VIP” sections that, with million-dollar ocean and main-stage views, spanned one side of the main stage crowd. This was the swanky, sandy stomping ground for high rollers to watch bands like Capital Cities and Modest Mouse poolside, or from the balmy comfort of a hot tub or a party cabana, where The Real CFOs of Lower Alabama can stroke their dad-rock boners in comfort to soaring sounds of Gary Clark Jr.’s scorching blues licks. Astoundingly, media credentials gained festival photographers and rock critics access to this sumptuous, open-bar-boasting oases. If there was a dress code, it sure as shit didn’t apply to one Super VIP bro we saw wearing a sleeveless tie-dye shirt and a backwards mesh cap, the latter of which said it all: “I came here to drink and fuck BITCHES.”

From that veritable ivory tower, Hangout is the happy marriage of tried-and-true musical festival pastimes and resort-worthy accouterments on the Redneck Riviera — just imagine Bonnaroo at Club Med instead of in Manchester, Tenn. In general population, though, Hangout Festival is BroChella, and I was there as a lone wolf of snark and cynicism. But such cynical dispositions have no place at Hangout Festival.

Over the past couple festival seasons, Coachella itself has garnered a bit of a bad reputation. “Coachella has become less about music and more about being seen, with celebrities, style-bloggers and a whole bunch of white girls with a crocheted crop tops and their parents' AmExes flocking out west to Indio, California, to do Molly and hide in the Pop Chips-sponsored VIP tent alongside the actresses from Pretty Little Liars,” blogger Madeleine Davies editorialized in a recent Jezebel post entitled “Coachella Is a Scenester Nightmare Hellscape.” But what makes Hangout Fest’s BroChella better than Coachella, is that its crowd — easy as these undiscerning masses may be to mock — come to enjoy the music first and party hard without inhibition second. Hangout Fest kicks ass because of its total lack of pretension. And like the hull of ancient ship studded with barnacles, my own hardwired pretenses were quickly eroding.

When OutKast kicked off their highly anticipated reunion run of festivals at Coachella last month, it was widely reported how the too-cool-for-school crowd responded to the duo’s set with ambivalence while they waited to hear “Ms. Jackson” and “Hey Ya!” This couldn’t have been further from the case for the duo’s festival-closing performance at Hangout Sunday night.

Hangout is the party fest, and OutKast is the ultimate party act, especially when performing a hit-heavy set in the heart of the dirty South. And make no mistake; OutKast is the Lynyrd Skynyrd of Southern hip-hop. From an opening “B.O.B.” that rocked the beach like a scud missile, blasting straight into the be-all-end-all banger “Gasoline Dreams,” Big Boi and Andre 3000 shimmied and grinned through an irresistibly infectious, no-stone-left-unturned 24-song catalog overview.

"If you came to the show without any panties, you can come home with me,” Andre 3000 proclaimed mid-set. He was rocking a white wig, matching white-rimmed shades the looked like they were bought on an Alabama boardwalk and rocking a black jumpsuit that read, “Big girls are beautiful to me.” No doubt, Dre gave Big Boi — who was clad in an over-sized, multi-color leather jacket, rocking a giant gold chain and a red baseball cap bearing his own moniker in Old English lettering — a run for his money in the pitch-perfectly, Hangout-appropriate wardrobe department. But on the musical front, both emcees were high on top of their game, machine-gunning rhymes with signature groaning gusto.

The show was broken into five acts. Individual, Speakerboxxx / The Love Below-leaning mini sets from Big Boi and Andre 3000, and an “ol' school set” boasting such chestnuts as “Crumblin’ Erb” and “Player’s Ball” were book-ended by opening and closing sets of crowd-pleasers like “Rosa Parks,” the deep, stoney haze of “Aquemini,” “Ms. Jackson” — the “whooos” of which make for one of the most fun call-and-response sing-alongs in concert history, rivaled only by seeing a tens-of-thousands-strong scatological sing-along to “Roses” — and the staccato smoothness of “So Fresh, So Clean.”

Anyone who disagrees that “Hey Ya!” is the single greatest pop song of the past 20 years hasn’t seen it live, with everybody from the front to the back singing along to its every lyrical non-sequitur and air-shaking Polaroid pictures with giddy abandon. This moment alone makes OutKast festival headliners of the highest order. But even during deeper cuts, no matter the tempo, it literally almost felt impossible not to dance, and — absorbing the duo’s dirty, Southern, psychedelic bravado — feel all the more cool; all the more sexy while doing it. This is what has made hip-hop become the dominant form of pop music over the past two decades. So yeah, OutKast is the Lynyrd Skynyrd of rap, and if there was any doubt, a live version of “Sweet Home Alabama” blasted out the speaker stacks after the band left the stage, while a minutes-long fireworks show lit up the night sky.

But days before that moment of transcendence, I was still on my a-hole A-game on Thursday night. By the time I secured media creds and made way through the festival gates, I’d missed most of Hangout’s Day One festivities, including what I can only imagine was a family-friendly set from Danny Brown. Because I straight-up fucking refuse to watch a band called Dumpstaphunk on principle alone, I settled for the rehashed ‘70s psych-rock, proto-metal sounds of Australian Aughts artifice arbiters Wolfmother. The takeaway: Wolfmother is still a band (surprise!). And Wolfmother is still exactly what you'd expect: The Fosters to Black Keys' Budweiser, with a hokey hint of Edgar Winter jamminess and reverb-drenched John Lord worship topped with Disco Stu fros. (No surprise.) Remarkably, people (who turned out to the rather large Palladia Stage by the thousands) still care about this band, and I can’t decide if that’s surprising or not.

Equally as predictable was the night’s closing set from Girl Talk, which remains the musical equivalent of a Buzzfeed listicle. Indeed, GT auteur Gregg Gillis is still paying the bills by mashing up snippets of pop hooks in festival tents and calling it art, while balloons drop, disco balls spin and an onstage posse of babes and dude-bros dance and shoot toilet paper guns over the crowd. To the casual observer, Girl Talk’s show has changed little over the last few years. And yet, Gillis still rocks out and plays ringleader to his rave-like spectacle enough to enrapture festivalgoers into partying like the world is about to end. If only the same could be said for The Black Keys.

Three days after releasing their moody divorce album Turn Blue, Dan Auerbach and Patrick Carney (with a pair of hired guns in tow), played their first proper show since 2013 and de facto tour kickoff, which only actually featured three songs from the new long-player. But a new record cycle notwithstanding, the band put on pretty much the same rote show I saw ‘em do at Bridgestone Arena more than a year ago. For real, y’all! They played 15 of the same 20 songs, in roughly the same order. If I recall, they may have even worn the same leather jackets.

They opened with same six-song pack, and “Howlin’ for You” isn’t even a good opener. While, behind the kit, Carney still looks like he’s trying to swat away hornets and wasps while sweating in a dry sauna, Auerbach spent most of the show looking dead-eyed and bored. During crowd-pleasures like “Tighten Up,” he was staring into the middle distance with the expression of someone mentally going through his to-do list or trying to remember if he shut the oven off before leaving the house. For a band with so many gigs under their belt and so many great songs, this was a bummer.

Auerbach did seem a bit more emotionally invested during a drawn-out acoustic into to “Ten Cent Pistol,” as well during the live debut of Turn Blue’s “Gotta Get Away” — an upbeat blues-rock stomper dripping with Exile on Main St. worship — and the album’s lead-off single “Fever,” which got the biggest crowd response since “Gold on the Ceiling,” the biggest moment of the show as far as fan interaction goes. Now that The Black Keys’ product-hawking ways have caught up with them and they’re officially uncool, the duo seems dangerously close to having too easy a gig to care about keeping their shit compelling. That would be a shame. Care to disagree? Check out video of the band’s (almost) entire Hangout set below.

Even at BroChella, The Black Keys didn’t triumph as the bill’s reigning rock band. That title went to Queens of the Stone Age, who, out for blood, took one of the two main stages just before sundown Friday night, deafening and destroying everything and everyone in their path. Going for the jugular, the heavyweight champions of muscle-bound, six-cylinder stoner rock kicked off the set with the epic one-two punch of rawk that opens 2004’s Songs for the Deaf — “You Think I Ain’t Worth a Dollar, but I Feel Like a Millionaire” and their lone hit “No One Knows.” While those songs got the massive crowd’s attention, what followed — the clap-along drug listicle “Feel Good Hit of the Summer” — set the tone.

"This will be a night we'll never remember,” perennially pompadoured frontman Josh Homme told the crowd early on. "Look around you, this place is the shit,” he said mid-set, cuing the flood lights to take in the sight, before counting the band into the swaggering … Like Clockwork rocker “If I Had a Tail.” Each time the stool-loosening, Black Sabbath-homaging power chords of the song’s chorus hit the crowd like a 10-foot wave crashing against the shore, cued to blinding LED screens, the notes rang out as thick clouds of weed smoke wafted over head.

"It's all right to smoke weed and do what you want,” ganja-rap god Wiz Khalifa told an equally receptive crowd on the same stage hours earlier. “We gonna change the world with smoking weed.” So, apparently all it takes to change the world is a couch and a Playstation controller. The more you know! Motivational speeches aside, the version of the rapper’s apocalyptic 2 Chainz collab “We Own It” had Hangout bros raising the roof all the way down the beach, well past where it was possible to see the stage. That’s a shame, as the sight of Wiz gyrating on the drum riser during “23 Show” was a true thing of beauty.

On Saturday night, while we were waiting for main-stage headliners The Killers to come on, volunteers went through the VIP pool crowd passing out flashing Pizza Hut bracelets, which were sure to look stunning on MTV, who was broadcasting (or streaming or something) the entire performance. Oh, did he mention that Sway was the Hangout Fest emcee? Well, he was. Anyway, Pizza Hut was all over Hangout, pushing their new product, BBQ pizza. It’s probably like The Black Keys, but edible. Certainly the bracelets may have given momentary concern to some that recently announced Pizza Hut BBQ pizza spokeman Blake Shelton might perform instead of The Killers, breaking the hearts of hoards of teenaged Killers fans populating the pit — they all wore the band’s shirts and staked out their spots early.

How exactly in the fuck are The Killers still so massive? The band hasn’t had a hit since the Bush era, they only had one truly massive hit to begin with, and yet they’re headlining festivals, with crowds taking to them with U2-worthy reverence. I mean, I knew a lot of people liked The Killers, but I just figured the band was well on its way to becoming the Cheap Trick of the mid-Aughts neo-New Wave boom. Are The Killers one of the defining bands of our time and I just never gave enough of a shit to notice? Decades in the future, will “All of These Things That I’ve Done” and “Mr. Brightside” musically accompany tearjerker slide shows at funerals of 80-somethings who were born in the ’90s? Since all, or at least most, of the band’s wistful anthems are written with a pre-packaged nostalgia for the magic of being young, I’m starting to think so.

I love a lot of stadium rock, but I never caught The Killers bug. That said, their show was excellent. From the instant the band took the stage like trial lawyers making the case for their own relevance and relatability — opening with a tour de force of an anthem called “Spaceman” — until the final strains of a closing “Mr. Brightside,” it was rousing moment after rousing moment of well-studied, expertly rehearsed heart-on-sleeve grandeur, and song after song of nostalgic sentiment and Americana imagery.

As a frontman, still baby-faced Brandon Flowers — who, with his cropped pompadour and tucked-in, short-sleeved collared shirt, looked like a clean-cut ice cream store clerk in 1950s Any Town, USA — goes for a combination of Springsteen-like everyman affability and Bono-like messianic gestures, with a hint of Chris Martin-esque calculated aw-shucksy humility. Sometimes he’d commandingly raise his fist high while singing behind a preacher’s podium; other times he’d banter with nervous laughter while sitting behind a keyboard; and he cued the band into seemingly random covers of Creedence Clearwater Revival’s “Bad Moon Rising” and Alphaville’s “Forever Young.” But it was the band’s original anthems (like “When You Were Young”) and sleek dance-rock (like “Jenny Was a Friend of Mine”) that made the biggest impact. Flowers & Co. milked each tune for all it was worth, keeping the crowd enraptured throughout the entire nearly two-hour set. Add a hit of Molly into the mix and it was hard not to get caught up in the en masse love fest. I found myself rocking out to songs I never liked when they were hits, like a hard-charging “Somebody Told Me” — a song that, to me, always sounded like Ian Curtis trying front The Backstreet Boys.

After the show, the crowd dispersed to hit up after-parties all around Gulf Shores. I found myself at a spontaneous gathering of 20-somethings a mile or so down the beach. There was a guy twirling fire, people up on condo balconies scribbling patterns across the sand with laser pointers and a bunch of subdued kids sitting in social circles, DJing EDM on iPads while a collection of eccentrics danced and played with myriad LED toys. There was Mirror Ball Mall, who was squeezed into a form-fitting, full-body disco ball suit; there was a Disco Dick — an older gentleman who had a neon bulb swinging from his crotch; and, among others, there was Flamingo Head, who bobbed along to the beats in elaborate headwear that would’ve made both Skrillex and John Waters proud. These kids weren’t much for conversation, but I gleamed that most of them were at Hangout to see EDM notables the likes of ZEDD, Pretty Lights and MiMOSA — extravaganzas they were still coming down from.

But on Saturday, I was there to rock and cautiously pumped for Modest Mouse. With a long-loyal cult following that endures, a fluke crossover hit and consequently a robust legion of bros and sorority survivors who dig their shit, Modest Mouse is The Grateful Dead of indie-rock bands. Like the Dead, their set up is ramshackle. In true slacker style, they take long tuning breaks between songs and stretch those songs out as some kind of spirit guides them to do so, and they give exactly zero shits about dressing up for the occasion. Enigmatic singer-guitarist Isaac Brock gave Bob Weir a run for his money wearing neon and yellow-striped, swimtrunk-like short shorts, a pair of Converse kicks sans socks and a black beanie fit for a snowboarding excursion.

Also like the Dead, Modest Mouse has good shows and bad shows. This was a good show. An opening “Dramamine” crescendoed to a furious, fuzz-fest climax, continuing on into heart-attack-serious versions of “I Came as a Rat” and “Ocean Breathes Salty,” the latter of which had people nodding along like they were watching a hip-hop show. For me, the highlight of the set was a tamer moment — kicking back while the band played a subtle, sublime “The World at Large” that was perfectly timed for the beach-side magic hour with the sun beginning to set. For the majority of the crowd, though, the highlight was (predictably) a spirited rendition of the band’s 2004 Top 40 hit “Float On,” which had the shirtless masses shouting along and doing the inverted roof-raise. Unfortunately, there was a mass exodus after the song, which was planted only midway through the band’s set.

On the local tip, Nashville ruled pretty hard at Hangout Fest. Wild Cub had a crowd of thousands — mostly fans who were singing and dancing along to the band’s sprightly, hook-y indie-pop — packed like sardines in front of the BMI Stage for a well-received Friday evening set. Looking seasoned, Keegan DeWitt & Co. bopped about the stage and hammed it up with the crowd, but they didn’t appear surprised by the adulation. I didn’t manage to make it to the Red Bull Stage in time to see Moon Taxi play Rage Against the Machine covers under the People of the Sun pseudonym, but reportedly many festivalgoers who did arrive in time were shut out of the show when the size of the crowd overwhelmed the ballroom-sized Red Bull Stage area.

Without question, the Music City ambassadors who had the biggest impact at Hangout were Diarrhea Planet, who played on the sizeable Palladia Stage at 12:30 in the afternoon on Saturday. It’s not hyperbolic to say the band, all guns blazing, transformed the large, jumbo-tron flanked stage and early afternoon set time into what felt like

. MTV had furnished the crowd — which numbered well into the thousands — with inflatable donuts, and almost instantly they were being used as vessels for an armada of crowd surfers. Some were singing along to DP faves like “Separations,” but many more were clearly unaware of the band and blown away by their energy as they worked the stage like bona-fide rock stars. A near-set’s-end “Ghost With a Boner” went into a poignant, by-pant-seat cover of OutKast’s “Hey Ya!” and by the end, Jordan Smith, Emmett Miller (plucking the strings with his teeth) and Evan Bird (with his ax behind his head) were guitarmonizing while being passed over the crowd in those donuts. MTV had challenged DP to put on a rowdier show than the Black Lips, who played at the same time on the same stage the day before, and our boys emerged victorious.

As for Black Lips, the ragtag standard bearers of Atlanta garage-rock revival had a spirited set of their own. Despite the beachy vibe of Black Lips’ psychedelic party-rock jams, seeing the band take a big stage before lunchtime to play for a shirtless crowd of people wearing Camel backs and fanny packs while noodle dancing to “Bad Kids” just felt wrong, even though I started drinking at 11 to prepare.

For all the partying that went on at Hangout Festival, you’d think Andrew WK — the guy whose set list included four songs with the word “party” right there in the title — would have drawn a bigger crowd than a modest couple thousand to the Palladia Stage Sunday night, but the motivational Meat Loaf of bizarro alt rock was going up against chill bro Jack Johnson, who was playing on one of the main stages, making WK's set feel like some kind of awesomely tragic side show. Undeterred, WK and his four-guitarist-wielding band unleashed an onslaught of WWF-worthy verve. Andrew WK really hasn’t changed at all in the decade-and-change since his debut I Get Wet became the soundtrack to every party in my college crash pad. He still dresses in dirty whites like a house painter, head banging, tickling the ivories and punching the air while singing decidedly overblown party anthems that add some kind of weird heart and triumphant beauty to block-headed jock rock.

It seemed like mostly super-fans turned out for Andrew WK, and his super-fans take him pretty seriously. Near the end of the set, one intrepid reveler vaulted over the barricade and onto the stage. That was about as far as his plan went. Overcome by the moment, he bear-hugged WK, who was in mid-head-bang while pounding out piano chords. This totally screwed up the singer. Then, the stage crasher decided he’d like to start playing piano, which didn’t go so well either. After the song, which the singer finished by putting his arm around the stage crasher, he asked his name. “Jeffrey Sullivan,” the fan said. As the crowd started chanting “Jeffrey! Jeffrey! …” Sullivan dropped to his knees and then did a back somersault. Then he wouldn’t get off stage, causing security to forcibly drag him off to the sounds of a crowd chanting his name and Andrew WK and band ripping into yet another glorious party song. I kind of wish my Hangout experience had ended like Jeffrey's.