Here’s the latest incarnation of the partial line-up, with the addition of Franz Ferdinand and Os Mutantes. Oh, and one subtraction, because the Ting Tings canceled.Anyway, I sort of slept on the initial Bumbershoot line-up announcement, but now that I’ve finally gotten around to checking out the roster and mulling it over, my feeling so far is that, like Sasquatch, it’s a pretty mixed bag. This collection of bands runs the gamut on my own personal excitement-nausea scale from “I’m so excited I may pee my pants,” to “Listening to this band for more than five minutes makes me ill.” On one hand, seeing Isobel Campbell and Mark Lanegan in tandem, De La Soul and Raphael Saadiq will be super. And there are a lot of great local bands on the roster as well. On the other hand, there’s an overabundance of shitty pop and brotard music that puts a major damper on my excitement. I know there’s a recession (could we possibly forget?) and that peanut-gallery bands like that bring in the dolla dolla billz, ya’ll, but seriously: The All-American Rejects? When is pop punk going to go away, already? And don’t even get me started on my musical nemesis, Katy Perry. If I live to be 200 years old, I will never be able to fathom why anyone over 12 even pays attention to her shitty Jill Sobule rip-off music. And there isn’t a word in any language that would adequately sum up my distaste for Michael Franti’s barfy jam band nonsense. I’ve mentioned my loathing of this guy’s music once or twice before on this blog, and somebody commented to express the sentiment that Franti (and, in his or her opinion, Ben Harper) should be shot into space. Which gave me the chuckles (anonymous person, if you’re out there reading this, I salute your sense of humor.) Though I’d like to mention that it’s the music I dislike, not the person; Franti seems like a really decent human being and I don’t want to imply that I hate him just because I hate his music (and there are definitely other people on this staff who enjoy his music.) Honestly, I don’t think Franti would bother me half as much if he wasn’t on either Sasquatch or Bumbershoot’s line-up every single goddamn year. In conclusion: yes, I’m obviously aware that a lot of people out there like pop music and would probably hate most of the stuff that makes me swoon, and it’s fair to cater to the largest number of people possible rather than pretentious assholes like myself. I guess what I’m really saying is that, when the economy is a little more stable, I’d like to see the lovely folks over at Bumbershoot and Sasquatch take some more risks with the line-up. You know, surprise us. After all, that’s the point of a festival: to get a whole lot of radically different music lovers in the same place to expose those people to artists they wouldn’t have heard anywhere else.