When I was sitting at my computer waiting for my purchase to go through, I thought I was buying tickets for what was going to be the best music festival of the year. With a lineup that included Chance The Rapper, Mac Miller, Bryson Tiller, Cage The Elephant, Kanye West, Kygo, The 1975 and many more, how could The Meadows not be an amazing turnout? Unfortunately, I was wrong. The excitement I felt leading up to the day was all let down the moment I walked off of the hot, sweaty subway and into the venue.

  On Sunday October 2, 2016, I attended the festival. The day started off gloomy which set the mood for the day, which was pretty disappointing. Thousands of people filled the line waiting to enter the festival and my body filled with anxiety.

As soon as you enter the venue, it was noticeable that the creators of the festival oversold the tickets. From the beginning the vibes were odd, but as anyone else would, I just went with the flow of things. Within the first 10 minutes of entering the lot, our group got split up and was split up for the rest of the festival.

    The festival consisted of 4 stages: The Meadows Stage, Shea Stage, Linden Blvd Stage, and Queens Blvd Stage. To get to the stages there were enormous stair cases set up in the middle of the lot. Honestly, this made it hard to get across the lot to the four different stages, and it seemed to me they were placed there for no good reason. What started off as a group of eight went down to two within the first hour we got there. We attempted to reconnect at Chance The Rapper’s set, but it was impossible to set a meet up spot in the sea of people waiting in front of the stage. That being said, the crowds during the sets were pretty intimidating, getting sweat on and pushed around isn’t really my ideal concert experience. Like any music festival, smoke filled the air and drunk sloppy teens staggered around the venue bumping into you at every direction.

   As well as the crazy crowd, some wild stuff went down with the line up. The first disappointing experience with the line up was during Mac Miller’s performance. I was so excited to see one of my favorite artists for the third time, but was let down when I literally couldn’t hear a word of any of his songs, the sound was pretty terrible and we had to walk away after just five minutes. My cousin and I left Mac Miller to go stand and wait for Chance to come on and try to get super close, but the crowd of people was so insane it made it impossible to enjoy being up front, so sadly we had to push our way out and enjoy it from afar.

To conclude all the craziness and disorganization of this music festival, one of the last acts, Mr. Kanye West, showed up half an hour late only to run off stage maybe four songs into his performance, getting everyone’s attention and leaving everyone to think, “oh that’s just Kanye being Kanye.” The news soon after traveled across the country and became a huge scandal stating that Kim Kardashian was robbed and held at gunpoint.

After Kanye fled everyone watching just got up and left the festival. This was probably the worst part of the night. Thousands of people just followed one another trying to get out of the venue and the sight of this was unreal. No one actually knew where we were going or how to get out and there was absolutely no staff around directing anyone or helping us return to the subways. Not knowing where you were walking to was pretty scary and it just all around was a mess. This just sums up how badly executed the festival was and hopefully they work on their organization of the event for next year.