While rain ultimately defeated Prospect Park’s Great Googa Mooga in its second year of existence, and it successfully demonstrated a model of how to combine a neighborhood community festival with wider regional (and perhaps national) attention. Googa Mooga bills itself as an “amusement park of food, salve drink & music, order ” and the festival’s organizers certainly adhered to an evenly distributed array of entertainment. In addition to two stages of music ranging from DJ dance sets to Pearl and the Beard’s unconventional brand of folk pop, Googa Mooga 2013 featured dozens of local food vendors, a craft beer garden, literary discussions, and even activities to entertain younger children of the festival’s parental clientele.
The crowd may have come for big-name acts like The Flaming Lips, Yeah Yeah Yeahs, and Matt & Kim, but Googa Mooga wasn’t competing in the same arena as dedicated music events like Governor’s Ball. Rather, Googa Mooga emphasized a diverse range of Brooklyn’s contemporary (albeit middle to upper class) subcultures, from the never-ending selection of food from Brooklyn eateries to the music itself. From Hamagedon’s row of pork dishes (spearheaded, no less, by a metal monument to the archetypal God of Pig) to James’ equally terrifying and delicious “Duck Corn Dog”, Googa Mooga’s culinary component was a showcase of how restaurants in Brooklyn are on the cutting-edge of today’s foodie reinventions and innovations. Most importantly, the long rows of stalls gave the impression that Googa Mooga’s food vendors represented a unified scene of chefs and their patrons crystallized in the context of a larger festival. Googa Mooga’s celebration of Brooklyn’s bohemian food Renaissance was truly its own, representing both cultural place (“Pork Slope”) and space (“Big Gay Ice Cream”). It’s an experience that deserves to continue in the coming years, and should be more fully replicated by larger music festivals that seek to prioritize their local identity.
Food was such a big component of Googa Mooga that it sometimes entered the collective mind of the musicians as well. The most food-obsessed was Father John Misty (aka Joshua Tillman), who spent much of his time between songs oscillating between culinary one-liners (“Guy Fieri: Please stop!”) and a strange affinity toward mocking the festival’s patrons and vendors as a whole that bordered on thinly-veiled condescension (“That’s right, I’m a culture warrior–I’m making fun of food at a food festival. It’s very funny.”). Regardless of his thoughts on “local, artisan, handcrafted cheese bread crisps” (i.e. Cheez-Its), Tillman gave a forceful and physical performance that included a spate of mic stand brandishings and a couple of trips to the hemmed-in audience while crooning his AM Gold-tinged folk rock. Another highlight of Googa Mooga’s music schedule was Jon Batiste and Stay Human, a modern jazz ensemble from New York. Batiste, the 26 year-old co-director of the National Jazz Museum in Harlem, kicks ass–there’s no other way to put it. The group moved slightly soggy listeners of all ages to dance with their energetic blend of jazz, funk, and blues, with Batiste even providing a wildly spontaneous 360-degree percussion solo around the drum set that played out like a mock-chase of drummer Joe Saylor.
Googa Mooga represented a homecoming of sorts for some performers and a pilgrimage for others. Matt & Kim noted at the start of their hypercharged glee club set that the band began in Brooklyn and that Kim used to be a nanny nearby. Italian world music maestro Jovanotti professed his deep admiration for the Beastie Boys and cited them as a major influence throughout his career, and covered their “No Sleep till Brooklyn” with unrelenting exuberance (even if he had to refer to English lyrics printed in front of him from time to time). Well-established in Europe, Jovanotti’s career has already spanned two decades, and while few in the audience likely understood his native Italian, even fewer could resist the zigzag nature of his eclectic musical style that combines nearly everything with a danceable beat.
Googa Mooga likely faces a tough battle for its third incarnation after having this year’s festival cut short by rain on top of resisting a vocal neighborhood opposition to its residency in Prospect Park and a slew of ticket refunds in 2012. It would be a shame if Googa Mooga’s uncertain future resulted in the festival not returning for another weekend because it is multidimensional community celebration that extends beyond the usual market of 20-something summer concert goers. No matter what happens over the coming months, Googa Mooga’s ambitious goal of creating a way to celebrate some of Brooklyn’s neo-bohemian cultural production, and show its influence on the local, national, and international levels.
