Reminiscences of Gov Ball 2025
Image courtesy of Gov Ball’s official Instagram
I’m running late to Jean Dawson’s set. It’s my first New York summer in years, my first alone and my first Gov Ball. Taking the train from the Upper West Side felt like a wondrous journey, moving from underground to above seemed like moving between worlds. I couldn’t help but see the native New Yorkers unmoved. However, it was such innocent awe that captured the moments of Gov Ball 2025, looking at music as dreamy and full of self-potentialities.
The Gov Ball 2025 lineup represented a majority of the voices that defined 2024’s year in music. Something about that year had struck a chord amongst the collective. As we waded through brewing political turmoil, music turned into pillow talk and our personal notes. Music felt authentic through the honesty and creative risks artists seemed encouraged to take. For some, career stalls signaled risk as the best choice. But from what I heard, creative risk seemed to be how artists were making sense of themselves and the musician they wanted to be. It was that musical processing that spoke to listeners facing a world that was asking them to do the same.
People slowly arrived at Jean Dawson’s set. The gates in Flushing Meadows had just opened. Many festival-goers were still figuring out their tickets, searching for friends or exploring the festival grounds. There was a nascent feeling to Dawson’s set–a slow converging of people all choosing together to experience a unique musical moment.
I think I’ve discovered Jean Dawson’s music at least three times, each time my intrigue renewed. Arriving at Gov Ball, I’d submerged myself into the depths of Dawson’s discography. His music is an intentional balance between punk, rock, heaviness, pondering and feeling. I’d found his song “Darlin” by chance on a Spotify playlist and then was re-introduced to it from another creative’s Spotify playlist. The song is filled with contradiction with his deeper vocals that are calls to a lover, with softer notes. In the song I can feel the petals of a flower drying in the backdrop of a day ending in explosive colors–your thoughts left unsettled and unresolved.
Just like everyone else, I’m just happy and grateful to be there, the pleasure of being able to witness this moment that feels sacred. Dawson’s set is bittersweet. I contemplate a range of feelings–distance from others and finding solace in beauty. The idea of settling into art as a moment of solitude and reflection becomes challenged at a music festival. Where the individual engages in a personal listening session, music festivals ask us to expand our personal experience into one that is shared. There’s something transformative about live music, but experiencing it on a wide scale makes it more impactful. To take that innermost personal thing and see that others have felt what you felt from the same notes, lyrics and sounds becomes another point of exploration.
Music festivals, in order to stay funded, have become associated with commercialism as well. While some festivals keep their commercial spaces separated from the music spaces of the festival ground, Gov Ball keeps music integrated with the activity areas. The stage set-ups meant you would always be hearing an on-going set. It’s perfect for music discovery and continued engagement with the festival. I enjoyed that the Gov Ball organizers found ways to keep festival-goers immersed in the music, and most importantly for creative freedom for artists to focus on performance rather than competing with the non-music aspects of the festival.
Creative world-building was important to many of the artists featured at Gov Ball 2025. World-building expands music from a recorded moment to experiences that can live beyond an audio recording. This was clear at Gov Ball with artists such as Dawson, Frost Children, Conan Gray, Tyler, the Creator and most importantly Mk.gee.
Where Jean Dawson captured the bittersweet nature of a live music experience, Mk.gee channeled those discomforting feelings into a hazy, indescribable world–you’ve been there, but don’t remember when or how you got there. Such feelings of uncertainty and out-of-placeness came to life at Mk.gee’s set. The screen was slightly grainy in green-blue hues, a smoke machine clouding the singer’s figure, crafting a shadowy vision of him. This liminal atmosphere seemed to overtake the crowd with more stillness and focus. I’d observed people at Dawson’s set trying to take in the music and allow it to flow through them, Mk.gee’s set seemed to be a confrontation with our dueling selves.
The moment of sonder I’d felt earlier in the day, returned later in the afternoon as I felt that aspirational call during Mk.gee’s set. In me, reverberations of a void came through, hanging after the bittersweetness that’d been elicited earlier. I felt like living beyond myself, and it was during this set that I was most aware of the multitude of the innerworlds happening around me. This was helped by the screen focusing more on Mk.gee’s perspective of watching the crowd, rather than focusing on his face for the audience to view. It seemed to illustrate how though the music was about the self’s inner fight, it’s best contextualized as an exploration of the things beyond us as a mode to find ourselves.
All of this went hand-in-hand with the feeling of deconstruction and collapse that was found in conceptions of what music could be in 2024 and onward to 2025. Collapse wasn’t just for an understanding of music, but for how we chose to understand ourselves. Gov Ball 2025 elicited an exploration of feeling and self through music, letting sound settle in us to grow into something more.