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Jason and I went to the Pitchfork Music Festival in Chicago's Union Park on Saturday. I could people-watch at a festival like that for hours. Correction: I could simply read people's t-shirts and check out their tattoos for hours. When I add in my other favorite pastimes—noticing how people interact and overhearing snippets of conversation—I could stay happily occupied for days. (IF I didn't have to deal with port-a-pottys, that is.)

<a href="http://www.pitchforkmedia.com/">Pitchfork</a> is a Chicago-based online tastemaking publication reviewing mostly indy rock music. The festival has been called "the country's most significant showcase for the rock underground" (there's also a bit of festival history in <a href="http://www.suntimes.com/entertainment/1066012,CST-FTR-dero21.article">this article</a>). Not surprisingly, the 17,000 people there each day provide a pretty good almagation of what the "rock underground" looks like when it wears clothes and fixes its hair. (I'm not a fashion writer, so check out <a href="http://themidwasteland.com/blog/pitchfork-music-festival-fashion-2008-saturday">these pics</a> if you want to get the gist.) Essentially, the look is Urban Outfitters, carefully assembled to be over-the-top trendy while made to look like the alternative festival-goer just threw on whatever happened to be lying on the floor when they got out of bed. Add a pair of  Mom's huge glasses from 1983 and a few piercings and tattoos, and you're set.

Seeing as how a good portion of our day Saturday was spent waiting for one thing or another—waiting for the next band to start, waiting in line for food or beer, waiting to use the port-a-potty (which thankfully I only had to use once)—I had plenty of time to think about how people brand themselves. Self-branding is a natural urge, and a good one. It helps us understand (and ultimately communicate to others) who we are, or at least how we want to be seen. At a festival like Pitchfork, ironically, it becomes an effort to identify with a group of others by setting yourself apart as much as possible. The very definition of independent music—out of the mainstream—ends up creating its own sub-stream. If you like the band <a href="http://www.chkchkchk.net/">"!!!"</a> (seriously, that's their name even though you can't Google it), then you also support Obama, do your best to save the earth, and have a closet filled with fashions flashbacks from the mid-eighties, when you were still in diapers. Your shoes say more about your social progressiveness and political leanings than they do about more obvious consumer parameters like your income or how much you care about comfort. (Trust me—those ballet-flats from the 80s are NOT comfortable.)

In case you're wondering, I'm not out to criticize people for trying to be different and, in the process, being a lot like everyone else who hangs out where they hang out. Sure, there's a lot of that out there, but I think finding yourself and your people is important. It's a valuable process, and what you wear and believe and listen to and do with your free time all feed into that. I just wish people didn't have to work so hard creating a brand out of thin air. I wish it was more an uncovering of who's really there, rather than a putting on of some persona.

And really, wouldn't it be nice if there weren't so many visual markers and cues immediately leading people into a series of conclusions about your opinions, beliefs and what music is on your iPod? Where were the Animal Collective fans who also love Stravinsky? The ones who pray before eating their Chicago-style dog and washing it down with a beer? What about the boring, generic dressers, who honestly didn't think through what they were going to wear? And there must have been a few (God forbid) closet McCain supporters at the festival, right?

I'm sure there was a bit of everything there—all kinds of people in their halfway-to-normal states, like me. It was an independent music festival, after all. And I think the true alternative-independent state involves more mystery and surprise than we generally give it when we try to boil it down into an idea that fits on a t-shirt or bumper sticker.