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Abstract

In 2008 it was announced that All Tomorrow’s Parties, an independent music festival originating in the United Kingdom, would make its first ever appearance in the Eastern United States at Kutsher’s Country Club in Monticello, New York. As a diehard indie music fan who happens to have grown up in Monticello and spent a good part of my youth navigating Kutsher’s in various roles, this particular harmonic convergence of Borscht Belt culture and indie culture served as an opportunity for reflection, remembrance, and ethnographic investigation. In this article I watch, wander, converse, and dust off old diaries and photos, tacking between multiple roles as music maven, lapsed Jew, and upstate yokel, trying to make sense of indie’s mining of the past for authentic experience and of my own ambivalent quest for a home in modernity.

Keywords

Ethnography independent music festivals

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Going Home for All Tomorrow’s Parties

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