It seems the humble selfie stick is turning into the adopted ginger stepchild of the music festival world. After being blacklisted from Australia’s Soundwave earlier this year, the wand of idiocy has now been prohibited from two of the world’s biggest music festivals, Coachella and Lollapalooza.
The Frequently Asked Questions section on Lollapalooza’s website dictates that there should be no “GoPro attachments like sticks, selfie sticks & monopods”, while a similar section of Coachella’s official site states, a little more specifically, “[No] Selfie sticks/Narcissists”.
In addition to being an audience-wide nuisance, selfie sticks are also viewed as encouraging the unauthorised recording of the festival’s performances. As Soundwave promoter AJ Maddah explained in the lead-up to the 2015 instalment of the festival, “Most of them are pointed at the stage with kids taking photos.”
“But I think the one that kind of put it in perspective for me was there was a band set going and a young girl pointed it at herself. It took every fibre of resistance I had not to just grab the stick off her and kick her out.”
“It is just the ultimate expression of narcissism.”
Other major US festivals such as Bonnaroo, Governors Ball and Sasquatch are yet to take an official position on selfie sticks. Meanwhile, the recent decisions from Coachella and Lollapalooza follow previous stipulations in the UK, where the devices have been banned from major music venues such as O2 Academy Brixton, London’s O2 Arena and the SSE Wembley Arena.
We can’t help but think that, if the selfie stick was a person, its current emotional experience could be summed up using this classic scene from the movie Zoolander.
