Life Is Beautiful Music Festival was an experience for the ages. The festival, now in its third year, stretched over 15 blocks of downtown Las Vegas and drew thousands of attendees. This year’s festival was the largest and most extravagant to date, complete with carnival rides, photo-booths, culinary delicacies, seminars, fanny-pack painting, and even an Art Motel. Gigantic murals from countless renowned artists were scattered across the festival grounds, and party-goers adorned themselves in everything from tie-dye to colorful tu-tus.
With notable performers such as Stevie Wonder, Kendrick Lamar, and Imagine Dragons heading the bill, the festival’s success was imminent, and was fueled with dozens of other up and coming music names to back the line-up.
While arriving early to catch their favorite acts each day and staying until the very end seems to be utterly exhausting for even the most seasoned festival goers — we’re talking three ten hour days of non-stop music, standing, and dense crowds — it’s even more so in triple digit heat. Fortunately, the reward is phenomenal music, for those who arrived early were treated to standout performances from a steady stream of emerging acts such as Ab-Soul, Walk The Moon, Chance the Rapper, Lindsey Stirling, Big Data, Royal Blood, Hozier, Future Islands, Andra Day, and Meg Myers , stellar sets from well established names like Atmosphere, Snoop Dogg, Duran Duran and even surprise performances from The Killers and Weezer. Ultimately, the memorably passionate sets by the mainstage closers were well worth the wait each of the three nights, with Kendrick Lamar taking the cake with the festival’s finale. He performed cuts from his new album, To Pimp A Butterfly as well as all of the trailblazing radio hits from Good Kid, MAAD City.
In essence, third installment of Life Is Beautiful was, in fact, a very surreal, beautiful experience. The festival blue-print was fairly foot-friendly, with the stages being in close enough proximity that it didn’t seem as though you were going on a trek through the woodlands to get to catch the next stage’s performance, which, fortunately, were all scheduled with commute time in mind, and ultimately in a manner that didn’t present much conflict. We would definitely recommend this event as a first festival experience to anyone, and would suggest to bring plenty of water, comfortable shoes, and the will to enjoy life. For, after all…Life IS Beautiful!
Photos and Story By: Meme Urbane
