All of Us and Gay DJ's

Every time June comes around in Chicago, the month holds massive importance to those within. Fun fact for you, Chicago has has an extremely large Queer community, with a total 6.022 Gazillion LGBTQ+ folks who call Chicago their gay little city. Another secret fun fact that the elites don't want you to know, June is Gay Pride month #TRUTHNUKE. In all seriousness though, Chicago offers its gay residents large number of festivities for pride month. One of these that I had the pleasure of attending via UIC Radio was All of Us Chicago, a two-day long festival held in Grant Park. The festival was set up by Auris and Dreambite who both specialize in the creation and setup of these events. From my cursory research, this is the first year putting on All of Us, and because this is the first year, it can help excuse some of the problems I encountered. I will delve into that aspect later within the review, so let's start with the music.

The music was at its worst, a fun listening experience, and at its best, a transcendent flash forward in time to a Cyberpunk Chicago where everyone was at least 1/3 cyborg and people smoked data from flash drives instead of Geek bars. Two of the standouts on the 27th were: TRQPiTECA, a two-person set. What stood out with them was their use of samples, many times having me stop in place with my jaw stuck open. If you thought "Everything She Wants" by Wham! couldn't be played in the club, you'd a moron of the highest caliber. Another one of the standouts was Channel Tres. At this point in the day the crowd had filled out; even if it was one person, their set would still have the crowd going crazy. This set considerably sped up the BPM and with it, the energy of the whole festival. Overall, the first day was but an appetizer for what was to come in the second day. By no means is this to say the first day of the festival was lesser, just that the second day was where the festival knowingly supplied us with heavy hitters. I was accompanied to this festival by my friend Nikki and when talking about day 2 she said, "The full commitment to booking acts considered iconic to the gay community added a lot to the experience of the second day, as it actually felt like a genuine pride event and a safe space for queer people". While the first day often had you focusing on the blistering heat and the battery left on your phone, the second day run of Slayyyter, Cobrah and Arca didn't give you the ability to focus on anything by robbing all of your attention. "Arca in particular likely gave us the most unique DJ set any of us will hear in our lifetimes" says Nikki, "For just those three artists, and maybe just for Arca, I'd endure all of the inconveniences and setbacks of the festivals organization all over again".

It would be dishonest for me not to mention the setbacks of this festival, which almost entirely revolve around the organization. The issues are by no means time ruining, however, significant enough for me to mention. I arrived on Friday at 2:02 with the sounds of the first DJ Rae Chardonnay playing beyond the gates. I would have arrived earlier, but due to the Nascar race being set up and the website used to buy these tickets not displaying the exact address, I arrived a little later than expected. Once arriving at the gate with no-one around besides 30 or so workers, I showed the ticket and was told to come back in a bit because they were still setting up. Leaving, I found Nikki and went back to the gate where now 4 other people waited and I was let in at ~2:20. Weirdly though, it was ONLY me who was let in while the others still had to wait. Trust me when I say it is an insanely surreal experience to be the only person in an entire music festival being played to by a DJ besides the workers. This experience persisted for almost 20-30 minutes before they let the other handful of people in. In that waiting time, a small gust of wind came in and almost blew a large fence over on me, but luckily, I got out of its reach in time. Around 2:45, I was joined by the other festival goers, and they were able to listen to the last 15 or so minutes of Rae's set. For me that was the depressing part, that this DJ came out and played almost an hour worth of music to only me and no one else. The good part of this was that this was only a day one experience and it seemed like on day two all the problems ended up fixed, proving the issues to be only day one issues with setup.

What the beginning 20 minutes of the festival looked like

Overall, I would really like to see All of Us 2026, I have a strong feeling that the organizers fixed all of the issues that were present this first time. The music overshadowed the rest of the experience by magnitudes, and I can't wait to see what's done in the future.