In a strange way it was a blessing when Sunday afternoon’s severe thunderstorms put the Lyrical Lemonade Summer Smash on hold. The Douglas Park festival had barely started its second day—it was around 2 PM, and Maryland rapper IDK had just removed the Reagan mask he’d worn for his grand entrance—when a voice cut through on the PA telling the crowd that the music would stop till the weather cleared up. IDK’s fans chanted, “Fuck that shit,” but the subsequent four-hour delay—nearly half a day’s programming—wasn’t the disaster for the Summer Smash that it might’ve been for any other outdoor fest.
The schedule was only available via app, and it didn’t match the information posted on the grounds via screens embedded in a giant lemonade carton in the middle of the field (which only showed schedules for the two main stages). On Friday, the fest announced the 34 acts appearing on its third stage (including rising Houston rapper TisaKorean and Chicago radio legend DJ Pharris), though I didn’t find its set times in the app till Sunday. I’m not even going to get into the no-shows and last-minute changes, except to say that I feel bad for the Boogie Wit da Hoodie fans posted up at the second stage and cheering for him to come out, with no way of learning that he’d already performed on the main stage.
Juice Wrld owes some of his success to Cole Bennett, who launched Lyrical Lemonade as a hip-hop blog while in high school in 2013 and has since turned turned it into a mini empire. All weekend teens clustered around a large merch tent that was selling $40 Lyrical Lemonade T-shirts, or lined up to spend $7 on cans of Lyrical Lemonade-branded lemonade (dear reader, I abstained). Bennett also shoots and edits videos under the Lyrical Lemonade name, and the clips he’s directed for Soundcloud rappers such as Smokepurpp and Ski Mask the Slump God (both of whom performed this weekend) helped make him a star while elevating the scene. Bennett’s video for “Lucid Dreams” kicked Juice Wrld’s career into hyperdrive.
And let’s not forget that XXXTentacion, the Soundcloud-rap poster boy who was shot to death last year, went right on getting more popular even after allegations of his abusive behavior toward his ex made big news. His breakout hit, “Look at Me,” was inescapable at this year’s Summer Smash. His collective, Members Only, closed their second-stage set rapping over it, and disorientingly enough, Lil Tecca’s DJ warmed up the main-stage crowd by spinning the same song slightly out of sync.
