Life is Beautiful

Life is Beautiful is a pop, indie and hip hop festival in downtown Las Vegas, Nevada. The first edition ran on 26 and 27 October 2013, in Fremont East. Rehan Choudhry founded it. He had run entertainment at the Cosmopolitan and worked with Aurelian Marketing. This is not Life Festival Oświęcim, the peace meeting in Poland. It is not the film La vita è bella. It is not LIB, Lightning in a Bottle, the California gathering. It is the two-day city festival that took about fifteen blocks of the old centre.

Choudhry did not pick the Strip. He picked downtown, the Fremont stretch that Tony Hsieh’s Downtown Project, out of Zappos, was pushing as a district of offices, bars and empty lots. Another Planet Entertainment, the Outside Lands house in San Francisco, came in as producer. MAKTUB was among the partners too. The site was not a fenced desert camp. It was city: streets closed, five stages, food, art and talks. Write-ups of that first year put the weekend crowd at about sixty thousand.

The 2013 bill explains the genre mix. Pretty Lights and Zedd covered the dance electronics that pop had already absorbed. Empire of the Sun, Passion Pit, Portugal. The Man and Haim sat in radio indie. Jurassic 5 and Janelle Monáe opened hip hop and big-stage soul. Alabama Shakes held the band-rock end. This is not a list to copy a poster. It is proof the festival started by mixing rooms: one stage could ask for dancing and the next for a guitar set. The crowd walked from one to the next on sidewalks, not down a field corridor.

In 2014 the format went from two days to three. That widening is not a season announcement here. It is the change second-year sources have in writing: more hours, more blocks taken, the same downtown. The core stayed put. Music, food, art and conversation in a centre that was not the tall-hotel Strip. Anyone looking for a desert campsite had the wrong site. Anyone looking only for a hotel club had the wrong scale.

October downtown is a walking weekend. Fremont East does not ask for a shuttle from a sand car park. It asks you to get out in the centre and cross blocks of low casinos, sheds and lots. By day there are food trucks, stands and talks in rooms or tents. In the afternoon the stages start to fill. At night the volume rises between buildings, not against a hillside. October in the valley is dry and still warm at noon; after dark it cools. There is no meadow mud. There is asphalt and, sometimes, wind that lifts dust off a lot.

Another Planet brought the craft of a large urban-park festival. Outside Lands shows how people move between stages in a city. Life is Beautiful applied that logic to a centre still being remade. Hsieh and the Downtown Project wanted the neighbourhood to look alive for a weekend. Choudhry wanted a bill that was not only a hotel residency. The clash of those aims is the format: not a locked rave and not an arts fair without volume. It is a street festival with pop, indie and hip hop headliners.

Getting there is a city trip. You land at McCarran, take a taxi or monorail toward the centre, or drop down from the Strip on a short bus. You do not cross a campsite. You enter a perimeter of blocks. The crowd splits: Pretty Lights people stay on the dance floor; Alabama Shakes people look for a band stage; food people move between both. Talks ask for another speed. You go into a room, sit, and return to the street when the panel ends.

There is no need to mix this name with the Oświęcim festival. There, entry was free and the frame was a peace foundation beside Auschwitz. Here you pay, and the frame is downtown Las Vegas. LIFEM, in London, is an early-music instrument fair. Lightning in a Bottle is another LIB, with another history and another ground in California. Benigni’s film does not book stages. If a search mixes Life is Beautiful with any of those, Fremont East, Choudhry and October 2013 cut the knot.

Life is Beautiful is the pop, indie and hip hop festival Choudhry put on in downtown Las Vegas on 26 and 27 October 2013, with Another Planet, the Downtown Project and about fifteen blocks. The second year added a day. Later seasons are not stated here. The ground is city, not a camping desert. The first weekend’s bill already said so: Pretty Lights, Empire of the Sun, Jurassic 5 and Haim on streets that were not the Strip.