On hurricanes and music festivals and why you should go

I know the word “irony” gets used a bit too loosely these days, but I think I may have managed to achieve it this week. On Tuesday I inked this deal with the Voodoo Music Festival in New Orleans, on the one-year anniversary of Hurricane Katrina hitting the city. Immediately after signing the deal, I began bringing furniture off my porch into my living room because they were telling us that we were about to get hit by a hurricane of their own. In fact, it was a bit of a rush to get the fax off before the power went out. Of course it never did go out, as Ernesto turned out to be the storm that wasn’t, which came as more than a welcome relief.

Anyway, Voodoo is triumphantly making its return to New Orleans City Park this year, after having been displaced last year. The idea here is that by attracting outsiders (and their money) to events like this, it infuses a bit of revenue into the local economy, hopefully making things in New Orleans suck just a tiny bit less for those residents still trying to get their lives back a year later. And it’s going to be a heck of a show this year, with the Red Hot Chili Peppers, Duran Duran, Wu Tang Clan, and too many others to list. This festival is so much bigger than us that I feel privileged just to be allowed to partner up with them, but nonetheless iProng be there in full force. We’re even going to figure out how to tape iProng Radio at Voodoo in one way or another. If you want to meet up with us at some point during the festival, just holler at me sometime between now and October 28-29 and we’ll make something happen.

On a personal level, this is gratifying for me because I’ve been saying from the start that iProng was going to be as much about the content as it was about the technology, and while I haven’t always been able to live up to that over the past few years, I think this qualifies. This is the kind of event I’d be attending whether we were involved with it or not. But more importantly, I’m hoping that our participation will in some small tiny miniscule way make things just a little bit better for New Orleans. If you want to do something yourself, attend this festival. See you there.