My second visit to Miami’s highly anticipated crown jewel of an event that is Ultra Music Festival was so much fun that even a week later, I’m not fully recuperated.
Well, one certainty of attending an event with crowds exceeding 150,000 people in a compacted downtown city area as small as Bayfront, is you’re gonna come out of it with Covid v. 6. I get Covid every year. I’m positive every “cold/flu” that’s “going around right now” since 2020 is some variant of Covid-19, at least the ones I catch.
But back to the show.
Ultra was… amazing. At 500 a wristband, and with guests flying in from all over the world, you can’t deny the gravity of the event. It is however, up to you to make the best of it. Personally, I love the “classic trance” character of the festival. It’s a 25 year annual event that started out as a makeshift stage on the sand at the beach in 1999. Songs like “Listen to Your Heart” by DHT and “Heaven” by DJ Sammy remind me of being a little girl around my mom and aunt at the peak of their clubbing years.
Since Ultra was born in the era of that dawn-of-the-new-millenium futuristic trance sound, DJs have a tendency to play the classics in their sets. Steve Aoki did; and some of the later DJs paid homage to the golden-era EDM classics of my (actual) college years, 2012-2016: songs like “Middle” by DJ Snake, and pretty much anything with Justin Bieber vocals.
I wrote an article about some other thoughts I have about this year’s Ultra. Gripes made by local residents, safety concerns, noise violations and even the inauguration of an official “Ultra Day” by the grace of the city commissioner.
You can check it out below.
It’s a good day to be a Miamian. Be safe out there!
P.S. Don’t be afraid to leave the house. Sure it can be intense at times, but we live in a flourishing, vibrant, neon-lights international city that people only dream of experiencing. It’s important not to take that for granted.