UPDATED: Is ACL Festival Ignoring Houston? Does It Even Matter?
UPDATED (Thursday, 2:50 p.m.) to reflect the Houston-area roots of a few ACL performers this year, as pointed out by reader comments. We stand by our original point, though.![]()
Photo by Marco Torres ACL at sunset, 2010
As most of our readers no doubt know by now, the Austin City Limits Music Festival announced its 2013 lineup at the stroke of midnight Tuesday. This fall will mark ACL's twelfth edition in Zilker Park on the shores of Town Lake, and its first expanding to two identical weekends: October 4-6 and 11-13.
Rewind:
Depeche Mode, The Cure, Kings of Leon, Phoenix, Lionel Richie Head 2013 ACL Fest Lineup
Looking over this year's lineup, what leaps out first about the headliners is that, perhaps for the first time, the festival seems to consider thirty- and fortysomethings as the absolute upper range of its audience. This year's "heritage acts," what few there really are, all arrived on the scene in the late '70s or early '80s -- Depeche Mode, The Cure, Lionel Richie -- compared to the baby-boomer icons of ACLs past: Al Green, Neil Young, Van Morrison, Stevie Wonder, Bob Dylan.
The other thing that stood out is that, once again, the lineup is utterly lacking in any representation by artists from a most active if not outright thriving music scene barely 150 miles to ACL's east, aka us.





























