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The annual Bonnaroo Music & Arts Festival in Manchester, Tennessee — just outside Nashville — turns 15 this year. This is also the year that U2’s The Joshua Tree album turns 30, so the mega-famous Irish rockers will play their first-ever U.S. festival show as the Sunday night headliner for Bonnaroo.
The festival kicks off this Thursday, June 8th and runs through Sunday, June 11th. More than 80,000 music fans will descend on this tiny town to catch bands playing ten-plus music stages. New this year: The Other Tent, once a small tent for lesser-known acts, is being upgraded to a major stage on par with What Stage and Which Stage. The Other stage will be dedicated solely to dance, electronic, and hip-hop acts.
Joining U2 on the music line-up: Red Hot Chili Peppers (a strange choice of headliner since they just played the fest a few years back in 2012), The Weekend, Chance the Rapper, Major Lazer, Flume, Lorde, The XX, Future Islands, Glass Animals, Francis & the Lights, and many, many more acts spanning multiple genres. See a full music line-up here. Headlining the comedy tent is Jessica Williams and Phoebe Robinson of 2 Dope Queens and Hannibal Buress. More on the comedy line-up here.
The annual fest will also feature the old standards — a water park, a Ferris wheel, a food truck court, a craft brew tent, and more. For those who can’t let their workout routine slide for a weekend, there’s a full line-up of yoga classes and a 5K run. There are multiple parades planned, and there are plenty of costume theme parties to keep party animals busy all weekend. Fest-goers can keep cool inside the air-conditioned Cinema Tent, where cult classics, contemporary movies, and documentaries screen all weekend. Napoleon Dynamite — Jon Heder — himself will make an appearance at the screening of that film on Saturday night.
Check back here for a festival recap later this weekend.