Why Gov Ball 2014 still gets shouted about
A Reddit thread calling Governor’s Ball 2014 “the greatest curated lineup ever” is peak festival nostalgia — and not without reason. Looking at the poster, that year served a rare three-decade crossover of legacy headliners, indie darlings and dance-floor juggernauts that read like a genre map of the 2010s.
- OutKast
- Jack White
- Vampire Weekend
- The Strokes
- Skrillex, Phoenix, Axwell /Ingrosso
- Disclosure, Interpol, Foster the People
That lineup works because it didn’t try to please one scene. You had hip-hop and funk legends, alt‑rock stalwarts, buzzy indie bands and EDM mainstays all on the same weekend — and they weren’t token bookings. It felt curated, not commodified: each tier of the bill had bona fide stars or acts on the edge of breaking big.
Festival fans live for those collision moments — hearing a classic hip‑hop set right after an indie‑rock mainstage or catching an unexpected electronic banger at dusk. Gov Ball 2014 stacked those moments across Randall’s Island with enough marquee names to anchor the weekend and enough mid‑card gems to keep discovery alive.
Nostalgia helps, of course. But when a lineup is still being referenced a decade later, it’s more than meme energy — it’s proof that smart, broad‑thinking programming can make a festival feel indispensable. For anyone tracking how festival curatorship evolved in the 2010s, that poster is a case study.
Source: https://www.reddit.com/r/festivals/comments/1ozmj5u/governors_ball_2014_the_greatest_curated_lineup/