The headliner on Saturday was Stevie Wonder, an older generation's ubiquitous pop songwriter, master musician and preacher of positive thoughts. His jubilant, playful yet focused set leaped from hit to hit -- mostly his own, but with a little Marvin Gaye and Parliament-Funkadelic tossed in -- on the way to a finale featuring a gospel choir and an international assortment of percussionists. He was followed by Jay-Z, hip-hop's self-made, self-praised mogul and the embodiment of capitalist competitiveness. Rapping over grandly cinematic arrangements of his songs, with monumental rock beats, Jay-Z represented the businessman after Mr. Wonder's idealist, and drew equally loud singalongs.
The leading hippie among the performers may well have been Wayne Coyne of the Flaming Lips, who followed Kings of Leon on Friday night with a nutty, eye-popping video and stage spectacle, playing their own anthemic songs followed by a boisterous reworking of a full Pink Floyd album from 1973, “The Dark Side of the Moon." Mr. Wonder called for peace and love; Mr. Coyne called for peace, love and legalizing marijuana.
Bonnaroo's setup, on 650 acres owned by the festival's promoters, pays tribute to hippie nostalgia, with a rainbow-shaped entrance gate and tall bobble-head statues of figures like Jerry Garcia. Exhibits and recycling stations strive to instill environmental virtue (which can't make up for the actual impact of vehicles and trash from the festival).
The hip-hop and reggae bookings lean toward socially conscious performers like the rapper Nas, who performed with Bob Marley's youngest son, Damian, with songs bouncing between gun-toting toughness and calls for justice. On Saturday afternoon one stage was devoted entirely to Latin alternative rock, with a bill topped by the pan-Latin agitprop band Ozomatli and starting with a galvanizing noontime set by a Colombian band, Bomba Estreo: guitar, drums, laptop and the vocalist Liliana Saumet, in gold-lam shorts, who sang and rapped about “revolucin" over a fierce, electrified Afro-Colombian beat, champeta. (Oddly, in sets I heard at Bonnaroo, the BP oil disaster in the Gulf of Mexico went unmentioned.)
