This past weekend, Portola Festival returned to Pier 80 for its fourth year, glowing up the asphalt with five stages and another genre-hopping lineup of DJs, electronic artists, pop legends, and, um, the Mayor.
This year’s festival had plenty of controversy swirling around it, entirely due to the shenanigans of concert promoter Goldenvoice, an industry juggernaut that nonetheless bungled ticket sales in a way that I’ve never seen in 15 years of raving.
Those errors, which we’ll get into, soured the vibe for many attendees before the weekend, including me and my friends. But the bitter taste of the promoter’s missteps faded away once we passed security and ambled into the pier grounds Saturday.
The sun came out on both days, and the winds were far milder than expected along the water. Lines were tolerable everywhere, from the bars to the food vendors to the bathrooms. And overall, the venue remains perhaps the best in the Bay for a festival: Easy to navigate, convenient to peruse, and easily accessed by transit.
Here are my takeaways from a weekend of dancing:
RIP resales
Earlier this year, I wrote about my trials and tribulations during “early bird” ticket sales. Goldenvoice promised returning attendees discounted tickets as a thank you for our loyalty. What we got was an anxiety-inducing mess rife with errors and crashes that booted people out of line or left them stuck waiting in digital purgatory.
Then, earlier this month, Goldenvoice stunned the crowd by suddenly announcing a 25%-off sale on two-day passes, complete with a Waymo promotion that the rideshare company didn’t even advertise. What it meant was that loyal early birds were left having spent more than last-minute stragglers for the same tickets: an insult that Goldenvoice didn’t bother to smooth over.
There were no additional discounts, drink/merch vouchers, a goddamn decorative pin, nothing. Not even an acknowledgement.
The poor upfront sales and especially the discount left the once-healthy resale market completely obliterated. I saw a lot of sellers hawking $300 passes when I entered the festival on Saturday, way down from the early bird price of $350. The deflation forced people to lowball prices like crazy if they wanted a chance to recoup anything. A friend of mine sold their two-day pass for $190 the week of the event.
Going to a festival for cheap is a win for consumers, but the way it happened here was due to a combination of Goldenvoice pricing Portola too high, securing a lineup that pales in comparison to prior events, and then expecting everything to work out.
Next year, I’ll be waiting to buy my ticket second-hand a month or so before the festival. Good luck to Goldenvoice: Early ticket sales are crucial to projecting revenue, but nobody is going to be fooled again in 2026.
A wild Daniel Lurie appears
What a surprise: The same week I wrote about how our mayor is spamming the words “SF is back,” he shows up on stage before Christina Aguilera to basically say the exact same thing. This guy is inescapable, and it is quite literally performative.
His appearance inspired mixed reactions, from a smattering of cheers and claps to a chorus of halfhearted boos that communicated apathy more than hatred. One group of men, elated at the sight of their city leader, bounded toward the stage with drunk enthusiasm. The sight elicited one of the funnier quips I heard all weekend: “Imagine running for Daniel Lurie,” one attendee next to me sighed.
Love him or hate him, Lurie seems firmly committed to the bit of popping up at SF events like an unexpected Pokemon that’s been hiding in tall grass. As someone on Reddit observed: “The closest distance between two points is Lurie and a camera.”
Vintage is best
Speaking of Christina Aguilera, holy hell: The princess of early 2000s vocal acrobatics still got it! She might look a little different than she used to in her teen years, but her ability in the mic was in full force on Saturday, complete with insane range and her trademark growls.
Portola has been on a successful string of booking nostalgic millennial pop stars, including Nelly Furtado, Natasha Bedingfield, and MIA in past years. Aguilera was the best “random” pop offering yet, swaggering on stage in a bodice of dripping crystals while ripping through hits like “Genie in a Bottle” and “What a Girl Wants.” Fans sang back every word.
LCD Soundsystem is equally important for a certain brand of millennial (me), and James Murphy and Co. made incredible use of their 90 minute slot. The band sounded even better than when I saw them in 2016, despite a lot more gray hair visible on stage. Their brand of irony-laced, funk-derived jams still feels timeless; Murphy’s sardonic lyrics about American culture, alienation, and excess feel as appropriate as ever, too.
Room to breathe
Possibly due to low ticket sales, Portola felt emptier than ever this year. That’s perfectly fine for me, an older raver who wants space to dance, not to soak in the humidity emanating off a wall of flesh enclosing me. (That’s for small clubs.) Last year, the heart of the dance floor at the Ship Tent was nearly impossible to penetrate. This year, all you needed was a nod and a “thank you” to slip by people and find a pocket of free air, sans shoving and unhappy glares.
Slow down
The one exception? The Despacio tent, a unique set up with seven massive speakers surrounding a central dance floor. Remember when I mentioned I was a pretentious audiophile? Despacio was built for me. Those glorious 11-foot-tall speakers, from legendary audio company McIntosh, were designed with LCD Soundsystem’s Murphy to immerse dancers in a sea of high-fidelity sound. Instead of an artist on a stage, a rotating selection of DJs mix vinyl in the dark off to the side, encouraging people to groove with each other instead of facing forward.
The hype is real and it drew crowds like crazy. I only braved the line once over the weekend, and enjoyed every minute of my time in that surreal tomb of sparkling music. Some people reported that the number of people in Despacio varied wildly over the course of each day, but every time I looked over, the queue looked a thousand deep.
Kreayshawn never left
I first heard “Gucci Gucci” when it dropped in 2011, and it immediately became a core party anthem — the kind of anthem you put on before the party, during the party, and in a drunken stupor after the party. (To wit, the song is about “one big room, full of bad bitches.”)
To me, Kreayshawn was just some white girl with some hilarious lyrics about rejecting conspicuous luxury as a form of rebellion. But I know better now. Despite only putting out one full-length record, Kreayshawn is a Bay Area legend.
She was expelled from both Oakland and Alameda high schools for not giving an iota of shit about attending class. Instead, a teenage Kreayshawn, legal name Natassia Zolot, directed music videos for the Bay Area hall of famer Lil B (hail the Based God) before transitioning into making her own rap tunes.
The crowd for her mid-afternoon set was modest, if loving; I’m not sure the Pier mainstage was the right spot for her. But as Kreayshawn jumped around during “Missing Kitty” and “Go Hard (La.La.La),” I felt transported back to a time in college when the sound of her nasally voice signaled the start of me going dumb, in the happiest way possible.
After four years, Portola is on the cusp of becoming a tradition in SF. The ticketing fiasco in 2025 has left a lot of fans wondering whether this festival will survive and thrive, or become a fond memory of something bigger that could’ve been. Goldenvoice already suffered that scenario with Los Angeles’ FYF Fest, a beloved event that died after the promoter inflated ticket prices and then saw sales plummet.
Thankfully, the artists and fans have made each year of Portola a joy to actually attend. San Francisco is one of the most important places in the world for dance music. It deserves a festival that celebrates that.
