Where's Voodoo?

Florence + the Machine at Voodoo 2015, by Patrick Ainsworth

Is Voodoo’s extended period of silence telling us something?

In normal times, the Voodoo Music + Art Experience would have put a presale ticket package on sale in December or January. It would offer fans a chance to buy weekend ticket packages at a greatly reduced price before the talent lineup was announced. That didn’t happen this year, which is understandable in Coronavirus times when everything is up in the air, but it nonetheless represents a lost opportunity to pick up revenue from casual fans for whom interest in Voodoo is cost-contingent.

That’s not the only thing not happening at Voodoo, though. Last July, Voodoo presented the NOLA Drive-In Summer Concert Series, and if you want to know who played it, go to voodoofestival.com. That information remains on the festival’s homepage more than six months later with no mention of Voodoo or the 2021 festival on that page. Those who want to know about Voodoo have to click on the Information link and go to the fourth item on the menu—“Looking for Voodoo Festival”—to discover that “We look forward to returning in full force on October 29-31, 2021,” according to the site.

The website doesn’t appear to have been updated since June. To be fair, the websites for the other major festivals seemed similarly neglected last year. Buku and Jazz Fest had stagnant home pages that presented news about 2020 being canceled and looking forward to 2021 because they didn’t have another event to promote. Now, both announce their 2021 plans to move into October in front of Voodoo—Jazz Fest on the weekends of October 8-10 and 15-17, and Buku to October 22 and 23. French Quarter Festival is a slightly different animal because FQFI.org is the window into all of the events presented by French Quarter Festivals, including Satchmo SummerFest and Holidays New Orleans Style. The website focused on those events in their times, highlighting virtual events. Still, it seems unusual for Voodoo to leave content promoting events that have past on the site rather than post a placeholder announcement reminding the occasional visitor of the event to come.

Since social media has become the de facto Internet, a festival’s social media is arguably more significant than its website, but there too, Voodoo has been strangely silent. Voodoo’s official page on Facebook has been dormant since November 6 when it advertised the sale of the 2020 Voodoo T-shirt. An October 30 post links to an interview Nola.com’s Keith Spera did with Don Kelly, one of Voodoo’s organizers. In it, Kelly said, “I don’t have a crystal ball. But we’re planning next year’s festival and anticipating it will go forward as long as we have approval from the city and state. We’ll be back bigger and better than ever, but we’ll follow whatever guidelines are in place.”

During that same time, Jazz Fest’s Facebook feed has been far more active, linking to videos, pictures, and stories on artists associated with New Orleans and the festival including one from February 2 connecting to a Vanity Fair profile of Trombone Shorty by Brett Martin. Buku hasn’t been as prolific, but it recently posted a link to a “Buku Soundsystem” playlist on Spotify. 

Voodoo’s Twitter and Instagram pages haven’t been updated in 2021. The last posts on both went up on December 28 and featured the same clip of a Jeopardy question that mentioned Voodoo.

According to Voodoo’s publicist, this dormant phase doesn’t signify anything. “We are moving ahead with our planning for another great festival,” we were told in an email. That email came two days ago and nothing has changed on the festival’s website or social media since. After a month when two of New Orleans’ major festivals made news by moving into October with Voodoo and Buku, which made the move to October in late December. Everybody made news in the process but Voodoo, which remains mum.