Rogue Wave Embrace Bonnaroo's Jammy Spirit for Mellow Sunday Set

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For the first set on the last day of Bonnaroo, California rockers Rogue Wave offered a remedy to fest-goers' hangovers after Kanye West's epic sunrise performance, which started at 4:30 and didn't wrap until sometime around 6 a.m. The group delivered a mellow set of Shins-style indie-pop tunes, including songs like "Publish My Love" and "Chicago X Twelve." True to Bonnaroo's jam-band spirit, the quintet showed off their improvisatory chops: the droney ballad "Bird on a Wire" crescendoed into a full-on tribal groove, with all the dudes picking up sticks to band on toms before a segue — Grateful Dead-style — into "Lake Michigan." Nice!

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Song Stories

“Karma Chameleon”

Culture Club | 1983

Boy George has said this song was about standing by what you believe in. However, at the time, he was involved in a secret affair with Culture Club drummer Jon Moss. "Now people can understand the songs better," he said. "They were written about my relationship with Jon, and they were also written about being a gay man in a homophobic world." The lines "If I listen to your lies, would you say/I'm a man without conviction/I'm a man who doesn't know how to sell a contradiction," described his life at the time, he said. "I was selling this big lie."

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