This past weekend, I travelled back home to Raleigh to attend Dreamville Fest 5, the fifth iteration of the festival run by J. Cole and the Dreamville team. Every year, the Dreamville record label produces and facilitates the festival at Dorothea Dix Park in partnership with the city of Raleigh, local food vendors and artists, and the park itself. This year was different though. It was announced back in November that this year would be its last year. One last celebration to send off the beloved music festival promised to highlight the music itself and the impact that the festival has had over the past 7 years. To its credit, it did exactly that, bringing out artists like 21 Savage, Lil Wayne, Keyshia Cole, and Erykah Badu, somehow doing the impossible of making a lineup that was better than the year prior. Day One brought out the energy immediately with Chief Keef, Ludacris, PartyNextDoor, and an Ari Lennox set that quite literally melted my heart, closing out the night with Lil Wayne alongside groups Hot Boys and Big Tymers, throwing back to the classics of the ‘90s. Day Two featured some of my favorite artists, J.I.D, BigXThaPlug, Glorilla, and Wale along with headliners Erykah Badu and finally J. Cole. With a sense of community and similar ideals from everyone in attendance, this year felt like one big celebration, an opportunity to be in a group of people who all shared the same love and appreciation for the artform that I do, and it had an energy that cannot be compared to.

J. Cole closed out the festival for the final time on a set resembling his childhood home, taking the crowd through his journey in the music industry playing tracks from every distinct era of his career accompanied by only a pair of headphones and a drum machine, similar to the one he used to produce beats as a young adult under his old moniker, The Therapist. Serving as an Ode to everything that Dreamville stood for and had become, Cole closed the night with the track “Farewell” off Friday Night Lights, and I can’t think of a better final memory to come from such an impactful set of events.

As a festival, Dreamville has always had a distinct energy that I think so many others fail to replicate. The choice of performers, brand partners, and local artists who worked on the countless murals and installations all felt purposeful to create a community atmosphere that shared a common appreciation and passion for the creativity that was being displayed. It isn’t like Rolling Loud or Coachella whose goal is to bring in as many of the most popular artists as possible, often to the detriment of the event itself, leading to moments like Olivia Rodrigo fans having panic attacks during the Kenny Mason set that came on before it. Dreamville never had this problem because of the careful consideration that went into all of these things beforehand, which led to the community feeling that I always enjoyed so much when attending. I can still vividly picture the moment at Dreamville 2024 when the crowd of over fifty thousand people all went completely silent as artist 6lack performed an acapella version of his song “Nonchalant” and the overwhelming feeling of passion from him on stage rippling through every person in the crowd. That level of community passion for a level of artistry is hard to foster at a large-scale event like this, yet time and time again the Dreamville team was able to execute this at the highest level. 

I first attended Dreamville back in 2021 during my freshman year of college at NC State and it has been a tradition that one of my best friends from high school and I go together every year since. Since then, it has become so much more to me. It has been a constant throughout my college experience. From navigating my freshman year to taking a gap year, transferring to a new university and starting a career, Dreamville has been something that I have always known I could rely on. In November I methodically prepare to buy my ticket, and try to convince friends to buy one as well. From then until March I theorize who is going to be on the lineup, what the big surprises are going to be, and what the merch will look like. March to April I obsess over the released lineup, check out the artists that I haven’t heard before and prepare myself to scream every line to every J. Cole song during his set. And once it’s over, I spend my time reminiscing over the past year in anticipation of buying my ticket for the next. It seems only fitting that the institution that was always there in my life as one of the only overwhelmingly positive things I could consistently rely on throughout my college career is ending just a few weeks before my own graduation. I can find comfort in knowing that I couldn’t have gotten to where I am now if it weren’t for having Dreamville as such an important part of my life, and knowing that as the team behind Dreamville goes on to create new innovative things in the world, so will I. 

It was announced the night before this year’s festival that though this would be the last official Dreamville, the team behind it would begin working on a new series of events taking place in Raleigh over the course of the next five years. Told to have the same central ideology as the original, this new venture would serve as a new take on the industry and an outlet for the team’s creative energy. To peel back the curtains a bit, I originally started writing parts of this piece prior to Dreamville this year in order to meet the turnaround for its release and the original ending was to be much more melancholic. This pillar of my college life is going away at the same time that I am, and I am going to miss both of those things, but this new news has given me a much more positive outlook on the future. Just as I am going to change after graduation, so will the idea of Dreamville, and change is a good thing in both of these situations. Change gives you a new opportunity to step into a position you may have not known was possible. It encourages growth and building on the things that you already care about. Just because parts of my life are about to change it doesn’t mean that the things that I hold close to myself are going to go away. The people I care about, my passions, my dreams are still going to be with me, they’re just going to change too, in the same way that Dreamville is going to change, but still have the same passion behind it. Dreamville will always hold a very special place in my heart for everything that it has given to me, and I know that wherever I am, whoever I am, it will still be around for me to come back to.