Virginal, Mobile, Festive: Sunday

At one of the beer stands by the South Stage, a shirtless, severely sunburned guy is arguing with a girl who won't serve him because he doesn't have I.D. "You must be fucking kidding me!" he says over and over again. He's lost his wallet, he says, which he seems to think is a problem mostly because it's preventing him from buying beer.

By 1545 hours, the crowd packing in towards the stage for prolific mix-taper L'il Wayne is almost as big as the one that watched Foo Fighters close the place down here last night.

1550 hours -- Stage time. No Wayne.

1600 hours -- Sampling of the text messages scrolling across the stage video boards: "Why So Serious?" (Dialogue from The Dark Knight is getting a lot of text play this weekend). "Free Tibet!" "Khandi loves Marhuri!" And, of course: "Let's See L'il Wayne!"

1614 hours -- The D.J. puts on the theme from "The Fresh Pince of Bel Air," then turns it down just in time for what sounds like the entire audience to supply the line, "I got in one little fight and my mom got scared." The tune abruptly cuts out. The video monitors are now display images of the stage, notable for the absence of L'il Wayne. Eventually the cameraman finds a pair of, um, gifted ladies sitting on two guys' shoulders wearing tight homemade "Save Weezy" tanktops.

1621 hours -- No Wayne. Who the hell does this guy think he is, the year's best-selling artist in pop music? Well, er, it's still rude for him to be late.

1628 hours -- Thousand of extended middle fingers hail Weezy's entrance. "I believe in God, do you?" he asks. "Yes" carries the voice-vote. "I ain't shit without you, so make some noise for what y'all have created," he says. Also, he fuckin' appreciates us, he motherfuckin' appreciates us, and he wants us to throw our motherfuckin' hands in the air.

There are a lot of syllables in "motherfuckin,'" which is maybe why the 25-year-old rapper sounds out of breath five-minutes into his shorter-than-advertised set. Must be why they call him "Weezy."

He reportedly hits his stride later, even earning a guest appearance from headliner Kanye West, but by then, I'm back in the press area waiting for an official festival staff escort so I can bring my recording gear onto the field. What I saw gave me no clue at all of why this guy is a big deal. On the outer rim of the South Stage field, there are 10 or 12 Baltimore cops in tactical dark blue coveralls with "S.W.A.T." stitched onto their shirt pockets. L'il Wayne's set is the only time I see them all weekend.

Ace photographer DCist Kyle:
Lil 'Waye was over half an hour late and a total snoozer when he finally showed up, unlike Iggy and the Stooges. Frontman Iggy Pop, looking every day of his 61 years, ran around the stage, flipping people off and acting like a madman while his band ran through their garage rock classics.

DCist Chris:
Iggy! Yes! A feral, primeval terror, looking probably 15 years younger than his sixty-one. Seriously, this guy must have been subsisting for decades on snakemeat and rage. He muscles are about to pop through his leathery skin. His eyes threaten to flee his skull, like escape pods from flaming spacecraft. Every tune — "I Wanna Be Your Dog," "Fun House," "1970" — gets exorcised with intensity enough to act as a set-closer. He looks and sounds like he could kill, skin, and eat every member of Taking Back Sunday and still have enough energy left to beat Weezy — 36 years his junior — in a foot race around the horsetrack. Hey, have you seen any of those Taking Back Sunday guys around since they finished their set?

Watching Iggy makes you ravenous. I wait in the only long line I experience all weekend for a worth-it chicken curry pita avec lemonade ($12 plus $1 tip). Still hungry afterwards — Iggy really takes it out of you — so I get a pretzel ($4). It's dry. Washed up. Past its prime, and offerring only the faintest echo of the salty immediacy it must once have had. Oh, it's almost time for Bob Dylan!

DCist Valerie weighs in:
The Black Keys are wont to pulling extra-long sets full of extended jams and improvisation. Lil Wayne's extra late entrance made that an impossibility, cutting songs like "The Breaks" to half of the duration it lasted at a 9:30 Club show. Thus, their soulful rock fury was tinged with vitriol and the only people more annoyed than The Black Keys at their shortened set were The Black Keys fans. When Dan Auerbach received shouts of dissent after introducing their last song (Attack & Release opener "I Got Mine") he told the audience "You can thank Lil Wayne for that." Believe me, they did.

Moby doing a DJ set is not Moby as you know him on alterna-rock radio. Sure, he'll throw in a slower sample of his like "Porcelain" here and there but he'll back it with booty shaking beats and more often than not, his M.O. was to hype the audience up rather than calm them down. It worked seeing as everyone in the dance tent, next to the dance tent and behind the dance tent was jumping and lifting their hands to the bouncing bald bespectacled man pulling the strings.

DCist Chris:
Among the warm-up tunes playing at the South Stage while the crew sets up for Dylan, besides the old-timey country and blues characteristic of his current sound, is a song from Post Rock blogger David Malitz's favorite Wilco album, 1999's summertheeth. It's "When You Wake Up Feeling Old." Somebody on Team Dylan has a sense of humor, apparently. Actually, that sense of humor may belong to Bobby Z, his own enigmatic self, given the both grandiose and gently mocking introduction he gets 20 minutes after his scheduled stage-time — wish I'd been fast enough to write it down.

Dylan, fronting a six-man crew dressed in sharp suits and hats (brown for them, black for him) gets right down to business, opening with "Rainy Day Women." There are plenty of people in the field who don't shout along with the chorus, "Everybody must get stoned!" — Dylan's oddball phrasing tends to foil singer-alongers, perhaps by design — but behind me, a 40-something guy tells his two small children, "That's Daddy's song!" Huh.

"It Ain't Me, Babe" is rearranged, like most of the evening's performances of the classics, to conform to the shufflin' blues template of his excellent 21st century albums, Love and Theft and Modern Times. The numbers from those two ("Rollin' and Tumblin,'" "High Water") are the evening's best. The video boards on either side of the stage stick to long and medium shots of the band throughout the performance — apparently the camera operators are afraid Zinny will go Glen Hansard on anyone who steps in too close.

I'd been trying to keep my expectations in line — listening to the 1966 Bootleg Series live album in the car on my way to the show was no damn help — but Dylan easily surpassed them, delivering a pleasurable if not revelatory set just as V-Fest Double-Aught-Eight was starting to feel long in the tooth.

Ace photographer DCist Kyle:

Stone Temple Pilots were next on the North Stage and gave a great, if somewhat subdued performance. Lead singer Scott Wieland was a whirling dervish last year with Velvet Revolver, but this year were didn't get to see much of his slithery-smooth rock star moves. I had forgotten how much I secretly loved "Wicked Garden."

Nine Inch Nails finished the night off on the North Stage with a command performance that put fellow headliner Kanye West to shame. A very buff Trent Reznor, clouded in smoke and back lit by some strobes, came out full of energy tossing mic stands around the stage like he had an army of replacements (he did). It was quite an experience watching 12 year-olds sing along to the likes of "Closer" and some of the band's other hits. NIN may not have the cache of past headlining acts like The Red Hot Chili Peppers or The Police, but I enjoyed their set much more than those of the bands I just mentioned.

DCist Chris:

It's 8:55 and everyone is waiting for Mr. West. A 40ish guy in a "Rehab Is For Quitters" T-shirt is holding his infant son on his shoulders. Really? A baby, at an open-air rock show nine hours after alcohol sales started? Dad of the Year contender, right there.

The best short of the day arrives on the South Stage video boards pre-Kanye. It's an animated film about four girls in grade school forming a rock band. When the bass player's instrument turns into a Shark, she says, "My bass feels seaworthy." Love that.

At 9 p.m., The graduate emerges, silhouetted by a swirling cloud of orange and purple smoke. Kanye eschews the space-exploration motif of his Glow in the Dark Tour for a straightforward hit parade, and it sounds great. His second song, the synth-driven "I Wonder," is a lot closer to something from an Andrew Lloyd Webber musical than anybody here would want to admit, but even on his weaker material, West's authority and charisma are undeniable. He's a raging egotist who is every bit as good as he thinks he is, like the Dylan filmmaker D.A. Pennebaker documented in Don't Look Back, 40-odd years ago.

"Can't Tell Me Nothing" gets some site-specific detailing: Kanye is the cat who "Had a tour called Glow in the Dark / that used to chill in Takoma Park / That used to chill in Silver Spring / Right here in Maryland, home of the Terrapins."

The sea of hands in the air during "Flashing Light," "Touch the Sky" and really, every song, is a beautiful image to take home from these two exhausting but rewarding days of pop music.

BEST IN SHOW: Kanye West

NOT WORTH WAITING FOR; L'il Wayne

OMISSIONS, REGRETTABLE: The Black Keys, Nine Inch Nails

OMISSIONS, INTENTIONAL: Paramore, Taking Back Sunday

FEARED AND RESPECTED: Iggy

HAD US WORRIED FOR A SECOND THERE, BUT IT TURNED OUT WELL: Dylan