To see lots of pics of bikini-clad girls and neon-wearing dudes, check out our slideshow of the ID Fest.

Identity Festival feat. Steve Aoki, Rusko, Pretty Lights, Disco Biscuits, Le Castle Vania & DJ Shadow Cynthia Woods Mitchell Pavilion August 27, 2011

Saturday's Identity Festival was Aftermath's first exposure to popular electronic music in over a decade, since we gave up the ghost when we discovered The Clash and punk rock. We left rave culture and electro beats behind for something we saw as more "real," before the big letdown that nothing is real anyway.

After leaving Identity, the biggest surprise for us was how much more curious we were about dubstep and the new sounds currently making the electronic youth movement spin. Aftermath wasn't at all surprised about how detached we felt from the crowd or the music, though.

With the crowd roughly a decade younger than us, for the most part, we sat on the sidelines, bewildered and amused, but not at all disgusted or turned off. If anything, we just wanted to know how long we had been ignoring this next wave of electronica.

The festival's maiden voyage was very reminiscent of the all-day events we had previously seen at the Pavilion. Your Buzzfests and whatnot are not that far off from IDF, with three scattered stages, adolescents milling around ruling the day, and copious amounts of attitude and alcohol.

It was orderly in structure, not at all the packed clusterfuck full of drugged-out burners we had (sadly) hoped for. Music is the real drug, or some shit like that.

Saturday was also the hottest day of the year as the weather kept on reminding us, topping out at least 110 degrees when Aftermath set foot on the grounds around 5 p.m. The heat probably deterred a good amount of the crowd, old and young, from making it out, and rightfully so, but by the time the sun came down and headliners Pretty Lights, Steve Aoki and Rusko went on, plenty of new faces began to appear.

Our first find of the day was Le Castle Vania, Dylan Eiland's five-year-old dance project, shortly after arriving. He was playing on the second, Dim Mak stage. It was hella more intimate, obviously, than the stuff going on at the main stage, where the venue's security handlers were trying to in vain to keep dancing kids inside the aisles. Like herding puppies.

What was strange about the crowd as a whole was how young everyone was. We would like to think we are professional musical sociologists (LOL), but we couldn't place where fur leggings, neon, and this post-rave stuff had come from. We stood next to local DJ and good friend Eric "Ceeplus" Castillo, and we were both shocked and excited in equal turns.

Was it Girl Talk, parents shoving Adderall into their kids' heads and installing a drug lust, or just plain ol' rebelling from mainstream rock culture and materialistic hip-hop and rap? Say what you will about bleep-bleep-bloop-shronk, but no one seemed to be worried about money or crass individualism. It was pretty communal, actually.

Disco Biscuits was a decent soundtrack for our early-evening creepy, lonely laze-about down an aisle near the main stage, with the livetronica act mixing jammy passages with samples and ambient noise.