Vic Mensa was so determined to get into Lollapalooza last year that he tried jumping a fence near some downtown train tracks, brushed against an electrical transformer powering the trains, fell 25 feet to the ground and wound up in the hospital.
He will be back at Lollapalooza on Friday — but this time as a performer.
Mr. Mensa, 18, belongs to the band Kids These Days, which will play on the first day of the festival. This group of eight Chicago musicians, four from Whitney Young High School, may be new, but the task ahead is as old as rock ’n’ roll: striving for stardom, writing new music, building an audience and negotiating their way into a fragmented and bottom-line music business.
