Sure, there’s plenty to gripe about when it comes to all-ages festivals—having to drink beer in a cage, losing all feeling in your toes after the fourth instance of being run over by a stroller worth more than your car—but I think I’m finally at the point in my life where I’d rather see a crowd full of actual babies wearing noise-cancelling headphones than adult babies wearing flower crowns. And boy, did PDX Pop Now! deliver on that front. People of all types and ages congregated under the Hawthorne Bridge over the weekend, but my attention was drawn to those at the ends of the spectrum: the toddlers and the older couples clearly lost on their way to the esplanade. My “is this band cool” gauge was reliant on those two groups—if you can’t impress all ages at an all-ages festival, what are you doing?

As inane and irrational as that barometer may be, Old Grape God’s Saturday performance killed it with my litmus groups. The barrage of little kids losing their minds in front of the purple prophet was cute as fuck, and watching grandpas wearing Keens and earplugs warm up to the hip-hop show—which featured onstage painting and interpretive dance—warmed my heart.

“But what about the teens and tweens?!” Yeah, yeah, there were some of those too. PDX Pop Now! is a great resource for kids with an interest in live music. It’s always fun to see bands that usually frequent clubs or bars getting to play to a younger crowd. To ensure that my jaded, 21-year-old brain didn’t cloud my judgment I brought along someone still bound by the hands of puritanical Uncle Sam and the OLCC, my 16-year-old brother Michael. I wanted to get his youthful hot take. “There are people playing basketball and drawing on the street, that’s cool I guess.” Take that, Coachella! He took an interest in hardcore punk band Bobby Peru. They’re a mosh-worthy band with '80s punk nostalgia that fits in venues like the Know, but it’s hard to beat watching dads with kids on their shoulders bopping along to songs about eating someone’s face while high on bath salts. After some light afternoon thrashing (very light, this year everyone was great about the “girls to the front” rule) we surveyed the crowd that Michael deemed older than he would have expected.

While there were more teens at shows scheduled later like Maze Koroma, it did seem like the majority of every audience was made of people in their 20s. As long as I’ve been attending the festival I’ve always felt surrounded by my peers, and this year I got the impression that the festival was growing up at the same pace as the attendees.

PDX Pop Now! is mellow, and although it may not be the coolest spot of all time (Michael was weirded out by the booths: “It makes me kind of sad to see that empty PGE booth"), the atmosphere makes each band accessible to a new audience and gives them creative control to make their set what they want it to be. Plus, who doesn’t love spending prolonged periods of time under the Hawthorne Bridge? As Michael so eloquently said, “Yeah the location is really tight.” From the mouths of babes!