Mother Nature is a cruel mistress. Because they exist at the mercy of nature, outdoor music festivals sometimes go epically wrong. Nevertheless in 2018, the fashion-forward Chicago hip hop conglomerate Lyrical Lemonade gambled on live music. And it paid off. Summer Smash, the hip hop bonanza cofounded by Lyrical Lemonade and SPKRBX, has been going strong for a half-decade. This year’s festival takes place over three days across three main stages — not in Douglass Park on the West Side as in past years, but at SeatGeek Stadium in southwest suburban Bridgeview, home of the Chicago Fire.

Where there’s fire, there’s smoke (but no Ice Spice; she backed out of the festival a day before showtime). On Friday, thousands of revelers — most of them young, many of them male, bare-chested and backpacked — convened for Day One of Summer Smash. It had to have ranked among the weediest affairs in living memory. The festival grounds are long — SeatGeek Stadium sits on about 60 acres — but no matter where a person roamed on Friday night, the stench of cannabis followed. Some festivalgoers were hot to trot; we would not have expected to encounter twerking at, of all places, a calm and cerebral Vince Staples set.

Either way most of the attendees went about their business peacefully. A heavy-lidded young man in dreadlocks inquired about the journalistic process. “Do you (handwrite) your articles or type them out?” he asked in a guileless drawl.

There was enough razzmatazz to satiate this reporter’s inner child. The festival grounds were strewed with funhouse-style concave/convex mirrors (so ticklishly distortive!), giant replica Minions and even a basketball court scaled down to backyard dimensions. And Summer Smash was no slouch culinarily. Vendors ranged from Harold’s Chicken to Arami, the West Town sushi joint. Also present was Trill Burgers, the fast-casual fiefdom headed by Houston rap legend Bun B.

Monster energy drinks sold for $12 a pop. Most spectators opted for tall boys of Modelo or ready-to-drink alcoholic juice boxes. (These little pouches went flying inside the Lenny Zig Zag Tent, where Lil Pump and Smokepurpp put on an utterly raucous, flattening steamroller of a set.)

And the music itself? Feastly indeed. Among the some 20 acts on Friday’s bill were a couple of local boys gone good. First up was Valee, a South Side rapper whose cucumber cool must’ve provided a nourishing respite from the late afternoon heat. Valee, who in a previous life was signed to Kanye West’s G.O.O.D. Music imprint, is debonair and melodically superlative. Meanwhile Freddie Gibbs, the steely human wrecking ball from Gary, Indiana, can bend any beat to his will.

Valee and Gibbs — and for that matter GloRilla, hip hop’s newly christened queen of mean (commandeering the Culture Kings Stage Friday) — are essentially “street” rappers. They’re like SeatGeek turf; they don’t give. Lyrical Lemonade’s allyship does extend to street rappers, but the brand has forever been associated with misfits, right-brained kinksters like founder Cole Bennett (an icon of what you might call raggedy chic). Friday was largely an alt-rap showcase.

You will never guess who made it to Bridgeview: Lil Yachty, Friday’s surprise guest. The cherry-locked rapper, who sounds less like a rapper than a squawking, birdlike humanoid, is upfront about his idiocracies. So too are the $uicideboy$, a horrorcore duo whose grubby, grainy presentation seems to be going for early Buñuel. The duo’s set on Friday attracted lots of bony youngsters in skullcaps.

The response to festival closer Kid Cudi was mixed. Some, including a female couple with matching hair dyed shamrock green, were loosey-goosey, gyrating in step with the languid music. But others seemed to rue their investment in Cudi; they came for the epochal oldies, not his more recent material. One overserved heckler literally screamed, “Play some old (expletive)!” Cudi didn’t help matters with his pitchy, stumbling vocals and oblivious banter between songs.

Saturday’s headliner is Future with special guest Lil Uzi Vert. Sunday’s are Playboi Carti and Lil Durk.

“This is my first time being here — I’ve never seen anything like it,” chuckled Veronica Vasquez, decked out in in gym attire. First her phone lost service, a problem that became more widespread as night receded into early morning. Then her teenage son briefly disappeared into the morass of exiting concertgoers. The Bridgeview iteration of Summer Smash is not perfect. There are kinks to unwrinkle and maybe problems of overcrowding to be addressed. But all things considered, Day One of the festival was a (weedy) good time. At its best, it felt epically right.

Lyrical Lemonade’s Summer Smash runs through June 25 at SeatGeek Stadium, 7000 S. Harlem Ave., Bridgeview; www.thesummersmash.com

M.T. Richards is a freelance writer.