It’s a day of tie dye and top 40 as the faithful descend upon the two L.A.-area arenas.

Jerry Garcia might have died 15 years ago, but ambling through the parking lot of the Forum on Saturday night, you'd have been hard pressed to know he's gone. Two hours prior to the Dead's first L.A. show in more than a half-a-decade, the sun-scorched asphalt was already swarming with people. The scene was a cross between a Renaissance Faire, a Bedouin crossing and the world's most pot-addled family reunion.

Limousines ferrying baby boomers idled next to withered Winnebagos still following a band that first formed nearly 45 summers ago. Rusting school buses cloaked in rainbow Day-Glo paint were packed to the gills with AARP-aged hippies - the strains of "Scarlet Begonias" mingling with the smoke from dirty windows.

Not so far away, at the Verizon Wireless Amphitheater in Irvine, a very different kind of arena show was underway: KIIS-FM's Wango Tango, a top-40 blowout featuring Lady GaGa, Kelly Clarkson and the Black Eyed Peas, in addition to a host of other radio-friendly favorites, attended by hordes of screaming teenage girls.

The weekend concerts illustrated two opposing approaches to being a devoted music fan in today's pop culture landscape: Either embrace every genre and artist with the same open-minded ardor or single-mindedly invest all your energies into the one performer, group or style that defines you.

His meteoric popularity was met with criticism, but the young Atlanta-bred star's second album is a success too, and rappers are lining up to work with him.

Soulja Boy Tell'em harbors no ill will toward his haters. Not even the ones who since his 2007 debut album, "Souljaboytellem.com," have been loudly -- and with almost numbing constancy -- calling for the death of the rapper-producer's career.

He incurred the wrath of an angry hip-hop nation after the meteoric success of his breakthrough single, “Crank That (Soulja Boy),” a by turns menacing and minimalist pop confection that seemed to capture the zeitgeist two year ago. It spent eight weeks atop the national singles chart, resulting in 5.5 million digital downloads and 3 million ring tone sales.

Then came the negativity. Ice-T, the Los Angeles gangsta rapper-turned-costar of "Law & Order: Special Victims Unit," accused the Atlanta rapper, via 2008 mix tape, of having "single-handedly killed hip-hop" and castigated "Crank That" as "garbage."

Similarly,Snoop Dogg derided Soulja Boy as a "bubble-gum rapper" and dismissed his music with a barnyard epithet in various radio interviews. Wu-Tang Clan's Method Man said of Soulja Boy: "Lyrically, he's not the truth. He's a shorty." As well, various critics and bloggers called him a one-hit wonder, criticizing the virally popular “Superman” dance Soulja Boy pioneered as "a modern day minstrel show" and, worse in the rapper's eyes, denouncing him as "the new MC Hammer."