Coachella is a stone cold mess.
Coachella is a stone cold mess.
Nostalgia, niggles, novelty acts and nasty clowns: when did Coachella become ... this?
“I should not have done that,” says Grimes.
She’s suffering technical difficulties on the Sahara Stage, staring blankly at the buttons on her mixing desk.
“Everything has been put to double tempo … I’m doing a lot of math in my mind … this could be cray.”
She’d certainly made an entrance, arriving at Coachella in a robotic spider-car while snacking on grapes. But the future-electro dance star – known more for her relationship with Elon Musk than her music these days – soon cut her DJ set short.
Failing to fix her hardware meltdown, Grimes began babbling, then shrieking. “Fuck it!” she yelled, then screamed repeatedly into her microphone: “Fucking … argh!”
It was just another meltdown in a festival full of them, a moment that helped make this past weekend the crayest of all Coachellas.
The annual Palm Springs festival, which draws 250,000 people to the desert over two weekends every April, and many more through six popular livestream channels on YouTube, is considered the big thinker of international music festivals.
Coachella doesn’t follow trends, it creates them. It is known for its forward-thinking and future-planning genius, anointing a string of headlining acts who craft movie-style moments and get to cement their superstar status.
What happens next comes from what Coachella does.
Not this year. Judging by the Coachella 2024 livestream, which I relentlessly annoyed my family with over the past three days, the festival that everyone looks to for inspiration has thrown its hands up in the air and gone: “Dunno?”
It was a stone cold mess, a festival that felt like someone put the entirety of Spotify in a blender and threw it on a stage hoping something might stick.
There were many moments that looked to the past. Blur, who last played Coachella in 2013, were there. So too were metallers Deftones, ska-poppers No Doubt, emo-rock stalwarts Taking Back Sunday, dance titans Justice, grime star Skepta and dubstep duo Skream + Benga.
Sublime, another 90s act, jettisoned their long-term fill-in front man for their late singer’s son. It backfired: their main stage set was, at times, unlistenable, and it wasn’t the only one. There were technical issues galore, like Lana Del Rey’s underpowered Friday night performance laden with microphone and performance issues.
Jhené Aiko chipped a tooth. Hatsune Miku’s promised hologram turned out to be a CGI character dancing on a flatscreen TV. I saw several acts come out to microphones that weren’t turned on, problems that took many minutes to rectify.
Several performers should have had their microphones turned off entirely.
Vampire Weekend’s Saturday performance was billed as a special one-off appearance. It was dire: raggedy, unrehearsed, off-key. They found a way to make it much worse: inviting Paris Hilton to join them.
Aside from 90s nostalgia, there were few trends to point at, little indication of where things might be going, nothing to confirm that anyone at Coachella really knows what’s going on in the wider music world anymore.
If Coachella still has a finger on the industry’s pulse, it’s weaker than ever. Perhaps our festival issues aren’t quite so localised after all.
But at no point did it fail to be a spectacle. Far from it. For my money, of which I spent none, the three-day livestream provides the year’s best live TV entertainment, and the messiness made this year’s Coachella more interesting than it has been in a long time.
For those not making the trip to the desert, there was gold to be found by skipping around the streams to find performances that rose above the disconnectedness of it all, as acts found new and innovate ways to surprise, confound and delight.
Oh, there was also Clown Core.
What’s with all the clowning around?
Imagine characters from Saw playing horn-infused death metal against a backdrop of AI cannibalism porn and you’ll come close to describing Clown Core, both a band name and a terrifying genre of one. Clearly, someone took their stoner dorm-room joke too far. It’s one I hope to never hear again. Yet they weren’t alone. This year’s Coachella was full of novelty acts, from The Aquabats’ dated ska performed in matching blue outfits to Grimes’ spider-car and Hatsune Miku, a digital avatar whose appearance caused controversy. Careful, Coachella: you’re turning into Eurovision.
The guests were bigger than the headliners.
Lana Del Rey’s wispy, wafty, undercooked Friday night performance required Billie Eilish to beef it up. Tyler, the Creator performed much the same set as his Spark Arena show in 2022 but lifted it with guest turns from Kali Uchis, A$AP Rocky, Charlie Wilson and Donald Glover. Shakira played a surprise show, and Will Smith did his Men in Black theme tune. The biggest guest of all was saved for No Doubt’s surprisingly fun set when Olivia Rodrigo gave Gwen Stefani a hand on ‘Bathwater’. I’d put good money on Rodrigo headlining next year. Someone’s gotta class the place up.
Where did The Beths get their big fish?
Was it a late-night drunken purchase from Temu? Or a specially-commissioned artwork from Dick Frizzell? I need to know lots more about the upright carp wafting around behind The Beths as they made their Coachella debut. Does it pack down? Does it smell fishy? How do they inflate it? Bike pump? Vacuum cleaner in reverse? Anyway, it was incredibly cool to hear songs that normally ring around Whammy Bar, The Powerstation and The Town Hall played on a mass international stage. Great job!
The guys need to give hip-hop up for a bit.
Many of Coachella’s big name rappers were entirely missable. Ken Carson, Lil Uzi Vert and Destroy Lonely treated the place like it was Rolling Loud, jumping and screaming to backing tracks but doing little else. Tyler, the Creator fared better, but much of his show is two years old now. Far more impressive were two of Listen In’s stand outs: Coi Leray proved she’s potential future headliner material, while Ice Spice padded her set with Taylor Swift and Barbie remixes but was so darned fun it didn’t matter. Then there’s Doja Cat, who only gets better the weirder she gets. My kids definitely shouldn’t have seen her R18 mud orgy though.
The best acts played like they weren’t at Coachella at all.
Rather than trying to fit into Coachella, the best acts created their own vibes. Deftones’ late afternoon Friday set was brilliantly bruising, with Chino Moreno and co getting progressively nastier. Gesaffelstein performed brutally minimalist French bangers behind a terrifying full-face mask. Khruangbin floated by on a perfect cloud of Sunday chill, while Jungle were so good I now consider their upcoming May show to be unmissable. Doja Cat closed the weekend with a mud-flinging stunner, while Ice Spice, Peggy Gou, No Doubt (?) and Coi Leray all ruled. Meanwhile, Young Fathers went straight to the top of my bucket list, their passionate politicism and clear camaraderie winning out over the otherwise messy spectacle.
See you next weekend, Coachella. Please, let’s figure some stuff out before then.
New Zealand has fewer journalists than ever. Yet there are stories going untold every day. I’m trying to tell as many of them as I can right here. If you’d like me to continue doing this, please consider upgrading to become a paid subscriber.
I didn't catch everything you mention but I did catch an awesome Jockstrap set. the mix may not have been perfect but the playing singing and attitude was and the audience lapped up something that was when all was said and done arty as fuck.
Is next weekend live-streamed as well?
I didn't see as much of this one as I wanted to.