EVERY GENRE PROJECT - April 21 - Coachella Pop
Genre of the Day - Coachella Pop
Festival of the Day - Coachella 2024!
April 21, 2024
To be truthful, this article is coming a day late. Trying to keep your phone charged at the Coachella campground is not particularly easy. Either you wait around after all the festivities and your legs are stone to get your phone charged, or you sit in the blazing heat (99 degrees F on Sunday!) before the festival opens. Thus, it’s a bit hard to find time to write. I’ve now departed from the fever dream that was my first music festival and first Coachella, and the musical joy that is able to erase through the sun-induced headache, the subsequent dusty dry eyes, and the aforementioned leg pain. It honestly was a transcendent experience as a music fan, an avid SoCal appreciator, and an ardent believer that the spring comes with an unshakeable, enwrapping bliss.
Yesterday, I focused more on some of my impressions and initial reflections of the festival. Today, as promised, I wanted to touch on some of the uniqueness of the genres presented by the acts I saw. We started the day at Australian DJ Mall Grab’s euphoric deep house. We then hustled over to the Coachella Stage, the biggest stage where the headliners perform, for trailblazing Latin female MC Young Miko’s reggaeton, dembow-tinged, and bubblegum synthpop-reggaeton-fusion set. We ran back to a thankfully covered stage for a taste of hot newcomer Chappell Roan’s high femme synthery and new wave as she entranced the crowd in a butterfly costume. I muscled my way through to near the front of main stager Sabrina Carpenter’s bubbly, coquettish Bardot-ex-trap-pop, eagerly awaiting her customary sexed-up improvised “Nonsense” outro. Another fantastic performance awaited us in the covered stage with Tinashe, who gracefully balanced her stray pop hits with her avant-garde, minor-key RnB complete with some of the most incredible dancing of the whole festival.
Once the sun had thankfully set, we moseyed on over to Lil Uzi Vert’s cloud rap with a dash of Jersey club alienism. At one point he slid down the stairs of his set with a worm while serving the craziest eyes I’ve ever seen on a performer: the man is a star. Friday was a non-stop rush. The three biggest tents at Coachella are the Coachella Stage, the Outdoor Stage, and the Sahara Stage which often houses major EDM artists alongside big rap acts. Unfortunately, the Sahara Stage is a major trek, complicating switches between big names. It’s good crowd control, bad for the voracious music consumer. Nonetheless, we ran, made a pit-stop at RUFUS DU SOL’s hypnotic, swirling progressive house before catching the last song of ascendant Latin tastemaker DJ Bizarrap’s Sahara set. A quick restock break back at the tent, then the very end of Peso Pluma’s massive set, with some breathing room for the main event of the day for me: Lana Del Rey.
Lana deserves her own paragraph, really. I adore her artistry and songwriting. She was the first artist I really remember falling in love with at only ten years old. I was worlds away from what she was describing in those early songs—she had two albums out when I became intrigued—but her sweeping, lush drama and narrative, hazy songwriting stood out like a ripe peach tree among a forest of birches to my younger self who adored reading and dramatic stories. I was, however, unsure of her as a live performer. I saw her in 2018 during her post-Lust for Life tour. It was nowhere near bad, but it did feel slightly sleepy and stagnant in a midwinter arena. Once she began her set at Coachella, I immediately saw that an arena just hadn’t fit her.
Entering through the crowd to Neil Young in a gorgeous black dress, clutching a biker, she looked captivating. Not only that: she was grinning practically the whole time. Her voice teetered more on the warm side than the spectral nature often assigned to it. Her storylines came to life, not least thanks to the elaborate set designed to look like a certain tunnel referenced in the winding title of her last (and best, at least to me) album. She’s on another plane songwriting wise, but she also put on a genuinely great show. Completely eschewing probably everyone’s expectation of, like, Father John Misty or Stevie Nicks, she brought out Camilla Cabello of all people. The newly blonded Camilla honestly looked so incredible I couldn’t be upset for more than five seconds—if there’s one thing Lana loves to do, it’s avoid the obvious. She pole-danced, explicitly took aim at the critical jabs towards her over the past twelve years from the auspices of a bird cage, and rode out as she came, a black-veiled, eternally wild biker.
While nothing could match the back-and-forth of Friday, to write up the next two days in the same manner would still be madness. What I loved most about Coachella is how global it is now, a far cry from the painfully white lineups its first ten years sported. The roots of just about any major musical tradition could be traced from the grounds of this polo club. Tyler the Creator’s wandering troubadour, desert-rock-chic set was equally mind-blowing. He brought his trademark blasé sense of humor and a sense of levity to his emotionally-charged, gorgeous, California soul-tinged rap. Weekend 2 even got a personal shoutout afterwards from him—pardon the dust.
Doja Cat was top two in terms of best live performers I’ve ever seen: I’ve never seen anyone command the camera with such force as she set out to prove the biting nature of Scarlet matched her ambitions. Her ending it with gyrating with her dancers in a tub of mud is all you need to know about how bewildering and weirdly metal it all was. Seeing Jhené Aiko’s harp-ornamented, who I actually discovered when she opened for Lana (which she only did a few times on that particular tour), was life-affirming, to say the least (tears actually rolled down my face).
Enough yapping. The first day I really set out to bring my every genre project to life. I eventually got lost in the music, though, reminding me that while the taxonomy of music is great for scholarly and investigative purposes, just being out in the wild allows you to take the art in more naturally and fill you with surprise and wonder. I had a fantastic time, and I hope that you soon get to go catch a show somewhere outside, and maybe it’ll be something new.
Love,
Reid
PS: A special shoutout to the person who made this all happen. You know who you are; I adore you and your level-headedness and for helping me get lost in the joy of the moment.
PPS: Another shoutout to some of the other sick acts I got to see or caught glimpses of: The Adicts, RAYE, Ice Spice, Gesaffelstein, No Doubt, Sublime, J Balvin!, the smaller DJs at the colorful Do Lab, Bebe Rexha, Victoria Monét, BLOND:ISH, and Grimes.