Coachella wraps with community vibe, diversity
The Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival was launched amid comments that have become commonplace after 17 years.
The lineup wasn’t as strong. The festival is for Hollywood hipsters. The emphasis isn’t on music.
But the festival closed Sunday with comments that also have become commonplace as festival-goers reflect on their three-day experience at the Empire Polo in Indio.
“There’s such a special sense of community and joy,” said Briana Sauls of Houston, who was spending her honeymoon at Coachella with her husband, Stephen, and maid of honor, Zeno Forbes, after getting married last week in San Francisco.
“It has a community vibe,” said Steve Kim of Los Angeles.
“The location and the people and the atmosphere — you can’t find anything else like it,” said Charlie Friedman of Phoenix.
If Coachella could be accused of being focused of one particular type of music, it would be EDM. The crowds for electronic artists Calvin Harris, Major Lazer and Disclosure on the Coachella Stage and Jack U and Zedd on the Outdoor stages dwarfed their rock and hip-hop counterparts. The Sahara tent was packed through 12 hours of electronic music per day on both weekends.
“I think there was more EDM on the whole,” Blair Threatt of Los Angeles said of the programming. “You can definitely see how it’s trending. It really makes it hard to decide where to go because, while I really want to dance, I really want to see these great bands.”
What has come to define Coachella more than any single component is its diversity and variety.
“I’ve been to a couple of Coachellas,” Threatt said. “If you didn’t have variety, it wouldn’t be Coachella. Because it’s Coachella, I could choose between Ice Cube and Zedd.”
The second weekend of the 2016 Coachella will be remembered for its memorial to the man who epitomized diverse music, Prince, who died one day before part two of this festival began. But by Sunday, the musical dedications and physical expressions of love for the 57-year-old Minneapolis artist had subsided and the real dominant aspect of the programming had become more apparent.
Some festival-goers, including Threatt, mentioned there were still no female headliners. There hasn’t been one except Bjork in 2002 and 2007. But there were more female artists fronting bands than ever before and many proved worthy of moving up the bill at future Coachellas.
Most notable was Sia, who presented a similar if not identical show to last week's appearance on the Coachella Stage. It was great performance art, integrating video with live music like an orchestra driving silent cinema. There were multiple elements, most notably interpretive dance, but the most important component was the mystery.
Sia kept to the side of the action, clad in a eye-shielding wig, while her voice directed a kind of passion play on stage. Celebrities Kristen Wiig, Tig Notaro and Paul Dano once again acted as her proxies, performing dressed in hairpieces connecting them to the singer in prerecorded segments that were broadcast on the enormous stage screens. The star of the show, however, was Maddie Ziegler, Sia's young muse who first got her start dancing on the Lifetime show Dance Moms before blowing up in Sia's Chandelier music video.
But on Sunday, there also was Meg Myers, Wolf Alice (featuring singer-guitarist Ellie Rowsell), Matt and Kim (featuring singer-drummer Kim Schifino), and Beach House (featuring French singer-keyboard artist Victoria Legrand, niece of legendary French composer Michel Legrand).
Matt and Kim drew a Guns N’ Roses-sized crowd in the 5 p.m. hour on the Coachella Stage and had them jumping up-and-down — even when they only played the introduction to Van Halen’s Jump as a lead-in to their own Can You Blame Me. Singer-guitarist Matt Johnson credited the crowd’s enthusiasm to the wind, which kept temperatures low without causing much disruption (although the lines of balloons that have become a Coachella trademark were removed as a safety precaution). But most of the credit should go to Schifino, who worked remarkably hard to develop an interactive show. She asked the audience to blow up balloons, form a mosh pit and crowd surf (before she did so herself). She also gave a shout-out to small breasted women and almost asked them to expose themselves.
The Legrand-led Beach House, who performed at the 2010 Coachella, is clearly working its way up the festival ladder, performing in a showcase slot that led to Florence + the Machine’s advancement to the main stage. Legrand has a remarkable voice that slips into the ethereal range when her soprano interfaces with the electronics of the band electro dream-pop sound.
Some of the guys put on a good show themselves. Kelvin Swaby of the English band, The Heavy, delivered some new material like Turn Up and What Happened to the Love that measured up to the quality material they’ve been doing since 2007, which is high praise since they have the anthem, How You Like Me Now in their repertoire.
Rancid delivered classic punk, including two songs that have become punk standards, Time Bomb and Ruby Soho.
And award-winning, up-and-coming country star Chris Stapleton no doubt won some new rock fans with his early evening set in the Gobi tent. But he’ll definitely be playing before a bigger audience when he returns next weekend for the Stagecoach country festival.
Follow Bruce Fessier on Twitter: @BruceFessier