Coachella is so well-known, so expensive, so committed to being everything to every person who buys a wristband well before the performers are even announced, that it has come to run with the whirring efficiency of a corporate retreat, or a small war. Its lineup has a tentacle in nearly every corner of the charts—it would be difficult, simply looking at the schedule, to draw sweeping conclusions about the state of pop music in good faith.
What Coachella now provides for artists at a certain point in their careers is the chance to subvert expectations or preconceptions about their work, to argue for themselves as auteurs, to claim their own centrality to pop music. Especially after Beyoncé’s Earth-rattling set last year, some stars and would-be stars lunged at the chance to make Statements with their performances over the weekend, with productions designed to appeal as much to live streamers as to the crowd at Indio, California’s Empire Polo Club.
No one embodied that auteurist ambition like Donald Glover. The 35-year-old headlined Friday night under his Childish Gambino moniker amid excited whispers about Guava Island, a project of his that had been shrouded in mystery and debuted for a small number of people in the desert just the night before. The 55-minute movie, tenderly shot in Havana by Glover’s frequent collaborator Hiro Murai, is something like Purple Rain shrunk way down for a short run on cable. It stars Glover as a rebellious musician on a tropical island that is under the brutal rule of a sort of paramilitary capitalist regime (the film is now available exclusively on Amazon Prime).
Guava Island, which co-stars Rihanna, is charming but narratively undercooked, and it works most interestingly as a tonal counterpoint to Glover’s Friday night set itself. For the performance, Glover was again photographed expertly. But where Murai’s camera in Guava Island (or in “Atlanta”) plays to Glover’s considerable strengths as an actor—especially his eyes and the way they project distrust—the Coachella set was shot in a way that emphasized a Glover who was always in motion, confronting the audience and the viewer at home.
Cameras tracked him closely and rendered him in jarring HD on screens beside the stage; he was always shirtless and usually bathed in colored light of some kind. In between songs, Glover spoke in cryptic, urgent fragments, at one point musing about his father’s passing. It was an audacious turn at the top of the marquee, even if Glover has yet to become a consistently engaging musician.
Though the Coachella lineup may seem predictable to the point of inevitability now, a sense of spontaneous drama ripped through the festival before Billie Eilish took the stage Saturday evening. A rumor spread that the 17-year-old phenom may not even show up, and by the time she was 20 minutes late for her set at the Outdoor Theatre, it had morphed into a dozen new, unkillable strains: Billie was still hours away in Los Angeles; this was a fakeout, and Billie was going to start singing from the middle of the crowd; Billie was having a panic attack in her trailer; Billie was protesting Coachella organizer AEG. Soon you could see panic on the faces of young fans, some of whom circled up and gestured angrily, deciding whether to stay true to the cause or make alternate plans. But Billie is building a very big, very goth tent: I even saw a thirtysomething man in a tucked-in polo shirt turn to one of his boat-shoed buddies and say, gravely: “Dude… I don’t think she’s coming.”
Eilish did come out, 30 minutes past her scheduled start time (presumably because of technical difficulties—she brought out Vince Staples only for his mic to be dead). Pulling from both her new album, When We All Fall Asleep, Where Do We Go?, and from her 2017 EP, dont smile at me, Eilish was on stage as she is on record: free but formally sound, refreshingly weird without too much pretense. It was light and, at its best moments, electric—the kind of performance that confirmed her as a somewhat nervous teenager and as an obvious superstar in waiting. In contrast to Glover’s outsized artistic vision, the stakes for Eilish’s set were refreshingly modest.
The giant Sahara tent, which has transformed from an EDM hotspot to a bastion of rap over the last few years, enjoyed an excellent Sunday-afternoon run that began with the Vallejo, California quartet SOB x RBE and moved into the punkish Playboi Carti. The night before, it was closed down by the one-two punch of Wiz Khalifa and Kid Cudi, and also offered a great showcase for Juice WRLD, who pulled off some of the trickier melodies from his recent Death Race for Love album with a cool professionalism.
The most singular rap performance of the weekend—and one of the few in any genre that had a notably regional character—was YG’s. He played on Sunday night in the Sahara, as the sun was going down. He began a capella, asking the audience to chant the name of Nipsey Hussle, his close friend and collaborator who was a fixture in South Central L.A.’s musical and business communities before he was murdered in front of the clothing store he owned on March 31. From there, YG ran through songs from his three albums, stopping intermittently to drink from (and then stump for) a bottle of tequila, and to hold a moving moment of silence for Nipsey. The second half of his set dug further into his back catalog, for songs like “You Broke” and “Bitches Ain’t Shit” (both of which feature Nipsey) and for his breakout hit, “Toot It and Boot It,” all of which were rapped enthusiastically by a shocking percentage of the crowd. The set had two surprise guests: Tyga, and a Donald Trump impersonator, who set the stage for a furious rendition of YG and Nipsey’s “FDT (Fuck Donald Trump).”
The weekend sported some thrilling dance music: Four Tet’s Saturday night turn in the Mojave tent was transcendent, and Aphex Twin’s set that followed was a heavier, nearly bludgeoning complement. The previous night, the same tent belonged to SOPHIE, whose production design was familiarly eerie, and whose crowd hung on every turned dial.
The Friday afternoon crowd seemed unusually thin, but that day featured some of the festival’s best performances, including a crackling set by Kacey Musgraves and an anarchic screed by JPEGMAFIA. Also on Friday, the experimental pop band U.S. Girls absolutely tore down the Sonora tent; Janelle Monáe used the main stage to bring Dirty Computer to full, Technicolor life; and vibrant Barcelona upstart Rosalía imagined her work as tensely choreographed opera in the Mojave tent. Khruangbin, the psychedelic funk/rock trio from Houston, had perhaps the day’s most arresting set, locking in at the Gobi tent for an hour that included covers of Warren G’s “Regulate” and ODB’s “Got Your Money.”
Back in January, it was widely reported that immediately before Kanye West was to be announced as one of Coachella 2019’s headliners, he pulled out. The breaking point, apparently, was when the festival’s organizers could not fulfill West’s request to be allowed to perform in a giant dome, situated in the middle of the festival grounds, which would require moving or eliminating bathrooms and other infrastructure. (Kanye will bring his “Sunday Service” gospel performance series to a hillside within Coachella’s campgrounds next weekend.)
The notion that Kanye West would come to an impasse with a concert promoter over an issue of grandiose production design is not, in and of itself, particularly surprising. What raised a few eyebrows was the fact that Ariana Grande was the artist tapped as a last-minute replacement, since she is seemingly a much bigger draw than fellow headliners Glover and Tame Impala (and, in 2019, likely West as well). In January, Grande was coming off of a massive album and follow-up single, and in between her being announced as the Sunday headliner and the festival itself, she dropped yet another blockbuster LP. On the whole, her set affirmed her position as a uniquely prolific hitmaker, the rare star whose output has accelerated as she’s gotten more famous.
Before Grande took the stage, she had teased on Twitter the possibility of an *NSYNC appearance—she samples their “Makes Me Ill” on her hit “break up with your girlfriend, i’m bored”—and early in the night, the group (sans Justin Timberlake) came out for that song and to play their own “Tearin’ Up My Heart,” eliciting roars from some nostalgic members of the crowd. She also welcomed Nicki Minaj to perform two duets, though that cameo was complicated by sound issues.
But *NSYNC and Nicki largely turned out to be bits of misdirection. After reaching back to songs from her first two albums, Yours Truly and My Everything, Grande brought out Diddy and Mase to play “Mo Money Mo Problems,” a delirious, bizarre showstopper. But as quickly as Diddy and Mase had appeared, they were swallowed up by Grande’s own “NASA,” and by “Dangerous Woman,” and, finally, by “thank u, next.” It was an appropriately strenuous set for the pop star given her remarkable work ethic: She appreciated everyone’s excitement, but there was more work to be done.
