In an ill-fated attempt to hype myself up for the Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival, I went on YouTube to look at an inflatable blue gorilla—a stage prop for the hip-hop act Brockhampton, who had announced that Coachella would be the group’s last booking ever.
The festival unfolds in two identical three-day lineups over consecutive weekends; I was attending the second weekend, and I wanted a taste of how the first one had gone.
In the video I pulled up, Brockhampton stood with the gorilla, which undulated like ink in water.
Yet my focus was pulled to what was at the bottom of the screen: a forest of cellphone cameras held aloft by audience members.
Though tickets for the 2022 fest sold out in hours, the lead-up to this year’s event was defined more by turbulence than hype.
Coachella scrapped all COVID restrictions in February, even though cavalierness toward the virus continues to jeopardize musicians’ livelihoods.
Just a few weeks ago, the rapper Ye (formerly Kanye West) dropped from his headlining spot—after vowing to bring out Travis Scott, the founder of last fall’s Astroworld Festival, which caused the deaths of 10 people.
When the first weekend of Coachella 2022 finally happened, the resulting coverage—much of which focused on a logistically botched party for famous people,
or on reports of Timothée Chalamet making out with a model—hardly gave the impression of a vital cultural institution.
A towering review by the critic Jeff Weiss laid out the unsettling ways that the aesthetics, ethics, and economics of this year’s fest made a mockery of Coachella’s onetime alternative spirit.