Del Rey clearly cares about Californian iconography in general and Coachella in particular.
Lana Del Rey, meanwhile, has been playing tons of shows, developing her live presence, and releasing increasingly excellent music, including the single best album of 2019. He has spent the intervening time releasing one-off singles, throwing vaguely controversial dance nights, and giving occasional elusive interviews where he mostly talks about, like, some fancy vest.
His album Blonde will be nearly four years old by then. Unless he adds some more shows, it will be Ocean’s first proper set in nearly three years. But one is headlining, and the other is not.įrank Ocean is headlining. And they are both playing on Sunday night. They both have histories of being awkward and boring live. They both have stage names that have something to do with the sea. They both empathetically and eloquently capture a certain languid, apocalyptic Californian jet-set ennui. They both interact with the music of their great ’70s forebears while coming across as extremely right-now. They have both had pop-chart flirtations, and they have both built themselves up as great singer-songwriters.
Frank Ocean and Lana Del Rey both emerged around the same time. We need to talk about Frank Ocean and Lana Del Rey. Maybe that means we’ll get a no-hard-feelings Chuck D appearance.Ģ. So I’m interested to see that Public Enemy/Prophets Of Rage member DJ Lord is on the bill, way down in the tiny fonts of the Saturday lineup. That’s great! Bring it!Īlso, we can probably now all acknowledge that Prophets Of Rage, the RATM tribute that paired all the non-Zack Rage members with Chuck D and B-Real, was a terrible idea - one even more misbegotten than fellow post-Rage project Audioslave. Presumably, RTJ will play the mainstage just before Rage, making for a thundering block of righteously upset mosh mayhem. For one thing, they’re playing on the same night as De La Rocha collaborators Run The Jewels. There are some fun little subplots to the Rage booking, though. We haven’t earned it.) Right now, it seems like it would be a whole lot cooler to see Rage at one of their own reunion shows, in El Paso or Phoenix or wherever, than at Coachella. Can they just keep doing this? Doesn’t it feel like a slightly lazy booking? Or at least an unimaginative one? Could Rage just end up playing the exact same setlist as they did at the 2007 festival? (I don’t even want to think about whether there will be new Rage songs. They’ve already headlined the festival once in reunited form. Rage Against The Machine have already headlined Coachella twice. Because there’s something weird about this one. The news of the Rage reunion came out weeks ago, and my immediate reaction was to book myself a plane ticket to the California desert immediately. De La Rocha seems to have an uneasy relationship with his own fame, and that makes it all the sweeter on the rare occasions when he reemerges. He might not do shit even when he does feel like it, most of the time. Zack De La Rocha, meanwhile, is the realest of the real ones, and he doesn’t do shit when he doesn’t feel like it. Tom Morello might’ve long ago revealed himself to be a grandstanding cheeseball, some unholy fusion of Henry Rollins and Joe Satriani, but that man has riffs. They are one of the greatest rock bands of their era, and their music feels even more raw and urgent with every passing year. Rage Against The Machine are fucking awesome. We need to talk about Rage Against The Machine. Nobody cares about the font sizes in the Shaky Knees or Hangout posters. But Coachella remains the big dog, the ruler by which all others are measured.
This year, a bunch of those festival have already unveiled lineups. Every year, that poster shows us an of-the-moment music-business pecking order, or at least the music-business pecking order as it’s perceived by the extraordinarily successful festival bookers at Goldenvoice.Ĭoachella’s lineup also gives us a pretty good idea of what we’re going to see during the entirety of the American 2020 festival season, since most American music festivals are now slight, off-brand versions of Coachella. It’s not something you should take too seriously, but I love the way this festival - the biggest of them all in America - gets cold-blooded and mercenary with its font-size discrepancies and its lineup placements. There’s this dumb thing I do every year: Coachella unveils its poster, and I write a way-too-long thing about all the little narratives hidden in that lineup, and in the way the poster lays that lineup out.