About halfway through Addison Rae’s Saturday evening set on Coachella’s main stage, after the Louisiana singer had implored her audience to “manifest something” for themselves and chant the hook of “Money is Everything,” I tried to take stock of what I was seeing. Rae’s setup was meticulous, maximalist, and totally unified—the boa made of hundred-dollar bills, the backup dancers who looked vaguely like mimes, the scaffolding that suggested Moulin Rouge! could be restaged somewhere between Baton Rouge and the inside of a microchip. I glanced past the margins of the stage: to the sky, where a single-engine plane was dragging a banner that read “THIS IS YOUR SIGN TO MAKE A WILL,” and to the ground, where a woman in front of me had, on her left calf, tattooed the name “AKON.” It was difficult to take in all at once.
Over the past decade—starting even before the festival began to emphasize at-home viewing via video streams—the visual language of Coachella sets has trended toward a sort of deconstruction of performance, a meta-commentary on what was being shown. There are innumerable examples of this, but my mind jumps immediately to Nosaj Thing, who in 2016 outfitted himself with 3D sensors and projected his slightly unreal, eerily calm likeness onto giant screens; to Donald Glover, whose 2019 headlining set was shot in such a way (tight frames, shaky tracking) as to make the presence of cameras not only unavoidable, but suffocating; to Jamie xx, who in 2022 seemed at first to be displaying a live feed of dancing fans, only for the footage to gradually reveal itself as having been looped, edited, perhaps even staged. And of course, there was Frank Ocean’s planned headlining set the following year, where the crew rushed through the bowels of the stage as if watching a facade crumble in real time.
All of those choices call attention to the fact that we have all become hypervisible cogs in a surveillance machine. Yet this weekend, it felt for the first time that there was a conscious, genre-spanning shift away from that sort of self-referentiality and toward an artifice we can all accept. During her exceptional performance, Rae played the pop star-as-pop star to dazzling effect, shifting between tones and moods but never so much as bumping against the fourth wall, even during her cover of the insistently postmodern Charli XCX’s “Von dutch.” When, in an effort to capture a limboing dancer’s face on screen, one cameraman found himself filming another, the revelation was purely incidental.
Even when performers decided to strip down, they did it with pageantry. On Friday night in the Mojave tent, Devo asked the crowd the question that’s always been central to their project—“How many of you here tonight think devolution is real?”—while stripping away, piece by piece, their iconic yellow jumpsuits. (The group was so captivating that Moby, who was scheduled to play later that night on the same stage, bobbed his head throughout the set in the VIP section.) Exactly 48 hours later in the same place, Iggy Pop’s shirtlessness was its own kind of supernatural costume as the now 78-year-old tore through his catalog.
Both of those sets were packed, and both were surpassed by other tent crowds: PinkPantheress at Mojave Saturday night and Oklou at Gobi on Sunday saw fans spilling far beyond the supposed boundaries. Continuing a trend from last year, Coachella has very clearly recovered from its post-pandemic ticket sales malaise. And while this is a blanket truth (the secondary-market wristband prices were out of control even before the lineup was announced), there was no question that Justin Bieber had accelerated things. I’ve been covering Coachella since 2016, and watched the Canadian’s headlining set Saturday night with a friend who’s been attending more than twice as long; we agreed that we had never before seen the main-stage crowd extend so far.
