In the weeks that have passed since the close of the 2010 Coachella Festival, I find myself compelled to write a few words on its unique importance. For those unfamiliar with the decade old music festival that rages for three days in the desert near Palm Springs, it has become among the most important cultural events in the country kicking off the growing Summer festival circuit. Coachella is a cross between Burning Man and Bonnaroo: music in the desert mixed with art installations and an outlet for youth culture self-expression. But at its core, Coachella has always been largely about indie music, from pop to punk to electronica to trance to alterna-country. More recently it has broadened its canvas to include mass market artists like Paul McCartney and Jay-Z that tend to headline opening night, but the majority of the event is about the 100 or so bands that play between 12-7 everyday across five stages and to 85,000 eerily well-behaved fans.
For me, music is the one religion I have always believed in. A great song or set witnessed live can be transformational, inspirational, motivational, and spiritual. It is both ephemeral, exposing perfect moments, and abundantly memorable. It is also one of the few universal languages that manages to inspire tangible, shared emotions that cross ages, races, classes and sexes. The music schedule at Coachella is truly brilliant, kind of like the musical equivalent of the Sundance Film Festival. Like a DJ reacting to the mood of the audience, the festival seems programmed to navigate concertgoers through the changes in temperature throughout the day which in turn dictates energy levels and moods. The schedule features big bands, small bands, old bands, new bands, and bunch of bands that most attendees are there to get turned on to.
This year there were poppy high-energy bands like Girls, Local Natives, Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeros, and Deerhunter all playing during the day when the crowds have the most energy and the dry heat burns across the grassy polo fields. In the late afternoon you stand with 50,000 people swaying to the more groove-oriented sounds of bands like The xx, The Specials, Spoon, De La Soul and Yo La Tengo, while the temperature slowly drops and you begin to feel the relief of the setting sun. At dusk the music shifts to funkier, rockier sounds mirroring the coolness of a darkening sky. This all leads fluidly into the sets big enough to fill the night sky with mind expanding sets from Vampire Weekend, Hot Chip, Pavement and Phoenix, all of which inspire loose and natural freedom.
Yes, Coachella is about music, but this event, and for that matter most big music festivals like the upcoming Jazzfest and Bonnaroo, transcend the superficial in so many ways.
In an age of increasing virtualism, ("friends" on Facebook and MySpace, virtual goods in casual games like Farmville and Mafia Wars, avatars that represent a better or different version of yourself) being among real people, experiencing shared emotions in real time is becoming less and less common. The genuine expressions of joy translated across tens of thousands of faces, the physical expression of this through dance and movement, brings you back to a more "real" world. We have lost touch with how important and powerful this is as we increasingly hide behind screens, profiles, texts, tweets and updates. At Coachella, everyone is present, alive and largely content.
The desert also plays a non-trivial role in ones reawakening from the slumber of modern connected life. Most people rarely, if ever, spend full days in the dry, ominous heat of the desert. But to do so is to purify yourself in a way that doesn't happen often enough. I mean this not in a hokey new age way, but more basically by way of the massive of amounts of water you need to drink to stay hydrated and the revitalizing Vitamin D that emanates from the sun. Yes, when the scorching sun finally sets, you feel a profound sense of relief- a sense we rarely experience so dramatically in our regular lives.
Perhaps some of this melodramatic self-reflection has to do with the fact that this year I attended the event as a 40-year-old, decades in some cases, older than the hordes of teenagers and 20-somethings that make up the majority of the audience. Most of this crowd hadn't yet been distracted by the responsibility of parenthood, career stress, and a multitude of other adult anxieties. Perhaps this would be a blessing, a life not bogged down by practical reality, but alas youth is often wasted on the young. And so, as I think about all the people I know who would have benefitted from being there, wandering back and forth across the over-crowded polo field from great band to great band, stumbling into sets where the joy of the unexpected puts you squarely in the here and now, I realize that the older people get the less likely they are to actually do these things, and this is exactly when people need it the most. Listening to great, creative music and being a part of a massive shared experience with anonymous masses is not part of ordinary life.
In one of the last sets of the weekend, late on Sunday evening, Thom Yorke, one of few true geniuses of modern rock, played a set that most in the crowd will remember forever. Exhausted, dehydrated, and running on physical and emotional fumes, his music washed over the crowd like a warm blanket. The set was sublime, ethereal and haunting. Yorke's vocals were both fragile and mesmerizing, and special guest Flea's bass was jumping while the rest of the band provided a kind of tribal, global wall of sound. You could close your eyes and just feel the music pouring over the desert lifting you off the planet for a movement and then placing you gently back. Yes, the times they are a changin, perhaps at an unhealthy pace, but the shared experience of music can help you ground yourself in the real world.