The lineup for this year's Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival was surely booked months ago. But there's a prescience in its choice of headliners: Two radical, inventive black artists at the peak of their powers and influence as well as an English rock band devoted to reinvention and melancholy.
Private pain, public resilience and music that feels necessary and new: This is the Coachella lineup we need right now.
When a festival famous for its white-guy rock headliners picks music's most visible black woman to lead a new charge, that's important. Beyonce is the fest's first female solo headliner since Bjork in 2007 and its first woman-of-color solo headliner to date (M.I.A. was second on the bill in 2009, and Arcade Fire is co-fronted by the Haitian-Canadian Regine Chassagne).
Beyonce's touring production and strict focus on perfection often keep her off the festival circuit. But the set feels like more than a tour stop for her. It's a reminder that for whatever ugliness the last year in politics may have yielded, the best of pop music is moving in its own direction, and it's one of inclusiveness, virtuosity and an increasing fearlessness.
While Beyonce was last year's undisputed pop culture triumph, Kendrick Lamar has been using his platform to make some of music's most startling, visually furious statements.
His 2016 Grammys showcase _ emerging shackled in a chain gang, departing over an image of Africa overlaid with the word "Compton" _ was the best thing on the Grammys in years and all the more important for its political urgency.
Lamar's played Coachella before, but given the wide-open potential of his hometown's biggest stage and the fear many of his young fans feel about the coming period in American life, his ferocity may be just the catharsis that the festival hasn't seen since Rage Against the Machine in 2007.
Even Radiohead, a multi-time headliner and one of the few rock bands that can credibly compete now in the strange sonic arenas of hip-hop and R&B, carved out new room in its sound to tackle this modern isolation.
Ironically, it's in a recording of one of its older tunes, the live favorite "True Love Waits," that finally arrived on record on last year's album "A Moon Shaped Pool." It's full of loss and despair but still tender enough to be someone's first dance at a wedding.
