The lineup for the 2015 Coachella festival was announced on Tuesday, the three days of each weekend headlined by AC/DC, Jack White, and Drake. For a few years now, Coachella announcements have been met with incredulousness. Posters for the festival are an easily reproduced meme; one could engineer a Coachella lineup headlined and supported entirely by Billy Joel.
These headliners, however, and the bizarre combinations of bands on each day, have a certain randomness, a chaos to their design that resembles the more intricate and subtle variations of the meme. AC/DC’s petrified rock will share the day with Tame Impala, Steely Dan, and reunited shoegaze band Ride. Jack White’s textural nostalgia for formal blues will be supported by the joyless alt-R&B of The Weeknd. Drake headlines a day that includes Florence and the Machine and Ryan Adams.
Coachella’s defining lineups were assembled for the 2005 and 2006 festivals, which are, curiously enough, not remembered for their headliners. Coachella 2005 was headlined by Coldplay and Nine Inch Nails but in the more diminished rows of font lay Arcade Fire and Bloc Party, indie rock bands enjoying an upward arc of hype. The following year’s banner names were Depeche Mode and Tool (who co-headlined the first year of the festival, in 1999, with Rage Against the Machine) but that year’s festival is overwhelmingly known for Daft Punk’s fluorescent and pyramidal set.
So Coachella’s relevance, at least when it comes to bands that approach headliner status, has always been sort of dubious; for instance, they mined a less specific vein of nostalgia when they organized their 2009 festival around a headlining set by Paul McCartney. The prominence of Steely Dan and AC/DC in the first day could be construed as Coachella deliberately targeting audiences that are receptive to “dadrock” – though the band most popular with the dads I know is Wilco. But this ascribes a coherence to the architecture of Coachella lineups that I don’t think exists. AC/DC’s aesthetic is so inflexible that they seem less like performers of rich nostalgic music than recently unfrozen. Steely Dan don’t code as “dadrock” for me exactly. Their relevance is renewable because their songs are about apocalypse, whether intimate or cosmic. A dadrock festival in 2015 would, I think, be headlined by the Replacements and the Old 97’s, mostly because these are the bands around which my conversations with dads have revolved.
The festival’s lineup merely continues Coachella’s tradition of hiring bands and performers that are increasingly arbitrary and disconnected from each other, as if generated by an algorithm. In a way, this is fine; strange juxtapositions can often be the most thrilling parts of festivals, building previously unheard connections between otherwise isolated bands. But Coachella’s lineups seem to be profoundly disorganized, oblique, shapeless constellations drawn together only by the coherence-annihilating, mirage-like shimmer of the desert heat.
