Coachella Doesn’t Care What You Think
Beautiful people somehow managing to have fun.
Coachella is a word that immediately conjures visions of cultural appropriation woven into macramé, tech heirs with carefully tousled hair pretending not to care about anything other than spotting a celebrity within a hundred-foot radius, and an endless ocean of curated outfits that seem designed more for an anthropological study than a musical gathering. It also conjures the fantasy of the first major festival of the year, where an eclectic assortment of internationally successful recording artists provide a soundtrack for thousands of people who have collectively decided that the only thing better than paying rent is paying for three nights in the desert to perform their most photogenic selves.
With the festival only weeks away, the annual cycle of commentary has already begun, that familiar churn of think pieces, listicles, and photo spreads, all of them oscillating between eye-rolls at the absurdity of the event and breathless reminders of its inevitability. The lineup has been declared weak by those who swear their Spotify algorithm delivers better surprises each week, the tickets are once again denounced as ludicrously overpriced, and the very existence of a VIP tier has been interpreted as an act of cultural betrayal rather than the simple fact that the rich are always happy to pay extra for a shorter bathroom line. Yet as these complaints pile up, the festival sells out with the inevitability of a desert sunrise, a reminder that the louder the chorus of discontent becomes, the more certain it is that people will still arrive en masse to bask in the mirage.
Each year the criticism falls into familiar categories: the fashion obsession, the influencer economy, the shallowness of celebrity spotting. The irony is that these grievances are almost always published by alternative magazines and independent blogs that cater to audiences with little to no intention of attending in the first place. In trying to puncture the myth of Coachella, they end up feeding it, for the act of writing about how much you hate the festival has become part of the festival’s cultural fabric. It is the high school dynamic preserved in amber, the so-called outsiders mocking the so-called insiders, while the insiders go on existing in a haze of wealth and sunburnt beauty, entirely unbothered by whether the outsiders disapprove.
The truth, however inconvenient, is that Coachella is no longer a music festival in the traditional sense but a lifestyle export, a three-day vacation in the performance of taste and aspiration, one that no amount of journalistic disdain can puncture. People attend not to have their lives changed by the transcendence of music but to live briefly in a simulation where they can pretend to be famous, or at the very least adjacent to fame, which in the hierarchy of twenty-first-century experience is often good enough. The music itself has become a soundtrack to the pageantry, a convenient justification for an event that is less Woodstock and more fashion week with bass lines.
It is worth remembering that your disgust will not diminish its popularity, your carefully crafted tweets mocking the lineup will not cause ticket sales to plummet, and your insistence that the festival has lost its cultural relevance will not prevent it from being one of the most photographed, most discussed, and most mythologized weekends of the year. Coachella’s success has never been about pleasing its critics. Its success has always been about existing as an aspirational idea, a sun-soaked mirage that draws people in precisely because it represents something unattainable, excessive, and absurdly glamorous.
So perhaps it is time to accept that Coachella is less a music festival than a mirror reflecting our cultural moment back to us in sequins and dust, a ritual that thrives not in spite of the criticism but because of it. The complaints provide the counterpoint, the necessary dissonance that keeps the conversation alive, while the festival itself marches on, bigger, richer, shinier, and ever more detached from its supposed musical core. You may not like it, but it does not matter. Coachella is inevitable, and the desert will keep filling with people desperate to be part of its glittering illusion, no matter how mid the lineup or how obscene the price of a bottle of water becomes.