Last weekend I spent a few hours watching Coachella on YouTube. The audio and video quality are high. It’s free of ad clutter, but maybe that’s because I pay for Google Music? The quality of the music is all over the map. If I read the schedule correctly, they’ll repeat the exercise next weekend, so I thought a few recommendations might be helpful. Even if it’s not available live, quite a few captures still seem to be there on YouTube, so check ’em out.
I tried sorting these into themes but that tied me in knots, so you get alphabetical order.
Lady Gaga brings it.
Blonde Redhead · Not sure what kind of music to call this, but the drums and guitar (played by identical twins Simone and Amedeo Pace) are both hot, and Kazu Makino on everything else has loads of charisma, and they all sang well. Didn’t regret a minute of my time with this one.
Ben Böhmer · I have no patience whatsoever for EDM. Deadmau5 and Zedd and their whole tribe should go practice goat-herding in Bolivia or anything else that’ll keep them away from audiences who want to hear music played by musicians. But there were multiple artists this year you could describe as X+EDM for some value of X, and much to my surprise a few of them worked.
(One that notably didn’t was Parcels, whose genius idea is EDM+Lightweight Aussie pretty-boy pop. On top of which, every second of their performance featured brilliant lights strobing away, shredding my retinas and forebrain. I say it’s EDM and I say to hell with it. Go back to Australia and stay.)
But Mr Böhmer not only held my attention but had my toes tappin’. His stuff isn’t just hot dance moves against recorded tracks, it’s moody and cool and phase-shifty and dreamy. It helps that he plays actual musical notes on actual keyboards.
Beth Gibbons · I thought “I remember that name.” (Sadly, on first glance at the schedule I did not in fact recognize many names.) Ms Gibbons was the singer for Portishead, standard-bearers of Trip-hop back in the day. Her voice sounds exactly the same today as it did three decades ago, which is to say vulnerable and lovely.
The songs were all new (aside from Portishead’s Glory Box) and good. Beth never had any stage presence and still doesn’t, draped motionless over the mike except when she turns away from the crowd to watch someone soloing.
What made the show a Coachella highlight was the band, who apparently had just arrived from another planet. It was wonderfully strange as in I didn’t even know what some of the instruments were. Anyhow it all sounded great albeit weird, the perfect complement to Beth’s spaced-out (I mean that in the nicest way) vocal arcs.
Go-Gos · This posse of sixtysomething women won my heart in the first three seconds of their set with a blast of girl-group punk/surf guitar noise and a thunderous backbeat. The purest rock-&-roll imaginable, played with love and bursting with joy. They can sing, they can play, they still have plenty of moves. It‘s only rock and roll but I like it, like it, yes I do.
HiTech · OK, this is another X+EDM, where the X is “Ghettotech, house, Rap & Miami base” (quoting their Web site). I have no idea what “Miami base” is but I guess I like it, because they’re pretty great. Outta Detroit.
Their set was affably chaotic, the rapping part sharp-edged and hot, and they had this camera cleverly mounted on the DJ deck giving an intense close-up of whichever HiTech-ers were currently pulling the levers and twisting the knobs. Sometimes it was all three of them and that was great fun to watch.
I’m an elderly well-off white guy and am not gonna pretend to much understanding of any of HiTech’s genres, but I’m pretty confident that a lot of people would be entertained.
Kraftwerk sigh · They are historically important but the show, I dunno, I seem to recall being impressed in 1975 but it felt kinda static and tedious. The only reason I mention them is that a few of their big video-backdrop screens, near the start of the set, were totally Macrodata Refinement, from Severance. I wonder if any of the showrunners were Kraftwerk fans?
LA Phil, conducted by Gustavo Dudamel · Give Coachella credit for giving this a try. Dudamel is a smart guy and put together a program that wasn’t designed to please a heavy classics consumer like me. I mean, opening with Ride of the Valkyries? But there were two pieces of Bach and the orchestra turned into a backup band for Laufey, an Icelandic folk/jazz singer, a Gospel singer/choir, and some other extremely random stuff. If you’re not already a classics fan, this might open your eyes a bit.
Lady Gaga · I’m sure you’ve already read one or two rave write-ups about this masterpiece. It’s going to be one of the performances remembered by name forever, like Prince at the Superbowl or Muddy Waters at the Last Waltz. They built a freaking opera house in the desert, and that makes me wonder what the Coachella economics are; someone has to pay for this stuff, do Gaga and Coachella split it or is it the price of getting her to come and play?
To be fair, as the review in Variety accurately noted, it was pretty well New-York-flavored hoofing and belting wrapped in a completely incomprehensible Goth/horror narrative. So what?! The songs were great. The singing was fantastic and the dancing white-hot, plus she had a pretty hard-ass live metal-adjacent band and an operatic string section, and she brought her soul along with her and unwrapped it. It was easy to believe she loved the audience just as much as she said. She didn’t leave anything on the stage. They should make it into a big-screen movie.
I did feel a little sorry for the physical audience, quite a bit of the performance seemed to be optimized for couch potatoes with big screens like for example me. Anyhow, if you get a chance to see this one don’t miss it.
Other headliners? · There were three nights and thus three headliners. You’ll notice that I only talked up Friday night’s Lady-Gaga set. That’s because the other two were some combination of talentless and uninspired and offensive. Obviously I’m in a minority here, they wouldn’t get the big slots if millions didn’t love ’em. And I like an unusually wide variety of musical forms. But not that shit.
Comment feed for ongoing:
From: Leo T (Apr 16 2025, at 05:58)
About 10 or 15 years ago, Glastonbury had an orchestra plus singers do all of Act 3 of Die Walkure in the early Sunday afternoon slot.
So you open with the Ride of the Valkyries, but then you get the full Wagner experience, finishing up with the magic fire sequence.
It was pretty well done. I was already a classical fan, so it appealed to me. But it looked like the crowd were in to it as well.
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From: Jim Millen (Apr 16 2025, at 11:14)
Tim, I’ve always enjoyed your writing on music - and mostly the same for this piece. Keen to catch that Gaga performance somewhere!
But I’m gonna have to query what exactly you mean by EDM.
If your definition is the lowest common denominator of commercial dance music, then OK, I kind of get it.
If though you’re lumping all electronic beat-based music under the EDM umbrella… well, seriously, that’s not cool. Ben Böhmer is great but there are many, many more electronic artists on the scene producing extraordinary music.
It may not be to your taste, not all of it is to mine either, but art is always subjective. Honestly, I was kind of shocked to read such a dismissive take.
Unless I’ve misunderstood, which I very possibly have…?
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From: Robert Sayre (Apr 18 2025, at 13:35)
It' a pun on "Miami Bass". Where "based" is the term coined by Lil B. Both searchable on Wikipedia.
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