The Best and Worst of Coachella 2024
Toward the end of No Doubt’s Saturday night performance on Coachella’s main stage—a performance that was the subject of near-endless rumors about the presumably astronomical fee the long disbanded group must have commanded for a pair of one-off gigs—Gwen Stefani offered the night’s lone detectable lie. After knocking out 10 quick push-ups, and before launching into “Just a Girl,” the 54-year-old Orange County native observed, “We are absolutely in the future right now.” A nice thought, maybe, but one that was tough to square with the onslaught of nostalgia that defined their set, the rest of Saturday’s bill, and post-COVID Coachella writ large.
Earlier this spring, much was made in the press about the festival’s slower-than-usual ticket sales. Usually, the first weekend routinely sells out within hours of wristbands being made available, all before the lineup is even announced; this year, it took almost a month. Last week, Billboard reported that only about 80 percent of the 250,000 tickets available across both weekends of Coachella had been sold.
With that in mind, Coachella staked this year’s lineup on a certain longing for the past. The festival has, of course, welcomed AC/DC and Guns N’ Roses as headliners, but those bands evoked the past by blasting it in the crowd’s face. No Doubt, in contrast, went for sentimentality, playing soft-focus footage of their early days as they performed onstage. And Billie Eilish, in a surprise DJ set on Saturday night at the Do Lab stage, spun some late-2000s/early-2010s pop hits. Performances like these might become suffocating, especially when scheduled close to one another, but it didn’t necessarily scan as regressive. As ubiquitous as “Don’t Speak” or Tyga’s “Rack City” were when they were released, they still sound odder, more alluringly alien than much of the music emanating from the big stages.
At times, this celebration of the recent past turned uncanny. Sublime’s late-afternoon set on Saturday’s main stage was well-attended, and the band sounded sharp and engaged. But Sublime’s music is an odd vessel for Jakob Nowell, who took over as frontman for his late father, Bradley. If Jakob, Bud Gaugh, and Eric Wilson find their shows together meaningful, or even simply fun, I sincerely hope they continue to play together. But the group’s music functions best when it has stamped out any lingering sense of self-consciousness, an inherently impossible atmosphere to maintain when Jakob Nowell ad-libs, “I love this part,” before he sings the end of “April 29th, 1992 (Miami).” I found it difficult to watch the set without thinking of death—but I’m just one Californian among many.
