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During the dual weekend of the massive music festival, Coachella highlights how far it has come since it’s opening in 1999. Some say it has fallen so far… This year however was the first time in history that Coachella featured two female headliners. The acts even surprised the crowd with bringing surprise guests on stage during their sets.
Since Coachella first opened in 1999, the festival has only had female headlines three times with the first being in 2007, the next in 2017, and finally this year’s Coachella. Headlining this year’s Coachella was Lana Del Ray and Doja Cat.
Lana Del Ray was joined on stage by Camila Cabello on Friday 19 April for a rendition of her new song “I Luv It”. This came as a surprise to the audience as Lana Del Ray had already welcomed a guest singer earlier during Coachella. She welcomed Billie Eilish to the stage during the first week of the music festival so they could perform both “Ocean Eyes” and “Video Games”. Billie Eilish was scheduled to appear for Coachella back in 2020, but the festival was cancelled. In a long social media post, the American singer-songwriter thanked Billie Eilish for showing up for her.
Featured above is Lana Del Ray (Left) and Billie Eilish (Right).
Doja Cat was the headliner for the final day of the first weekend of Coachella. She set out to impress the audience and she certainly accomplished that goal. She had several surprise guests including A$AP Rocky, 21 Savage, and Teezo Touchdown. A$AP Rocky joined the American rapper for a live performance of “Urrrge” after having been a guest for the festival earlier that weekend for Tyler the Creator. 21 Savage was welcomed to the stage to sing with Doja Cat for “N.H.I.E.” and Teezo Touchdown joined for “Masc”.
Featured above is 21 Savage (Left) and Doja Cat (Right).
More Coachella highlights include AP Dhillon and Grimes both having disastrous times during the festival. AP Dhillon smashed a guitar live on stage. During his performance, he broke a gold ESP LTD Kirk Hammett V guitar. He later posted on social media more photographs of him smashing the guitar and compared himself to Kurt Cobain with a vintage video of the deceased Nirvana musician. Coachella released a statement saying that “due to a scheduling conflict, AP Dhillon [was] unable to join us in the desert for Weekend 2”.
Grimes also had surprises for the festival goers, unfortunately it wasn’t anything good. On Saturday 13 April, Grimes took the stage at Sahara and things began breaking down during the second half of her set. She released a lengthy statement the following morning stating:
“I want to apologize for the technical issues with the show tonight. I wanted to come back rly strong and usually I always handle every aspect of my show myself – to save time this was one of the first times I’ve outsourced essential things like rekordbox bpm’s and letting someone else organize the tracks on the sd card etc.
I had a bad feeling beforehand not having run everything thru the cdjs myself and tho I flagged it I wasn’t insistent. the big lesson for me was a mix of 1 if u want it done right, do it yrself 2 be a c*nt even if ppl feel bad 3 probably pretend it’s fine and engage w the crowd rather than spend a whole show slumped over the desk trying to fix software when ur meant to be entertaining. I will personally organize all the files next week. I will not let such a thing happen again. I’ve spent months on this show, making music and visuals, and admittedly am not in the best mood atm. But, yeh – next week will be flawless, everything will run thru my hands. Some good lessons learned. Bless y’all. The cdjs were showing me bpms like 370 so I couldn’t even mix manually by ear and the front monitors were off so it was literally sonic chaos on my end trying to guess how stuff was sounding for u guys
Plz forgive me! Love, always.”
Some people this year have started to wonder if Coachella is still the great music festival it once was. With slow ticket sales, indifferent crowds leaving the desert and technical issues immediately following the first weekend of the festival even longtime fans are beginning to whisper about a quiet slow death for the days of Coachella.
Janine has always been a part of music and performing. The first show that inspired her to go into theatre was the Velveteen Rabbit which she saw as a child, and Drew works to keep that magic alive in her work. When Drew was accepted into an internship program for audio engineering at a recording studio, she jumped at the opportunity. That was at the start of 2020, and so much has happened since then, both in her career and in the world. Since then, Drew has taken several opportunities to work at recording studios, concerts, festivals, and even large theatres while spending some time on tour. Drew's favorite by far though, has been the chance to work on Broadways and West End shows, as this was a dream come true. Drew is honoured to get to share these experiences from being inside the entertainment industry.
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