Beyoncé brings change to Coachella
Most ambitious performance ever at music festival reflects new tastes, push for relevance
INDIO, CALIF.— So much for the “white people stage.”
That’s how Vince Staples, the deeply skeptical Long Beach rapper, referred to the main stage of the Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival as he found himself performing on just that platform Friday night.
And he was hardly being unfair: since its founding in 1999, the annual multiday event, which is widely regarded as America’s most prestigious music festival, has generally privileged rock and dance-music acts such as Radiohead, Paul McCartney and Calvin Harris.
Yet just over 24 hours after Staples’ pronouncement, Beyoncé replaced him in Coachella’s spotlight to deliver the most radical — and maybe the best — headlining performance ever here: a thrilling and painstaking tribute to America’s historically Black colleges and universities that had the singer leading about 100 musicians and dancers, including brass and string players, a drum line, a baton twirler and even a lively step squad that went to work when she left the stage to change costumes.
The thoroughness of the presentation, with skits and long dance routines and radical rearrangements of some of her best-known songs, was staggering — miles beyond what even the most ambitious of Coachella’s other performers are bringing to the desert.
Saturday’s triumph by the 36-year-old pop superstar — who said she’d been planning the spectacle since 2017, when she bailed on an earlier booking at Coachella after announcing she was pregnant with twins — signified a larger trend at this year’s festival.
Instead of the rock bands of yore, Coachella’s most prominent acts — which include The Weeknd, SZA, Cardi B, Migos and Eminem — come out of hip hop and R&B. The bill isn’t entirely free of the guys with guitars whom Staples may have been thinking of during his time on the enormous main stage.
But to the extent that a festival as big as this one can tell a unified story, rock bands such as Fleet Foxes and the War on Drugs didn’t feel like part of it, at least not during Weekend 1.
So what was that story? In part, it’s a tale of savvy marketing.
With more than 100,000 passes to sell each weekend (at a minimum of $429 U.S. each), Coachella’s powerful Los Angeles-based promoter, Goldenvoice, is responding to shifts in popular taste.
And yet you could also sense something deeper in the attempt to broaden the diversity of the lineup. Coachella wants to matter; it wants to be seen as part of the solution to a lack of representation in culture.
With its clever and heartfelt use of so many proud historically Black college and university traditions, Beyoncé’s knockout performance was a vivid assertion of Black self-determination at a moment when many are being forced to defend that concept.
The Weeknd also skilfully disrupted his caricature as a suave but unfeeling brute; his headlining performance Friday, in which he sang as well as he ever has, offered a surprisingly subtle portrait of masculinity in crisis.
Maybe next year some performer can blow away what remains of Coachella’s air of superiority.
As Beyoncé made clear, change is always within reach.