The First Collection of Criticism by a Living Female Rock Critic by Jessica Hopper

Author:Jessica Hopper [Hopper, Jessica]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Music Criticism
Publisher: Featherproof Books
Published: 2015-09-05T04:00:00+00:00

DISPATCHES FROM THE DESERT:

COACHELLA

Chicago Reader, May 2005

As soon as my friend and I got out of the car to begin our mile-and-a-half-long walk from “Coachella: The Parking Lot” to “Coachella: The Music Festival in the Desert” a couple weekends ago, I could hear them, faint but instantly recognizable and uniquely heartwarming to a girl of a certain age: Ponies. Ponies neighing. Coachella kicks it upscale—instead of spreading out a zillion-band lineup on the sticky blacktop of a sports-arena parking lot, the fest rents 78 acres of manicured fields from the Empire Polo Club in Indio, California. And before you get to the bands, or even to the long snaky line for the sun-ripened Port-O-Lets, you walk past the barns and corrals that house the scene’s year-round residents. When I got there, they were stamping and saying hello to a few of the roughly 96,000 people who’d come to pass out face down in the grass, relive their goth teenhood, and/or see the Arcade Fire.

The line for admittance, even for press, was half an hour long. I immediately lost track of my friend and wound up tagging along with Kelefa Sanneh, a pop critic for The New York Times. Once inside the festival grounds, we started making our rounds like dutiful interns, visiting the main stage, the side stage, and the three performance tents—Gobi, Sahara and Mojave. Our conversations went like this:

Me: “What band is this?”

K: “The Raveonettes” / “Snow Patrol” / “Eisley.”

Me: “Really? They’re awful.”

K: Makes razor-sharp joke referencing the band’s audience, influences or publicist.

(Repeat for three hours.)

I noticed that Kelefa was barely taking notes on the groups we were watching, and because I didn’t want to look like a fastidious cub reporter by comparison, I only pulled out my own notebook once all afternoon. When I opened it again to remind myself what I’d been inspired to write down, all I found was “Jamie Cullum: piano = awful.”

I decided to skip U.K. hype victims Razorlight, since I felt like I already knew everything I wanted to about them—sitting behind me on the flight from Chicago, they’d spent the entire time talking loudly about how fucked-up they’d gotten at such and such a party and which extremely famous persons they’d been hanging out with. Instead I went to the VIP area, where I saw the very-sweaty editors of several major American entertainment magazines shaking hands with the bassist from Snow Patrol. Then I overheard a couple of them trying to decide which one of the two black dudes wandering around the tent was the black dude from Bloc Party.

Around 7 p.m., just as Wilco was starting up, the sun began to set over the mountains that surround the Coachella Valley. Maybe people just needed a rest after spending hours cooking in the desert sun or getting sloppy with the mamis in the beer tent, but it seemed like everyone was prone on the grass, taking in the scenery. Wilco’s breezy sound, trilling Hammond organ, and soft-thrill solos turned out to

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