Sun sets on Indio’s music-lover mecca
The Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival was a sun-soaked feast for the senses.
By GIA CANTO & CHRISTINA CHKARBOUL
Look back at our live coverage.
Apart from the distinctive palm tree-lined mountains and watercolor sunsets, the Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival brought a weekend’s worth of beauty in the form of sound and vision.
“My favorite part about the festival is how much visual eye candy there is everywhere,” said Chris Turino, a senior majoring in communication at USC, in giddy anticipation of Girl Ultra’s Sonora tent set Saturday. “I forget that Coachella is also for art installations.”
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Between sets, attendees stopped to marvel at and take photos in front of the festival’s large-scale installations, which also served a critical role in shading the open, arid Empire Polo Club grounds. From NEWSUBSTANCE’s rainbow-colored “Spectra” structure to Nebbia’s “Babylon,” a brutalist-cubist mountain of polygons, there was no shortage of visual splendor at the country’s largest music festival.
Teeming with charisma, internet princesses Reneé Rapp and Victoria Monét charmed Sunday afternoon stages with astounding vocal runs and suave magnetism. The two dished out rock-fueled renditions of the tracks that sparked their rise to TikTok royalty, such as Rapp’s “Not My Fault” and Monét’s “On My Mama.” Rapp and Monét have built careers off their integrity, steadfast in their commitment to unapologetic self-expression.
Oh-so-gay in true Rapp fashion, the lesbian icon and “Mean Girls” alum delivered an enthralling performance, joined on stage by a giant pair of interlocking scissors. Monét very well could be Beyoncé’s second coming; she captivated the crowd in a hip-hugging body suit, with lusciously fan-blown curls and impeccable choreography to match her impressive vocal prowess. Rapp and Monét appear to have been blessed with some innate charm, two of a certain breed of musician that makes commanding crowds of thousands look like light work.
Tyler, the Creator was a true musical messiah, with some willing to trek thousands of miles for the chance to witness his glory in the flesh. Never one to shy away from exploring the various facets of his creativity, Tyler has built a repertoire of alternate persona that culminated in Saturday’s performance with a career-spanning setlist. The “See You Again” singer brought Yosemite to Indio with elaborately designed staging and a quintessentially Tyler introduction that saw him exploding out of the side of a camper van dressed as a park ranger.
Doja Cat closed the festival with each dance number more risque than the next: from simulated sex positions to sapphic mud wrestling. Doja’s characteristic lasciviousness seduced Coachella’s Sunday night crowd, her siren song luring in listeners with a contagious confidence, obscuring the embroiled controversy of their source. This lies at the root of Doja Cat’s popularity: her music so informed by her own self-assurance that it has the power to elicit that kind of feeling in others.
Lively sets punctuated the grounds of Empire Polo Club as festival-goers from around the world basked in sun and explored all the desert has to offer. (Christina Chkarboul / Daily Trojan)
Fandom and devotion loomed large at Coachella 2024, where a cursory look around at festival-goers in bustling crowds was enough to tell which artist they had made the trek to the desert for.
At Lana Del Rey’s headlining set Friday night, attendees in their teens and 20s wore red, heart-shaped sunglasses — a nod to Del Rey’s “Diet Mountain Dew” — along with ribbons in their hair and Americana aesthetic-markers galore. Many sang along in evidently rehearsed renditions of Del Rey’s songs, both radio hits and “underground” tracks that only the real ones know, in the Coachella Stage pit.
Audience members for patron saint of campy, yeehaw queerness Chappell Roan were distinguishable by their bubblegum-pink cowgirl hats and exuberant femme chic. The giddy Gobi tent crowd — which had accumulated hours before the start of Roan’s set — screamed her infectious pop ballads into the sticky air, with some attendees alternating between flicking their pink or rainbow-patterned fans to the beat and kindly fanning the people around them.
Peso Pluma wrought the kind of raw showmanship that produces an icon, drawing what Paul Martines, a graduate student studying public health at USC, deemed the “best crowd [he’d] seen so far.” Bringing Mexican regional music to one of the world’s biggest stages, La Doble P astonished attendees with a pride-filled, career-defining performance.
For some attendees, the yearly pilgrimage to Indio is a kind of homecoming. Michael Van Kleeck — who was fitted up in a pleated burgundy kilt, glow-in-the-dark festival T-shirt and orange lace-up sandals over white socks — said this year was his 20th consecutive Coachella.
The kilt has become a Coachella uniform for Van Kleeck, who first bought a Utilikilt — meant to be a functional alternative to pants — while camping at the festival in 2010. Van Kleeck came out “for the vibe” and to enjoy the ritualistic celebration that Coachella has become for him.
“This is mecca for me. This is my religion,” Van Kleeck said. “I know I’m alive when I’m at Coachella.”
The frenzy of the sweat-drenched crowds, the pulse of a packed-in audience and the promise of rhythmic release drive first-time attendees and long-time Coachellers like Van Kleeck out to Indio, year after year, for an unforgettable weekend of sun and music.
No matter the heat, or the growing crowd of content-hungry influencers detached from the spirit of the event, Coachella’s sprawling fields still feel like holy ground, like the final stop on a train of human experience — a celebration of the innate desire for connection through music.
Editor’s note: Chris Turino served as the host of the Daily Trojan’s arts & entertainment podcast, Rhythm and News, from September to November 2023. He also served as an arts & entertainment staff writer from January 2021 to November 2023. He is no longer affiliated with the paper.
