Photo by Chris Tuite
Coachella, Coachella was our Woodstock; Jungle our Jimi, Tame Impala our Sha-na-na, Steely Dan our Steely Dan, and Touché Amore our, uh, Modern Life Is War. It was a golden shimmering time, you didn’t recognize the faces but you knew the tote bags and the lingo (English), the unity of spirit was our gift to the universe… Coachella ‘15. The bands had pun names that sounded like other, more famous but perhaps less important, proper nouns; Tiger and Woods, Chet Faker, and one that sounded like Rock Against Communism but totally wasn’t. What are words anyway, but the confusion of Babylon? "Ph" was always interchangeable with "f" and "Z"s were as beloved as vowels were despised. We were wild and free like Paul Banks in 2003, but in 2015 so we could do lines off phones the size of a turtle, no, wait, a tortoise. I pity you, young man, that you were not old enough to experience it. Feel bad. Feel badder.
It was Coachella, 2015, and we were the target age demographic for the middle lineup, the rap acts, the EDM tokens who were more popular than the actual headliners, and the world felt as if it was wide open. It was that brief moment in time in America when you could wear a ceremonial Native American headdress one day and denounce it on Twitter the next and everyone would love you for it, panties and boxer-briefs tossed out the high windows of the changing zeitgeist. Seduction was as easy as reciting the entire Louis C.K. smartphone bit in a well-chosen ear during the intro to "Seven Nation Army". We used our phones to accomplish sexually what it would take literally minutes to accomplish in person at Woodstock, and the '70s, and much of the '80s… ANYWAY, it was an etheric river of water and we all swam midstream to spawn. It was also a literal river of water as we danced through the 324 bathroom stalls of Indio Valley, letting the spirits of our ancestors, the first white people to wear traditional headpieces, worry about a drought! Jerry Brown, from the '60s to the '15s was always a metaphor, his legislature to be taken as aphorism. The only drought that concerned us was the drought between Kasabian albums. You may try to judge us now, you kids with only your 3D print-outs of water to sustain you, but our wisdom was not the kind you could find in a $10 bottle of water. Though, yes, sure, we drank all that water, what truly sustained us were Drake memes.
I’m not trying to make you feel like it’s your fault. If I’ve taught you anything, it’s that nothing is anyone’s fault. Your generation’s festivals are OK; I’m glad Interpol is still playing fifth to last everywhere. We were a magical generation. Like the boomers but slightly less excruciating, we really believed we could change the world and just would rather not. Coachella '15, phrases like "it happened" almost fail to do it justice. Every generation gets the archetypical festival it deserves; Woodstock for the boomers, Lollapalooza for Gen X, Woodstock '94 for Y, and Coachella for Generation (so glad we finally got rid of the very offensive term "millennial") Bloated Hodgepodge of Exhibitionistic/Nihilistic Inanities. You, Generation Steampunk By Necessity, have yet to find yours. I don’t ascribe this to any character flaws in you kids—if I learned anything from Alt-J it was "who am I to judge," but I can’t help but pity you. We made a shimmering city in the desert, our hearts beating as one as we sang united that one Hozier song and that half a Kimbra song, as we celebrated the easy commute of Night Terrors of 1927 and the dogged perseverance of the Cribs and as we impotently shushed motherfuckers during Perfume Genius until we, our own near divine selves, had something we wanted to say to our neighbor. You’ll never know what it was like to live half in a waking dream and half in a never-ending War On Drugs blog post. We existed as they did on Yasgur’s farm in '69 (lol): both besides the point of the music and self-righteous about being "about the music," a beatific panorama of the senses sans shirts, a primal scream mixed with a Tumblr page devoted to "Who’s Primal Scream?" Or whoever the Primal Scream was that year. I don’t remember. But I remember the feeling, and I remember my feelings, and I remember the golden calf that we built to our feelings, that Coachella of 2015, when feelings were our personal and feelings were our political and for some reason AC/DC played!
Coachella was our Woodstock (without all the lame rain) and our Good War (but with the good sense to ban selfie sticks) and our (toned and far tanner) Marriage of Charles and Di and our (not faked) Moon Landing; and we swore, swore on our Mac DeMarco beer cozy and on Azealia Banks’ Twitter timeline and double down swore on whatever it was that made Cloud Nothings and Coasts briefly famous, and Brand New and the Orwells inexplicably long-term famous, swore on OFF!’s credibility and Florence and the Machine’s sense of subtlety, we swore on our Apple watches and we swore on our other non-anachronistic references, to remember Coachella '15, to praise Coachella '15, to pinky swear our age inappropriate affectations and, most importantly, true to our Woodstock ancestors and true to ourselves, to never ever EVER shut up about Coachella 2015.