For almost two decades, I have joined the pilgrimage of devoted patrons convening in the heart of the California desert. While the faithful are drawn for a weekend of music, hedonism, and flaunting their indulgences (at least as of late), I make the annual trek for a month of pay and an increased chance of skin cancer. Like a master mason of a Gothic cathedral, I have physically built the worship site per the specs of its corporate master’s divine plan. Officially named the Coachella Music and Arts Festival, colloquially “Coachella,” a Freudian slip of my fingers on the keyboard reveals an apt name for the Faustian bargain of attendance — Coca hell.

The event began as a few days of music for alternatively attuned audiophiles, being far enough away from the City of Angels to be considered an “escape.” Early on, its promoter Goldenvoice didn’t have enough coin in the coffers to compete with its more established competitors, who could offer the cash guarantees needed for booking top-shelf talent. So, in an act of desperation or faith, the brainchild of Coachella was born. The idea was simple — throw enough alternative artists at the walls, and see if the hype will stick.

Since 2001, the hype has evolved into a brand, a fashion statement, a lifestyle, and, ultimately, an industry. I know this trajectory well, and frankly lament its course — as I imagine the humble yet historic punk promoter Goldenvoice does as well, although the pillowcases full of cash may be soft enough to help them sleep at night. What started as a worthy pursuit — to broadcast rock and roll across well-manicured polo fields during the peak of spring, complete with a trove of wacky, interactive art installations nestled in the scenic bosom of the Santa Rosa and San Jacinto ridgelines — has since sacrificed true musicality for unabashedly commercialized banality.

But who am I to judge? I am personally complicit in this great crime against the musicians and music lovers of the world. And as the O’jay’s sang, “...you gotta give the people what they want.”

The early attraction of Coachella was how the event leveled the playing field, with a bevy of acts sharing the same stage — regardless of whether they sold out stadiums or played for drink tickets in dive bars. It was democracy in action, the worship of worthy sounds being the only qualifier. OG talent buyers defined the music tastes of a generation by pairing emergent acts deserving of their breakthrough moment (like Modest Mouse in 1999, The Mars Volta in 2002, or Amy Winehouse and Grizzly Bear in 2007). Sure, the festival always stacked the deck with the likes of Björk and Radiohead — but even this could be risky. The festival never lost so much money as the year it booked Prince, in 2008 (which was a great fucking show, by the way).

The attendees all slept in the same dirt back then, with the same access to the front row or the nosebleeds. Coachella even sold single-day tickets in the early years, being a true testament to the freedom of choice. As such, the crowd would evolve over the weekend, from the avant-garde and LGBTQ friendly Björk night to the flat-billed bros for Tiësto and Red Hot Chili Peppers to Sunday’s devolution into anarcho-syndicalist vampires in Dickies jackets for Rage. It was a meritocratic field of dreams, where patrons needed to get to a stage early if they wanted a good spot for a performance; if not, “y’all can get fucked, go stand in the back” was the ethos. Sure, the festival booked the occasional pop icon and harbored a slim rave scene, but it was a place where the indie kids reigned supreme, as evidenced by the first event in 1999 being an unapologetic middle finger to profits (which explains the gap year in 2000). Such debauchery juxtaposed against the freshly manicured lawns ringed by snow-capped mountains belied the future prospect of gold in them thar hills. 

At today’s Coachella, the denizens of Los Angeles have recreated the elitism and inequality that makes them feel at home. From the car-camping refugee-style squalor of the average attendee to the $32,000 all-inclusive yurt with dedicated golf-cart chauffeurs, daily maid services, and private bathrooms, showers, and masseuses, the once-democratic festival has all the trappings necessary to completely insulate the affluent from the realities of the common concert-goers. Beauty, power, and access are now the currencies of the grounds, far from the former vibes of raunchiness, charitable neighborliness, and sincere fandom. Influencers, models, and celebrities attend to post their looks and fits and exclusive soirees on social media, fueling the annual inflation of ticket prices, concessions, party favors, and revenues for AEG (the conglomerate which engulfed Goldenvoice in 2006). 

Yet until this year, 2024, it seemed like the show would go on forever. Then ticket sales dropped by nearly 20 percent. The first weekend, which typically sells out in under an hour, took nearly a month to pawn off its wristbands. The second weekend didn’t sell out at all.

How can a festival that cleared all its sales within four hours of opening the digital box office in 2022 be unable to maintain its audience just two years later? Can we blame the COVID stimulus checks? Russian meddling? No, this is a self-induced ailment, one which has grown like a tumor on the heart of Indio’s oasis and has now metastasized into the rest of the industry. There is one man who perfectly embodies these symptoms: Frank Ocean, and his 2023 headlining disaster. We will get to him, don’t worry.

As someone who makes their daily bread from the crumbs of the cottage industry that is festival production, I am accustomed to open-air shows being pockmarked with ugly topography. These are often geographically challenging venues, like hilly golf courses or forested state parks, which result in gridlocked traffic in and out that makes trucking in equipment and running in talent a logistical cluster-fuck. Site operations personnel — those manning crosswalks and banging T-posts and erecting light towers and parking cars — are uniformly understaffed, overworked, and grossly underpaid, most of them barely getting by on some combination of stale cigarettes, cheap beer, LSD, and C-grade cocaine (out of necessity, mostly). Staging teams are expected to install wildly intricate arrangements with skeleton crews on a shoestring, often subsisting on a similar diet as the guys parking cars in the campground (also out of necessity, mostly). And then there’s the exploitation of “volunteers” who spend most of an event working for free, in exchange for a ticket to a party they’ll barely be able to attend.

Event organizers almost always overcommit on rates for talent buying and give production teams a fraction of what they need to deliver in a sane fashion. This is how the machine generally works: Blow your wad on a big name to put on the top of the bill, put unreasonable pressure on all those actually responsible for making the event happen, and pray you break even without having to file an insurance claim or to field a call from the National Guard. Margins are tight for event organizers and artist teams alike. In the remote locations of many festivals, basic accommodations are scarce, which prevents productions from taking their whole camp of technicians and the trucks of equipment they typically manage.

Coachella has evolved over the years in ways that defy these festival norms. It now sells its tickets before the lineup is even announced (much like Bonnaroo, Lollapalooza, Glastonbury, and other “Blue Chip” festivals). In years past, selling out hundreds of thousands of tickets within an hour unlocked an unprecedented surplus of up-front cash that was used to advance contracts on a gluttonous volume of RFID wristband-checking yard duties and concert security stooges, along with lavish 3-day camping accommodations and VIP pass perks — with a mere weekend of access costing close to the median national income in 2022.

Coachella does not suffer from the terrestrial deficiencies of most other festival sites, either. It is situated upon a perfectly level, exceedingly lush polo ground, right off a stretch of the I-10, a highway that doesn’t see another metropolis to the east until Phoenix, another 250 miles down the road. It is just close enough to Los Angeles to get anything it needs in terms of equipment — every sound company, set builder, and lighting vendor is within a two-hour drive — but far enough away not to be plagued with the nonsense that every other LA festival struggles to deal with. Coachella announces its lineup as close to New Year’s Day as possible, giving it the competitive advantage of not being seen as the copycat. Due to touring schedules, major market festivals are destined to share many of the same headliners, but to the untrained eye of the average trust-fund hippie, the Coachella lineup announcement is the royal decree of the trendsetting acts of the year.

This results in a perfect storm. Of the mainline artists planning to go on tour each year, the vast majority of them have a residence in LA. As such, they are each logistically positioned to design and fund huge production packages meant to stun the crowd at the first major North American festival of the year. For non-attendees, both weekends are live-streamed in their entirety, ensuring that everyone is aware of how much they’re missing out — making for a stunning advertisement towards each artist’s next colossal show coming to a town near you.

This is the hex that Coachella promoters have cast upon themselves by doing so many things right. Paul Tollett, president of Goldenvoice, discovered the Empire Polo Club fields in 1999 during a fluke concert hosted there by Eddie Vedder of Pearl Jam to protest the service charges Ticketmaster was applying (no, the irony is not lost on me). Tollett has since maximized the efficiency of the festival for production teams, as well as the experience for concert-goers, and in turn has transformed the desert into a goldmine. Starting from a couple of risers and a stage or three, Coachella has now plopped down a remarkable ten stages worth of artists, all capable of performing simultaneously, who put on performances far more technically remarkable than many of their arena tour sets.

Over the years, this commitment to and realization of efficiency inspired Goldenvoice to put down deeper roots in Indio. In 2012, it purchased 280 acres of the Empire Polo Club fields and began to trench and pour concrete tunnels, construct bunkers for cable paths and delay-tower anchors, lay asphalt where there were once dirt horse trails, hence pouring cash into the local community. It also cut the city of Indio in on a portion of ticket sales (around $5 a ticket in 2013) and agreed to host five events each year through 2030. When COVID shut down the live event industry, the city took a $3.5 million loss from missing Coachella and Stagecoach alone.

In 2021, knowing a good opportunity when it saw one, Goldenvoice signed a deal with the Empire Polo Club to take complete operational control of the grounds through 2050. With long-term partnerships and infrastructure expenditures that some small nations would drool over, it was clear that the Coachella team was planning on the sky being the limit for the festival, and that they were scaling to grow the operation for another thirty years.

And why wouldn’t they think that? For decades, Coachella has ceaselessly amazed audiences and created unparalleled experiences: from Daft Punk’s reunion pyramid show in 2006, which seemed to kick-start the EDM boom in the 21st century; to the resurrection of Tupac via a “hologram” for Snoop and Dre in 2012 (a repurposing of the old carnival illusion called “Pepper’s Ghost” — à la Disney’s Haunted Mansion); to Beyonce’s 2018 performance that spawned 43 million live streams, a documentary, and the hashtag #Beychella; not to forget Kanye’s Easter sermon on the purpose-built Coachella grass mount the following year.

Coachella’s incredible location and management have allowed the promoters to outdo themselves, over and over again. At the same time, they’ve become forced to raise the stakes each year, to chase the dragon that was last year’s show. The problem with getting that high of praise all the time is that, eventually, one cannot keep up with the ever-growing expectations that one has created for oneself, like Japanese tourists reeling from Paris Syndrome upon finding the Eiffel Tower not quite as romantic amidst stale Parisian aromas of cigarettes and piss as they thought it’d be.

Which is exactly what happened to Coachella, for the first time, in 2023. After 2022 was scarred by the cancelation of the messianic Yeezy — right before he went off the rails with all his antisemitic hate speech — the festival needed to up the ante yet again. And, in typical Coachella fashion, it signed on another elusive rapper, Frank Ocean, who, despite being acclaimed with a platinum album and charting 14 songs on Billboard’s Top 100, has performed fewer shows in his entire career than many artists play in a six-week van tour. His last performance before the fateful Coachella show in 2023 was more than half a decade prior, in 2017, at the Goldenvoice’s now defunct FYF Fest (where “FYF” originally stood for “Fuck Yeah Fest” — making the full name of FYF Fest effectively “Fuck Yeah Fest Fest…”).

Frank wanted to go big, and Coachella needed to exceed the glory of their past shows while not infringing upon the artist’s creative license — a prerequisite of not voiding the default clause in Frank’s contract. Frank got himself architectural designers from outside the event industry who had some big ideas — a 40’ x 70’ ice rink at the front of house B-stage, to provide a 360-degree-boots-on-the-ground-style performance for the festival’s hundreds of thousands of spectators. The logistics of maintaining an ice surface in the desert be damned. This was showbusiness, baby.

Naturally, Goldenvoice green-lit the fanciful notion. Frank then purchased a custom fabricated ice rink, and leased a 230-ton “chiller” to continuously pump freezing glycol 500 feet out from behind stage to the ice, maintaining it for two weeks so it’d stay solid for his performances. (Where was Greta Thunberg when we needed her?) Frank then hired about 80 professional ice skaters and hockey players to be a part of the performance, who, of course, needed to emerge from the ice rink that was situated in the middle of the audience without anyone seeing them. To create this illusion, Goldenvoice excavated a 150-footlong, seven-foot-deep trench that led to a 22,400-cubic-foot hole where his ice rink was built (all of which would need to be refilled with sediment in just four days, before the start of its country festival Stagecoach). A thrust of steel-grated decks was erected from the main stage to the ice rink for the performer to traverse, while the 80 skaters hid in the underworld of the structure to emerge like Trojans, ready to take the arena by storm. Seeing as that all seemed easy enough, Frank then decided he needed a custom stage lift to emerge from the center of the ice rink, for him to lord over his faithful fans while the skaters raced round him on the ice.

Of the $4,000,000 that Frank was contractually promised to perform per weekend, he spent $5,000,000 of his advance on this spectacle. Worried that Frank’s lawyers may have cause to void the contract if they encroached on his vision, Goldenvoice jumped through hoop after hoop like trained show dogs. They bet the house on Frank delivering the greatest performance in the history of the event and distracting the festival-goers from Kanye’s headlines the previous year, which were a series of forceful kicks in the nuts following Coachella’s involuntary COVID hiatus.

Unfortunately, they gambled on a horse that doesn’t race. Frank’s a show pony (a studio musician and recording artist), not a track stallion (a touring performer). Frank didn’t rehearse his set, nor did he plan enough choreography for a full two-hour performance. Being surrounded by sycophants and yes-men, no one had the heart to tell the emperor that he was naked, and that show day was approaching. The first weekend of the festival came, with Frank’s Sunday set as the capstone. By nightfall on day three Frank was still a rumor, a ghost on the grounds. He didn’t even bring any merch to sell.

Björk finished her performance as Frank’s droves flocked to the stage, pining for positions in the crowd. A woman who has toured virtually nonstop for 30 years was met with yawns. The kids were playing Candy Crush, thumbing their Juuls, and taking selfies to post on the ’gram with the hashtag #waitingforfrank. His fans didn’t know or care that the “J” in Björk’s name is silent. They had come to see the creator of Blonde perform.

Frank finally appeared, nearly an hour late, with a stampede of “dancers” circled around him, obscuring him from view. These dancers weren’t dancers at all, which became painfully obvious — they were the skaters who were meant to be on ice while Frank was elevated by his lift.

But what about the ice? The video wall offered a close-up view of the bizarre cavalcade in high definition. Riddled with prerecorded playbacks, Frank randomly walked offstage several times while tracks were still playing. Long, excruciating silences lingered in between songs. In a fitting finale for the confused performance, the stage manager walked on stage, whispered to Frank, and the show was over. He was past curfew. His ice rink was never uncovered. In the interest of damage control, the festival cut the live stream before Frank’s set actually ended, limiting the number of witnesses.

Frank became the poster child for unmet expectations, performing for barely over an hour (including his gratuitous pauses between tracks), and he declined to return for weekend two. Yeah, you heard that right, this guy didn’t even bother to show up to the second weekend, leaving the door open for the 50-year-old rockers of Blink-182 to grab his $4 million bag for the headlining slot. Rumors — which were accurate — surfaced that he hurt himself buzzing around backstage during sound check on an e-bike, which meant he had to cancel his ice rink extravaganza, and which also triggered a loophole in his contract about production changes due to artist injury.

The fans were let down, the skaters were heartbroken that their hard work and choreography were for naught, and Goldenvoice and the rest of the vendors who helped produce Frank’s vapid iced-out dream were left with huge debts that his company, “Endless Touring,” seems forever unable to pay. Lawsuits ensued, some of which are still ongoing. Coachella emerged with fresh yolk on its face. In its ceaseless pursuit to push the limits of production possibilities, Goldenvoice had enabled an artist to sell it a long con for an epic performance, and then to swindle its audience with 90 minutes of karaoke. In flyboy language, they had screwed the pooch. So is it any wonder that Coachella couldn’t sell the tickets this year?

The industry rags will spin this, of course: The festival market is oversaturated, ticket prices and accommodations in the area have reached what the market will bear — but that is all a bunch of hooey. Fact is, Coachella hasn’t really slumped: It is still one of the best festival experiences in the world, and Goldenvoice should still be able to sell its tickets without a lineup. But the festival made a name for itself for having limitless potential, exponential growth — all the usual promises of impossibly unsustainable systems — and, big surprise, it can’t keep delivering on that promise. Now in debt — still seeking to recoup its money from Frank, as well as from purchasing a new custom fabricated tent structure to replace the old Sahara Tent rental — the 2024 festival spent conservatively on artists, leading to grumbles about the “worst lineup in decades.”

As I watched a performance by one of Elon’s baby mamas on the Sahara Stage this year, I realized that Coachella has become a sad parody of itself. Here is a girl who skyrocketed to stardom through a couple breakout tracks before dating a problematic eccentric, who’s playing a set she obviously didn’t prep, robed in AI-generated visuals with a mechanical spider twitching stage right like a rinky-dink rip-off of the mechanical villain at the end of Wild Wild West — and somehow she is given a coveted time slot on the festival’s second largest stage on Saturday night, when the drugs are hitting just right. Coachella, being the festival that was all about “the experience,” lineup be damned, has now fulfilled its own prophecy: It backs artists not based on their performance experience but on name recognition, and their promise to bring something “never seen before” to the desert, meaning monumental train wrecks in real time.

These aren’t one-off miscues at this point; a pattern has emerged. The new exciting experience that Coachella has brought to its well-heeled audience is something that money really can’t buy: watching paragons of the pop-culture sphere embarrass themselves in front of a live audience. Instead of presenting the best live music in the country, the festival has become a freakshow of cringe content that gets clicks and eyeballs. But isn’t that what our cultural landscape is all about now anyway?