Post Malone, who closed out the festival Sunday night, has a more legible personality, but songs that are just as anonymous and perhaps even more inane. The now svelte singer—another Dallas native, although really, he sprang from a suburban basement of the mind—has moved fully into pop-country territory, having long ago abandoned the hip-hop textures he rode to fame. (During “rockstar,” a shirtless, oddly paranoid, middle-aged man with an Australian accent asked me and my friend if “there’s a rapper onstage.” “No,” we could confidently say.) Post does deserve points, however, for insisting on an otherwise rote “you can be whatever you want to be if you follow your dreams” speech that more people should consider becoming entomologists.
On Friday night, Lady Gaga was significantly more effective. Her high-camp opera, which leaned heavily on last month’s Mayhem, was well considered and consistently amusing; two friends who were watching the YouTube livestream texted me separately to say that they were enamored. But, while Gaga is a seasoned arena performer, there is truly no way to account for the angles and sightlines of the surely more than 50,000 people who sprawled across a flat field. At times, from a distance, it felt like watching through a window as your neighbor assembles a ship in a bottle.
Fortunately, the acts just below the headlining level were exceptional. In succession, the penultimate sets on the main stage were from Missy Elliott, whose career-spanning performance was a highlight of the weekend, and not only because her UFO-themed costume was included a bicycle helmet that could have been purchased at the Target in Palm Desert; Charli XCX, who replaced Missy’s martian animations on the massive video board with a series of quick, cokey cut-ins, and played to a positively raucous crowd; and Megan Thee Stallion, whose execution recalled the freestyle videos for which she became famous. The default parlor game at Coachella is to speculate about who might be a viable headliner in the future; any of these three women could have held down her own day.
The asterisk in the paragraph above is because Charli’s Saturday evening set was actually followed by not only Travis Scott at midnight, but Green Day at 9:05. On this year’s bill, Green Day is technically listed as the Saturday headliner, with Travis Scott at the very bottom of the poster (the language being “Travis Scott Designs the Desert”). This marks the third year in a row, following Calvin Harris in 2023 and No Doubt last year, that the festival has essentially added a stealth fourth headliner.
