No Freaks At The Festival

My first big music festival, my last charade, and the early vs. latter days of Coachella

A catastrophe that is experienced will often seem eerily like its representation— Guy Debord

A Cityscape Made of Flesh

In 1960, Charles Mingus, along with Max Roach, Eric Dolphy, and Ornette Coleman, pitched tents adjacent the Newport Jazz Festival in Rhode Island, to create the first “Rebel Newport” Festival, which came to be called the Cliff Walk Manor Festival, in order to avoid association with and advertising for the main attraction to the upscale New England town that purgatorial American July. Spearheaded by Mingus, Cliff Walk’s overt grievances were pay disparities among musicians at the traditional festival and limp afternoon time slots for acts verging on avant-garde, while legible white ensembles headlined. There was also an ambient malaise around the commercialization of jazz being expressed in erratic attempts at protest or self-determination at every level of the genre’s production and distribution. Newport was a culprit in that it opened the form to cultural appropriation in exchange for elite audiences who saw black music as their portal into pleasurable leisure and perhaps nothing more than an attitude or accessory to their bohemian lifestyles. For Mingus and his cohort, this music was their blood and loadstar, their language, being manipulated and commodified to define and entertain the very demographics that would dismantle and discard it at will in order to follow the next trend. Jazz had been gentrified by the festival. Dangling their reputations over a picturesque cliff for better recognition of their intentions and the intents of their music was therefore a worthy and urgent risk in the pursuit of new modes of solidarity that did not rely entirely on white patrons or means of production owned by them. That Cliff Walk held its debut and finale in summer of 1960, while George Wein’s Newport remains a fixture to this day, reveals the hypocrisies and sanctimony of the American music festival industry. We really do not deserve the ready-made diversions that festivals are any longer, but the will of the spectacle is relentless and consumes anything and everything it must to reproduce itself, even if it has to use counterfeit music and audiences who have outsourced their hedonism to the simulation.

Music festivals begin purely enough however, as aesthetic manifestos that deploy an aggregation of all the right lures to trick customers into thinking they’re subscribing to an escapist’s best chance at utopia when they organize their spring or summer around such a contrivance. And they’re efficient; you can witness a handful of your favorite musicians on the same week or weekend, while intentionally stranded on the same island. The friction arrives when you and the music enter an assembly line and machine that supersedes the transaction between art and witness until all that can be experienced of and by either is simulacra, the idea of the self and that abstracted self’s idea of a place where everything you have a taste for is happening and available all at once. Hell, really, in Heaven’s arena, or that half-satisfying arousal by over-stimulation that leads only to oblivion; that’s what the annual festival season has become. An outdated deception aligned with a defunct version of Americanism that only knows how to create bureaucracies but mistakes them for events or original ideas. If the Newport Rebels had succeeded in their counter-insurgency, it would have been because they had discovered a way to organize an event in the manner the best trio of improvisers might assemble, unmediated by paperwork and protocol, spontaneous but not anarchic or unsure of itself, affordable but not free. Next to a monolith, is such a vision even coherent? Its corpse falls into its shadow. My growing disdain for American attempts at curated leisure is that they often usher anything that might be sincere or sacred so deep into the marketplace that all it can exude is lust and exclusivity thereafter. I suppose we are a nation of those who can make desecration look sexy and infinitely appealing until all that remains are the fashions and fascisms we’ve made of the profane, and that is our culture. The mainstream can and does cannibalize anything it accepts or even notices, and music festivals are the cannibal’s workshops.

You have to trust it

My first festival, my entry into the beast’s mouth to rot on its gums or escape, haunts me as if it was an initiation into a cult I’m still a member of now. In it, I was living someone else’s dream with the easy privilege of a village priest. The happy memories associated with it grow riddled with pangs hued in the muted blue you can only glimpse at dusk in the high desert. I guess I spent a lot of time there, and that time reminds me that I come from a family confusing and confused, on one side with an unconventional literacy that produced a songwriter who couldn’t read or write, my father, while on the other, my grandfather, my mother’s father, worked in children’s book publishing and earned a small fortune late in life consulting on textbooks as public school systems hustled to revise history toward a pedagogy of liberal guilt and its absolution into “multiculturalism.” And there I was like a poster child for nineties Social Studies. My uncle on that side made a small fortune working as the CPA for Saul Price, who owned “The Price Club,” which became Costco. He started working in the store as a clerk and quickly made his way up the ladder. He would take trips to Russia and Barbados to install Costcos. As I kid, I thought he was in the mafia and that mafia was benevolent because his house in the Rancho Santa Fe neighborhood of San Diego had a pool, sauna, horses, land for horses, a wife who cheated with the landscaper and left, my cousins who surfed and rode the horses and their perfect Lassie-esque midsize sedan dog could swim and do backflips into the perfect pool. Oddly, this uncle’s wife’s maiden name was Debby Holiday, which is the name of my sister from dad’s first marriage. A tone parallel and eerie in that my uncle had a crush on my sister when they first met, she’s only a few years younger than him. I thought the mafia was benevolent then and that I was a member of a secret crime family or perhaps the product of one of their crimes come home to roost. My cousins loved The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, and I felt like the female Fresh Prince on visits to their near-estate, an alien but interesting enough to play the main character in a minstrel scene after which everyone would laugh or cry inflated tears and disperse.

Together this uncle and my grandfather owned modest property on a gated golf course community in Palm Desert, California, about twenty minutes from where Coachella is held every year. The fourth year of the festival, 2002, while I was a student at U.C. Berkeley, my friends and I decided to drive down and attend. My grandparents would host. All my new friends would get the wrong idea about my upbringing and I loved this, a chance for reinvention or to shed some of the shame of the past. They would assume I came from a normal household, an elite one even. Maybe I did, but not in the way it would appear here. This was my cover. The mask would keep me safe from the scrutiny that had made me feel hostage to my mother’s sheepish black sheep karma in high school. On the surface, this would be a lighthearted affair, a normal American pilgrimage to a music festival, but if all went well, my masks would be wearing me by the time I returned to class after spring break. Internalized class warfare overcome by flaunting and disavowing both sides. My grandparents, who I called ‘the white grandma’ and ‘the white grandpa’ as a kid and not knowing better or maybe playing the trickster on purpose, would play my parents for the long weekend, and my parents would play dead and this would be my triumphant departure from the unwilling pacts of a childhood interrupted by violence and dysfunction.

So we drove, one friend had an Audi, another a Volvo, and we piled into each with snacks and too many outfits and listened to Bjork remixes for eight hours in anticipation of her headlining performance. Traffic down the highway was dense and our ETA went from 9PM to midnight. When we arrived and made it through the gated security using my name, the first sterling compartment of my mask, my grandparents were up and waiting with martinis in their hands. It was as if I had written them a script and they’d memorized it telepathically— be impressive, but not too impressive, fun, but protective, slightly protracted. Be so beautiful it hurts to wonder how I came to be so lucky and so safe, make me believe this is what I always came home to, vogue with me for my friends who do come from normal households and might not detect our break from convention to mimic convention. I didn’t want to impress them, I wanted to be made new on my own terms and use their obliviousness to any prior version projections as my identity. My end of the bargain: I’ll pretend I don’t long to be estranged from all these roots, all this range, toward an almost-sovereignty, even if it feels like desolation. I’d like to get away by pretending I belong here and leaving the thinnest trace of complicity possible ahead of total abandon, but I’ll stay a while if you finish this act with me. How else would I learn the difference between real love and obligation besides through cruelty, vengeance, unceremonious detachment? So and seven or eight friends and I partied with my grandparents ‘round midnight into the small hours, then woke up very early and made our way to the festival grounds.

Day one was my first experience with the new world water system. We were to throw away the bottled water my grandparents had given us at the entrance and purchase ten dollar new waters by the same brand and laced with the same microplastics as soon as we made it inside. It was ninety or a hundred degrees in shade. The excuse for confiscating our source of hydration was the newly enforced Patriot Act, plus the assumption we could be smuggling liquor in otherwise, vodka or gin disguised as water. We could be a threat to the glory of commerce. Either way I remember, because this was my first festival, feeling exhilarated even by the inconvenience, as if we’d been let loose on abandoned fairgrounds or discovered a stray Atlantis. The music appeared on staggered stages and in tents scattered across what felt like reviving an ancient metropolis that we had arrived to repopulate. All I recall of the afternoons are Belle and Sebastian and Blonde Redhead; we were on the cusp of grunge’s revision into white folk revivalism that year. Mos Def, when he was still called that, experimented with his Black Jack Johnson era, wherein he tried to pivot toward some hybrid of rock and rap using cacophonous screams as a bridge or where backpack rap activism yields to nihilistic rage and constant reminders that black people invented rock and roll. Music in this short-lived sub-genre was didactic and a little desperate to be activism, but how else could we address the void that James Brown’s scream would be leaving very soon. The white Jack Johnson performed also, soft complaint-rock like a mediocre Ben Harper. What symmetry, what low grade American picture show horror that we have one jaded romantic with the same name in every color. To trot backwards in the lineup, my favorite Blonde Redhead song is named “Harmony” my favorite song with my name it, and unfurls like a little ritual chant, also like jazz. The first four minutes are sitar and drums in a woodshed or bonfire against themselves, and suddenly, Harmony/you’re jaded/I want you… the song wanders on into poem that predicts me as a listener snapping out of its stupor or encountering a torn page of my biography in dreampop.

But as for us inventing rock music, being ripped apart and maimed by our inventions, we know, but it’s easy to forget while lounging on muslin sheets in dust and manmade pasture listening to “I fought in a War.” I can picture Prodigy playing, but not what they played, just the manic fact of their set, the Egyptian god Set insinuated by their famous “Firestarter,” and “Smack My Bitch Up.” With no who you callin a bitch in my heart, I joined the monotone jumping on beat but the band seemed a little fatigued firsthand, or just less feral than they sound on their studio recordings with all that engineering. I was being socially engineered into my eclectic potential future. Here on these relatively nascent festival grounds was every archetype that could be accounted for by audiophiles and casual listeners in music at the time.

Bjork in her half-sullen whimsy performing in all white and visibly pregnant with Matthew Barney’s child, was their leader and delivered one of the most emotional and satisfying live performances I’ve ever witnessed. The collective bellow we let out after the lights ceased their flickering announcement of her and she whisper-sung her divine promise: you’ll be given love, you’ll be taken care of, maybe not from the sources/you have poured yours. Some of my friends were wandering around on mushrooms and acid, and missed their chance to be coaxed back into the womb of the universe and forever altered and upgraded by her earnest, playful intonation. My boyfriend at the time was somewhere else, maybe with them, and I remember feeling like I could run away into the night and lose them all and be fine, find new love, truer love, another ancient modern city for refuge. I was overcome by sense of longing for the nonlinear or of seeking a quantum leap so intently it materializes as the performer or a sudden urge to be on stage giving birth to myself as Bjork was; in her harrowing and chaotic way she restored the soul of the desert, nurtured it past the price of the tickets and the trip and into alignment with the feeling that we had all floated in on a vision, no lines or traffic or vacation homes necessary. She was transcendent. Would I be given love when it was my turn to disrupt my own social fabric with testimony of what I’ve been given besides that. Live music is healing because it defies you and can catch you off guard during those acts of defiance and pull you into the mood that might heal your soul. Nothing else can grab you by the collar as abruptly. Here’s the next benevolent mafia I’d be joining or already belonged to. It can also be coercive, too commercial and terrible and hold you hostage in offensive frequencies. On this night it was like prophecy or skrying and pried my mask off so that I could face my desperation to be loved or seen as something other than wounded. The tension of what I’d tried to orchestrate fell away as I’d realized I didn’t really have much to pretend about. How lucky I’d been in love, but how alienated from that luck by shame for quiet suffering.

By our final night in the desert, strays whose campsites had failed them were on the living room floor when my grandmother woke up. I woke up early to warn her and watched her step over them gracefully. We all had breakfast by the pool. An environmentalist friend went into the trash to separate all the recycling, we did some chores then loaded our cars and drove home as if released from the tip of a dove’s tongue. My grandfather called my grandmother Dove. It’s the strangest, most selfish feeling, to have everything anyone could ever want and not want any of it as much as this language to alchemize it into poems and psalms, to long give it all up to feed to the song it would always become. To see it as foreign and disorienting outside of the story. The festival’s lesson was that the normativity I was trying to integrate into the myth of myself was untenable and useless, the love I’m given is upheld by the disasters I was trying to reconfigure into hospitality. It’s easier to let my story remain one absurd mystery after the other, unadorned by revision. I was naked again, unmasked, slightly liberated by acceptance and gratitude.

—

Coachella has not aged well. It’s now geriatric and fitted for its coffin, now so much more sinister than overpriced water, over-wrought curating, and minor sleaze as its owners have enough power and sway to bend the now-feeble music industry to their will. Goldenvoice, one of the monopolies that unites streaming, live concerts and monopoly capitalism to turn the artists who feed them into minions, has accelerated the ruin. The next time I attended, it was with a friend who worked for the New York Times, Drake’s year to headline, the spring If You’re Reading This It’s Too Late was the only album on the radio. My family had rented the house out to festival goers, influencers had turned the high desert into a blur of brand trips and wannabe raving. A couple of years later, Beyoncé offered this particular festival its best chance at a jazz funeral, and now, it’s a zombie cell gathering depending on its scale and reputation and so over-saturated with guests the organizers added a second weekend. A large percentage of this year’s attendees financed their tickets on digital layaway apps. Concert going is one of the most important rites of passage in American social life because it’s where the lifelong adolescence that surviving the US asks of you is invented and sustained, but the corportized mega-festival is turning live music into commercials for itself and destination cemeteries. If your identity remains tied to your privilege to be at Coachella or any festival like it, you can get a plot of land, a luxury tent, whatever, but that presence will be disembodied as if watching yourself in a movie about mind control through obscene spectacle.

It’s necessary to let these failed constructs and disaffected fantasies collapse, but that would require imagination and the bravery to reroute what has stopped working into the unknown, which could work better or might fail just as intricately. The more hype an event receives, the more banal it becomes, and the more banal it is the more difficult to uproot; now it’s a tradition, like Newport, like failed but legendary rebellions against broken or smug conventions. Having never been denied access to music in both public and private or even secret iterations, I don’t know how it would feel to believe that this is as good as it gets, but even I was caught swooning on a desert night in a trance of Hyperballad and great, complicated fortune, pretending my sweet mafia wasn’t built to shake me down for dues and don’ts. Do relish in and share your access, don’t expect to be loved for it, you’ll be misunderstood for it more often. Now the men in my life perform at Coachella and offer all access passes, my job offers them, and I don’t accept, for fear that it won’t feel like love in the current climate, where everything is suspected of being a flex or a wasted opportunity to flex. The adventures before camera phones are so much easier to romanticize, I wonder if it’s the style of documentation that is dulling the music and the senses. It’s no scandal, just the psychic vandalism at the end of empire where what used to feel beautiful is now a sign of utter frivolity and decadence that proves it was always this, we were just spellbound by it, not yet witnessing genocide on the same phones we use to document our live shows. American styles of leisure now feel like bypass or like watching someone with a terminal illness do everything on their bucket list as the things themselves are also robust with sickness.

—

The last day I spent with my grandfather, I knew it was the last, because I recorded him telling Korean war stories on a whim and then he, my grandmother, and I watched the Super Bowl as if we were at a festival, divine American leisure, and I enjoyed it. It was Beyoncé’s turn to do the halftime show. My grandfather, rarely impressed, was impressed; my grandmother was dismayed. I was amused at their dynamic. There were no longer martinis but glasses of wine washed down their Coumadin, blood thinners for which the ratios were never quite right. And I no longer needed an audience to perform it in front of, but it was clear I’d been given love, I’d been taken care of, I’d learn to trust it. I knew this was the last time I’d see him alive through some visceral intuition and watched him with the pensive delight of someone who should pretend not to know what she knows, but can’t and therefore refuses, surrenders. I come from a benevolent mafia. At any moment I could be asked to kill off a character or stagnant event, even an obsolete version of myself or my own kin. When it’s their time, I calmly oblige.