Coachella is a major annual music festival, known for the hype surrounding the fashionable looks seen there, but it didn’t start that way.
The festival started in 1999 in Indio, California as a two-day festival. Now the festival has two weekends, each consisting of three days of musical performances. Coachella is known for showing off a lot of genres but is mainly known for its electronic music. In recent years, festival goers have gone all out with their outfits at Coachella.
This year’s Coachella featured a Japanese Pop act called Vocaloid, which includes the notorious Hatsune Miku, who had spent some time already touring North America. Fans cosplayed as Vocaloid performers, which resemble characters from anime Fans of the Vocaloid expected a normal performance, a hologram, but days before Miku was meant to perform Coachella removed the word “hologram” from the performance and on the actual day they had Miku on a big flat screen. People were left feeling disappointed with the downgrade.
Korean pop was also featured at Coachella with Le Sserafim, a group that debuted only a year and a half ago and got the chance to secure a solo performance at the festival, making it the fastest Korean act to do this. With the performance, a lot of people criticized their live singing abilities, but at the same time on Reddit, they took in consideration the effort of being on stage and thought it was still good even if they faltered at times.
Sublime, a band that first became popular in the 90s, shocked festival goers with a reunion at Coachella with the original band members except for Bradley Nowell who died in 1996. The reunion featured Bradly Nowell’s son Jakob who took on his dad’s role as lead singer alongside the original drummer Bug Gaugh and bassist Eric Wilson.
The nu-metal alternative band Deftones made their first appearance at Coachella this year. They performed a lot of songs but the highlight that fans had was them performing a cover of “Please, Please, Please, Let me get what I want,” which is a cover of the famous 80s band The Smiths. During a backstage interview, Deftones said it has an album almost completed and will be released soon.
A queer artist that has been on the rise recently who also was at Coachella was Chappell Roan who showed on stage the first weekend with a drag-inspired look. Chappell Roan has been on the rise due to her music blowing up on TikTok. For Roan, this wasn’t just her first time performing at Coachella but her first time performing at a festival ever, but she pushed on.
