It’s noise.It’s all noise.
You can get lost in it.When you tune in, you might catch a few quick shards of something familiar and comforting.
You might be like: “Oh, huh, Blonde Redhead, that’s cool.Did one of their songs blow up on TikTok or something?” Most of the time, though, it’s sheer roiling alien chaos.
It’s here to overwhelm you.It’s here to fuck up your day.
Presumably, every time the good people at Goldenvoice unveil another poster for their flagship festival Coachella, they want you to think, “Oh, wow! Amazing! I will spend so much money to go to that!” Maybe that is what you think! Probably not, though.Judging by widespread online sentiment, at least in my corner of the internet, your reaction will be more like: “Oh no.
How could this happen? I am so old! I don’t know who any of these people are, except perhaps Green Day and Kraftwerk! The children are doomed, and also they hate me! This lineup has been specifically constructed to piss me off! The music-festival landscape is a fetid, rotting institution! Woe unto us!” I get it.You will never again be the same age that you were when you saw your first Coachella poster.
Maybe you used to go to the festival every year.Maybe you went once or twice.
Maybe you simply glanced at the lineup and though, “Oh cool, they got Rage Against The Machine, maybe I’ll go to that someday.” Maybe you always thought it was a crass and disgusting commercialization of left-of-center music.It doesn’t matter.
Time marches on, and the Coachella Valley Music And Arts Festival continues to unveil new posters.They are full of unfamiliar names, and they overflow with information.
If you can get beyond your initial reaction, they also tell a story.They tell many stories.
I don’t know why I started doing this, and I don’t know why I keep doing this, but I am here to unearth those hidden stories, to make sense of the chaos.There must be sense somewhere in there, right? About 125,000...