Coachella fashion on full display during the first weekend of the festival, on Saturday, April 16, 2022.
The last time I fell in love, it wasn’t with a person.
It was with a seven-piece Mongolian heavy metal band belting out guttural war cries while playing Motorhead-style riffs with traditional horsehead fiddles, electric guitars and flutes. Behind me, people of all backgrounds bob their heads, raise their fists and scream in harmony. I’m watching The Hu at Coachella, the first music festival I’ve attended since the world forever changed. And they’re f—king epic.
Equally enchanting is Spiritualized, an English space rock band who performed to a modest crowd at the Sonora stage. When the band starts singing gorgeous, choir-like arrangements, it does that thing that all powerful music does: It makes my wandering mind meditate. Hit by a wave of nostalgia, I think about the past and how this festival, for all the flak it rightfully receives, was a blessing to experience as a Coachella Valley teenager who felt trapped and misunderstood.
My first trips to Coachella were in the late aughts, back when catty indie gossip websites like Hipster Runoff dominated the odd corners of the internet and everyone wore dumb stuff like “tribal” print leggings and braided headbands. But at that time, when I was an irritable suburban goth living in the California desert, I looked forward to going to this festival every year in high school.
These days, the world-famous event brings nearly 250,000 attendees to the valley each spring. People line up to shell out hundreds, even thousands of dollars for tickets, sometimes paying nearly $10,000 for air-conditioned, “Shikar-style” camping tents. A backdrop for the rich and famous, it’s been attended by the likes of Kendall Jenner, Justin Bieber and Rihanna, even spawned a luxury vacation rental industry catering to festival elite.
But it wasn’t always like this.
In 2009, 2010 and 2011, Coachella was sweaty, surreal, and a whole lot of fun.
Before it started hawking $375 sushi dinners and $7,600 VIP travel packages, the festival gave bored Coachella Valley teenagers a direct line to alternative culture. The first time I went was in 2009, when I was just a 14-year-old freshman — and when general admission tickets were about two-thirds the price they are now. Every spring, my peers and I would pore over the lineup as soon as it dropped, deliberating which artists we wanted to see and whose house we’d crash at.
And when we arrived at the polo grounds, we got to experience total anarchy: My stoner friends would sneak entire Ziploc baggies of weed in their maxi pads; we’d peer pressure boys to hop the fence, and the ones who actually did gave us bootlegged wristbands so we could all drink warm beer in the Heineken Dome (TM). While we pushed our way to the front of the crowd to watch artists like M.I.A., Arcade Fire and the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, we smoked ridiculous, pastel-colored cigarettes and incorrectly inhaled from “stealthy” marijuana pipes.
It was sweaty, surreal and a whole lot of fun.
However, it’s important to note that even when the festival offered $99 day passes and $249 three-day tickets, it was still a privilege to attend. I was fortunate that my family saw the value in experiencing live music and got me those tickets – but these days, it’s even harder for local kids from low-income and middle class families to have that same opportunity. So after 11 years, I decide to return to the festival to see whether it still possesses that same magic — and who’s able to actually attend.
An aerial view from the Coachella Music & Arts Festival, 2022.
Tragically, I learned that the average Coachella Valley teenager will probably never be able to share that same experience I had.
“I don’t hear about a lot of students going to Coachella,” says 17-year-old Palm Springs High student and student government President Keona Corona. “They come from low-income families so they’re not able to do so.” Corona says that the festival caters to celebrities and the wealthy, making it near-impossible for her and her peers to attend. “A raffle should occur at a high school where students have the opportunity to go,” she says.
Similarly, Corona’s friend, Riley Keane, a 17-year-old Palm Springs local, says that she wanted to go see Harry Styles but couldn’t. “It’s because of how expensive the tickets are … and because of parking, dealing with the lines and even trying to get near the Coachella grounds. It’s all just a mess.” When asked who she thinks the festival is for, she tells me that it’s mainly for social media influencers, as opposed to “normal” people.
But Rafael Lopez, aka Alf Alpha, a resident DJ who’s been playing Coachella since 2011 (and who DJ’ed my high school dance junior year) says that accessibility isn’t an issue. “If you want to go, you buy a ticket. Goldenvoice has been offering local ticket sales to all local Coachella Valley residents,” he writes via email. While Coachella does offer general admission passes to locals, they’re sold at “full price” for $599 — meaning that residents pay about $100 more than those who buy Tier 1 general admission passes.
Regardless, Lopez says that Coachella has revitalized the area. He explains that it put the valley on the map, turning the local community into a “mecca” for music, art and culture. “The festival has inspired lots of economic growth in the valley. The festival has also introduced many new visitors. … It's given our valley more life.”
Resident DJs say the festival put the valley on the map, turning the local community into a “mecca” for music, art and culture.
And he’s right — it brings big business to the desert.
Indio’s city manager, Bryan Montgomery, says that locals who rent out their houses during festival season use that income to pay off their mortgage for the entire year. Thomas Soule, Palm Desert spokesperson, says that hotels in the area book for $700 to $800 per night during Coachella weekend. Attendees also dine out at local restaurants and shop nearby outlets, boosting the city’s economy. “This is when most people make their money for the year," he says.
Since 2020, there’s been burgeoning interest in the desert: The prices of properties in Indio are rising by about 33% every year. And from fiscal year 2016-2017 through January 2022, Palm Springs raked in a staggering $57 million in transient occupancy taxes — an 11.5% tax on vacation rentals like Airbnbs or VRBOs.
The valley itself is slowly becoming a venue.
Despite the economic boon, full-time residents aren’t always happy about living near some of these “party houses.”
According to the Palm Springs’ same report, it receives an average of 974 active “nuisance” calls to its vacation rental hotline each year, and in 2021 alone, there were a total of 733 active calls about disturbances like loud music, too many cars clogging up the street, over-occupancy and homes operating without permits, which resulted in hundreds of citations. Regardless, the valley itself is slowly becoming a venue — and city officials aim to take advantage.
“Being at the nucleus of the Coachella and Stagecoach festivals naturally increases corporate and other business interest in the city of Indio,” Montgomery writes. “We have received inquiries from those who recognize the city’s ability to stage big events and want to capitalize on that to further invest in projects that would benefit our residents, future residents and businesses.”
Scenes from the the scene: festival goers arrive for the Coachella Music & Arts Festival, on Thursday, April 14, 2022.
And following the rise of social media, optics are now just as important as the music itself. Over the years, Coachella has helped cultivate another industry: fast fashion. While it seems innocuous, the cheap, glittery stuff that gets bought for our social media posts is destroying the planet.
In 2019, The Fashion Law reported that Censuswide and Barnardo’s, a British charity, published a study revealing that “single-use outfits for music festivals, such as Glastonbury and Coachella, alone, account for approximately $307 million worth of items per year or about 7.5 million outfits worn only once.” The outlet says that this industry is already worth billions, and it’s only continuing to inflate.
According to a 2018 report from the United Nations Environmental Program, fast fashion accounts for 2% to 8% of global carbon emissions. And when the $15 rainbow fishnets and “bohemian spirit” bodysuits from brands like Dolls Kill inevitably get discarded, they’re burned in a landfill. By 2050, this industry alone will use up a quarter of the Earth’s “carbon budget.”
Festival goers walk among the many sights on the polo field at the Coachella Music and Arts Festival, on Friday April 15.
While I’m at Coachella, I see plenty of people taking photos in front of the iconic Ferris wheel, but I don’t recall actually seeing many people riding it. Surrounded by Festival Chads and their girlfriends, it was like my Instagram Explore page had come to life, with everyone cosplaying as happy concertgoers just so they could post about it online.They wait in droves for $12 lemonade and $9 pizza and maybe even hours to buy merch, even though the security guard told me it’s impossible to tell which bands are actually selling stuff. It’s like an amusement park, but specifically for influencers.
With this in mind, it’s difficult for me to fully embrace Coachella in the year 2022, despite the great performances I saw. I feel jaded and tired, spiritually and otherwise. But when I leave, I remember that no matter how it’s packaged and distributed, music is still a special, unifying force. After all, there’s something kind of amazing about watching girls in micromesh hot pants dance to Mongolian throat singing like it’s BTS. And perhaps because of our current circumstances, it means even more to those who attend.
“When we walked into the festival and we first heard and felt the beat of the bass, we immediately remembered exactly what we liked about concerts and what they meant to us,” Nick Romero, a Bay Area visitor told me. And when I did too, I couldn't help but agree.