Coachella 2010

LCD Soundsystem and Flame Vortex





Photos by Sam Julius

The Windmills

Photo by Phil Julius

Here we are at Coachella 2010, current center of the musical universe. Indio is ablaze with awesome music and scorching sunlight, and some great acts graced the stages last night. Arriving at the event was troublesome, however. Once on Jefferson, a mainline street into Indio coming off the interstate 5, traffic was so jammed we waited in snail pace traffic for 3 hours. We eventually found another route in and got a parking space. The lines to get a wristband were out of control and security was inefficient and scatterbrained to say the least. We had left at 12pm, and we were inside the grounds at 6:30. Time is scarce, so here is a brief rundown of some cool stuff:

Them Crooked Vultures
Josh Homme, Dave Grohl and John Paul Jones are all amazing artists and were definitely a successful recipe for a great live show. The main draw for me was Grohl, as this is what is becoming a rare chance to see him abuse a drum kit. He did not disappoint, with the machine of god fills and kick punching you in the face. Jones was locked in tight, filling out the low end, and Homme brought his blues and garage infested pop sensibilities to the mix (I'm a big fan of Queens of the Stone Age).

LCD Soundsystem
I've seen them before, and it seems they are consistently and awesome live band. I didn't see the whole show, but what I did see was great, them opening with Us v. Them, going into Drunk Girls, and closing with New York, I Love You. A giant disco ball hung above the stage. The energy of coming electronic dance with live instruments is great.

Jay-Z
I saw just a couple songs, including Brush ya shoulders off, a short part of Diamonds are forever, and Forever Young, that 80s song from Napoleon Dynamite which was sung by Beyonce. He had a great band behind him, and a really good visual set up.

Public Image Limited
This was a weird show. PiL is abrasive, atonal music to begin with, with little more and funky vamping bass and drums to hold it together. Johnny Rotten is still a psycho, singing with strange vibrato and snarl. This music seems to run from deep trenches of British disgust and impotency, so its not exactly good vibes music. Most people seemed to be locked in an apathetic stare while watching.

For Damon Albarn, its all a blur

With the new Gorillaz album coming out and with their impending Coachella headlining, it seems like a good time to reflect on Damon Albarn's musical contributions with his two successful acts, Blur and Gorillaz. I was recently relating to a friend how I though that Blur is an awesome band, possibly in a league with other seminal British acts like Radiohead, and even share similar themes of 21st century alienation and paranoia, yet were simple too obviously British and therefore not cool enough to break big in America. This implies that Americans have a fairly strict sense of what is cool, and that to embrace such an English aesthetic like Blur is to fall outside the boundaries of that cool.

Radiohead, on the other hand, don't seem to come lyrically from any geographical point; Thom Yorke is singing purely from his own disenchanted psyche, his own personal wonderland. Yet this leads to an inhumanness to the music, whereas Blur is all Essex flesh and blood, and therefore vulnerable to the scrutiny of American cool. Their masterpiece, Parklife, is a concept album ABOUT being English, among other things, and haunts the same emotionally desolate territory as OK Computer and Dark Side of the Moon, but because of the specificity of where the music comes from, carries a fun exoticness with it, as if your musical journey is both emotional AND physical.

If this was ever a problem for Damon Albarn, he has definitely rectified it with Gorillaz, for better or worse. With this group it appears Albarn has reverse engineered American cool, or at least built a sturdy copycat, made up of spare hip-hop beats, smoggy ambient drones and the occasional folky guitar strum. Like a miniature British invasion, Gorillaz is once again selling us our own music, and obviously having more success than any successful American rock band right now. Gone are the British doldrums of Albarn's parklife, replaced with fiery narratives of America's impending doom. But in Blur it was obviously Albarn was really LIVING those doldrums, whereas now he's simply the wizard behind the curtain, a ghost in the machine, safe from the turmoil he's mapping out. And of course we eat it up, our most narcissistic impulses being stroked, for who wants to hear the Great American Novel more than America? While Yorke is suspended in his psyche, his own world, Albarn is suspended in the music machine he's built, made from parts not his own, but if he doesn't do it, who will?

While Blur was personal and local, Gorillaz is international (or American, but in this setting America's devastation is the world's) and has our hero acting more as a central nervous system than human, simply holding it all together. If you can't live up to a standard of cool, you can always reinvent yourself, but its hard to keep it all in focus. Keep it sickly!