Sarahindie

My very favorite thing about Coachella is that it requires camping in the desert in California. I do not like deserts or camping. And in SoCal in April, bound to be on the warm side. That means the lineup can never be good enough to tempt me to blow a grand on going! However, it is still my duty to share the lineup with you. (Via our friends at Current Music.)Now, it’s not bad, per se. It’s just … odd. Instead of breaking it down by day, let’s look at it by category.

Obligatory indie bands promoting new albums: Vampire Weekend, Mew, Raveonettes, White Rabbits, Cribs, Them Crooked Vultures, etc.

Obligatory indie bands who are just available in April: LCD Soundsystem, MGMT, The Dead Weather, Spoon, Phoenix, Florence and the Machine, etc.

Obligatory Jay-Z: Jay-Z

Obligatory legacy indie bands: Public Image Limited, The Specials, Faith No More, Pavement, Gorillaz (not technically a legacy band, but I didn’t know they were still performing), Sly and the Family Stone, Echo and the Bunnymen.

Typically, a festival might have one legacy band per day, almost always one that is in the process of reforming or pushing a greatest hits album by pretending they’re reforming. I only included the legacy bands in the top two font sizes and I came away with six. I am left with that feeling of “Oh, of course” that I get everytime Broadway announces a new jukebox musical (“A hastily made but surely insanely profitable musical based around the music of ELO? Oh, of course.”) Every band that broke up before 1999 has spent the last year scheduling meetings and trying to find their guitars. Strike while the iron is hot, eh?

But mostly I came to complain? moan? about the weirdest thing on this flyer. The second stage headliner for the last day says “Thom Yorke????” Um, did they not confirm it before they went to press? I would have waited press on that one, or at least put down “Surprise guest!” and then circulated the rumor that it’s Yorke. If he pulls out, ticket buyers are gonna be piiiiiissed. Unless he’s just using the question marks as part of his name, the way Fun. has a period or 3!OH3 has an exclamation point. But it means that he must always refer to himself in the exaggeratedly interrogatory. “Hello, everyone. I’m Thom Yorke????” He should lift his eyebrows for emphasis.