Coachella and the Art of Escape
by Matt Lemas
“Turn on, tune in, drop out”
The sun beats down at excruciating temperatures. People stick to each other like a pack of sardines left out on a backyard countertop. Dust consistently wafts in the air, slipping into to your lungs and clogging your throat.
And yet, the Coachella Music and Arts Festival sold out this year in under 20 minutes. Nearly 100,000 people clamored into the Empire Polo Club this month to attend the annual musical festival, a three-day extravaganza held for two consecutive weekends in the California desert.
But for the vast majority of the world that doesn’t flock out to this musical mecca, it can seem to be a confusing gesture of reckless abandonment — a venture gazed upon from afar with a dissecting stare. The constricting crowds, the exorbitant ticket prices — why on God’s green earth (or brown, for California’s sake) do people submit themselves to a seemingly grueling exhibition?
For the same reason that my mother booked an impromptu vacation to Hawaii last summer. For the same reason that you find yourself staring aimlessly out the classroom window. And for the same reason that you call in sick with food poisoning on an exceptionally beautiful day.
Escape.
Escape from the tired and tried, endless cycle of modern life. Escape from routine. That is why people go, and that is why they will continue to go.
When Coachella first launched in 1999, it was a different beast entirely. The one-day event was attended by roughly 25,000 people, and as one attendee told me last weekend, it was merely a “haven for music nerds.”
The festival, however, has now seemed to transcend its musical headliners entirely. Just consider, for instance, the fact that advance sale for the festival sold out last May in just three hours — eight months before the musical line up was even released.
Critics aside, this year’s performances were impressive, star-studded by musicians of both contemporary and aged fame: AC/DC, Drake, Jack White, the list goes on — but more often than not, attendees will discuss their weekend far beyond than they would of a typical concert. To put it bluntly, the experience of the festival now trumps its musical selling points.
For just three days it seems like reality doesn’t exist, because it doesn’t. For the man who spends five days a week inside a cubicle, or the student who weaves in and out of lecture halls like a listless zombie, Coachella is a fantasy. The desire to shed life’s responsibilities and fiddle while Rome burns, so to speak, is shared by the 90,000 patrons carelessly dancing beside you.
Accountants, students and dental hygienists alike spring out of their societal constraints, leave them abandoned on the dried-up grass of Indio, and revel under the beating sun. There are no conference calls, no midterms, no appointments. The cellular service barely lets in a bar or two — your boss couldn’t get an email through to you if he wanted to.
And thus, Coachella is a plunge into both isolation and community, allowing you to exit stage right from your day job and enter into an oasis where renowned artists play the backing music to a weekend of constant, personal daze.
Perhaps indie pop vocalist Marina and the Diamonds described it most eloquently during a song off her Sunday sunset performance:
Underneath it all, we’re just savages
Hidden behind shirts, ties and marriages
How could we expect anything at all?
We’re just animals still learning how to crawl.
Coachella is an exhibition into that savagery — the idea that the young and old alike can communally seek a hedonistic escape from the mundane nature of everyday life, even if it’s only for a weekend.
Matt Lemas is a second-year journalism student at the University of Southern California. He has attended Coachella since 2013 and keeps the wristband on for far too long afterward.
