A Look At...
Coachella Coachella Lollapalooza LOLLAPALOOZA Edc ELECTRIC DAISY CARNIVAL Stagecoach STAGECOACH
#WORLDFAMOUSPARTY
Artist Profile
MAJOR LAZER
Coachella THE COACHELLA VALLEY OF MUSIC AND ARTS is an annual three-day music and arts festival, founded by Paul Tollett, organized by Goldenvoice, and held at the Empire Polo Club in Indio, California in the Inland Empire’s Coachella Valley. The event features many music genres, includingrock, indie, hip hop, and electronic music, as well as sculpture. Across the grounds, several stages continuously host live music. The main stages are: Coachella Stage, Outdoor Theatre, Gobi Tent, Mojave Tent, and the Sahara Tent.
Past artists include: Snoop Dogg, Paul McCartney, The Killers, Radiohead, Daft Punk, Madonna, Florence and the Machine, Kanye West, The Black Keys, Gorillaz, The Strokes, Swedish House Mafia, MGMT, The White Stripes, and Jay-Z. 1 |
MAJOR LAZER, LIKE MANY dance-hall and EDM artists, traffics in nostalgia via sentimental ’80s and ’90s samples. Evidence of that was apparent from the crowd’s reaction during Diplo’s sundown set with Major Lazer, which was packed to bursting with frenzied fans. Candy-coated samples from the likes of House of Pain, Eurythmics, and, gasp, Nirvana, “Smells Like Teen Spirit,” were employed to great sentimental effect. EDM is the new disco, and stands out in thumping relief from Coachella’s treasured new wave, alt-rock, and punk staples, which basically amount to classic rock at this point. And its rise makes sense. The world is digital now — a sea of raised iPhones during Major Lazer’s set paid testament to that fact. And when Major Lazer samples a beloved tune such as “Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This),” there is no visual reference point for the age of the song, so it is allowed to be timeless. That, and the whole danceable aspect of the mix, which flirts with beats perfectly calibrated to shift your groove thing into high gear. Thousands of raves, in thousands of cities worldwide, over the past 20 years, prove the ongoing popularity — and efficacy — of this simple musical tactic. “Coachella, make sure the person next to you has their shirt off,” yelled Fire halfway through Major Lazer’s set. Suddenly, through the speakers came a crashing, creaking sound like a dungeon door closing. “Throw your shirts in the air,” he insisted. Topless, the crowd swung the sweat-soaked fabric above their heads.
THIS PAST SATURDAY Alf Alpha, took partygoers on a wild ride. At 10:00pm sharp they boarded the ship, “World Famous”, for a trip that had themmoving, shaking, sweating, dancing, and partying to music selections from the 1970’s into the future, with origins from Africa, Berlin, New York, infused with that energy and enthusiasm that is similar to that you can find in all the party scenes and underground dance clubs in-between. The bartenders served each guest their personalized party potion Rx fix while The Coachella Valley Art Scene offered free art supplies to supplement the times a break from the dance floor was needed. The three different entitities complimented one another and kept a nice flow of a party atmosphere steady vibin’.
THE MUSIC GOES ON... IN THE FOUR DAYS between its two-weekend run, two bombs went off at the Boston Marathon, killing three and injuring scores more. Yet Boston’s Dropkick Murphys, which considered dropping off the bill to go home to friends and family, was perhaps the only band to reference the incident from the festival’s main stage, injecting a sense of reality into the otherwise carefree fairgrounds. The band grappled with how to bring current events into its set and thanked the crowd for “showing so much support for the people of Boston,” words that drew some of the biggest cheers of the weekend. However, the band debated against asking for a moment of silence.
DON’T MISS: PHILLIP K. SMITH III If you are one of those super rad individuals who have been following The Coachella Valley Art Scene since 2008 then the name, ‘Phillip K Smith III,’ might ring a bell. Phillip is an artist based in the Coachella Valley (by way of Indio) who we have been a fan of for years. We first caught interest through his public art pieces and from there stumbled upon his sculpture work, works on paper…and are now fascinated with his LED Lightings (and beyond). Every year Phillip pumps out more work, better work and travels further with it. Because of his journey and his return to the Coachella Valley to work and live as a fulltime artist, he is someone that we feel a lot of younger desert artists could look up to, especially those interested in installation, architecture and tech art. | 2
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POINTS OF INTEREST
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Kate Bosworth
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3 Emma Watson
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Joe Jonas, Lily Collins Alessandra Ambrosio, AnnaSophia Robb, Nick Jonas
6 Paris Hilton, Nicky Hilton
7 Alexa Chung
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Lea Michele, Katy Perry Lauren Conrad
10 Ashley Benson Troian Bellisario
ow To Make It Through Lollapalooza
“Lollapalooza is a place where young upstarts become legends, and legends return to claim their fame.” THIS YEAR, Lollapalooza returned to Grant Park for its eighth installment as a one-city, one-weekend festival, and this year’s lineup of nearly 140 acts is a mix of well-established names, buzzy upstarts, and veteran festival performers, spread across eight stages. It’s easy to get overwhelmed, if not by the insane crowds and profusion of logos, then by the task of planningw your day so that you’ll end up in front of artists you actually want to see. TICKETS All flavors of tickets, from single-day to VIP, are sold out. There are plenty on the secondary market going for about double their face value, and they might not even get you into the festival. LOCATION Lollapalooza sprawls over 115 largely
shade-free acres of Grant Park, with the main stages at opposite ends of the grounds. (They’re nearly a mile apart, so be prepared to do a lot of walking.) The primary entrance is at the intersection of Michigan and Congress; there’s a smaller one at Monroe and Columbus. GETTING THERE The downtown location means you’ve got a wide variety of CTA options, and there’s plentiful bike parking near the main entrance. The parking situation would make driving an exceptionally bad idea even without the overwhelming pedestrian traffic. BESIDES THE MUSIC Lollapalooza offers a wide variety of activities
that don’t involve watching music. Two Chow Town locations will be serving everything from fast food by fine-dining chefs to deep-dish pizzas (which some people eat in the sweltering heat, as difficult as that is to believe). The Kidzapalooza festival-within-a-festival has family-friendly performances, music workshops, airbrush-tattoo stations, and more. Several sponsored tents are also competing to give you stuff to do, including video games and something called Whac-a-H ipster (in the Prius tent), and some of them have air-conditioning, which is worth being aggressively marketed at. The Rock & Recycle program gives attendees the opportunity to exchange scavenged recyclables for swag at four locations.
A MUSICAL DOUBLE TAKE
The band the Bowerbirds.
The Texas guitarist Gary Clark Jr.
The band FUN.
Orlando Higginbottom/Totally Enormous Extinct Dinosaurs performed at the Spin Magazine party.
Yukimi Nagano of Little Dragon.
Channy Leaneagh of Polica, a Minneapolis band
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Behind The Scenes At Electric Daisy Carnival OUTSIDE THE DATES of the Las Vegas Motor Speedway, along the dusty perimeter road, party kids mass in the flat glare of the dusk sun. They’re here for the Electric Daisy Carnival, hyped as America’s largest rave—though it’s unlikely anybody here would describe it that way. “It’s not actually a rave,” says Peter, a cloud programmer in his late twenties from the Pacific Northwest I’d met in the hour-long cab line back at the Strip. “It’s a massive. A rave is at a warehouse, and it’s noncommercial. EDC is a hundred thousand people at a racetrack.” EDC is such a massive massive that it takes us twenty minutes to rush across the interior staging ground of the Speedway, from
craze for a culture increasingly addicted to accelerated nostalgia, or was this something different? There at the Speedway, the scene had grown so inclusive—Greek-letter tank tops and athletic jerseys—that it was hard to tell if it was a scene at all. I put the question to Peter, who was dressed in a symphony of gray: “When you look out at these people, do you see anything like a coherent style or culture?” “You can tell sometimes by how people are dressed what genre they’re into,” he says. He gestures at a little flock of scant-vested people who could be parking attendants at a busy nudist colony. “Like, those kids in the Day-Glo neon, they’re probably into house. And the kids who are in black or goth are probably into dubstep.
The entrance past the six satellite stages to the main stage, kineticFIELD. Though the biggest DJs aren’t on until 1 or 2 A.M., some of Peter’s favorite acts are on early, and our special wristbands—his VIP, mine media—hadn’t gotten us out of the long line to be frisked. That hundreds of thousands of kids would fly and drive across the country to pay hundreds or thousands of dollars to spend three days in the desert dancing to the beats of some 150 DJs would have seemed rather unlikely even, say, three years ago. Somehow the thing that everybody had predicted circa 1995— that electronic dance music (hereafter: EDM) would take over pop—had been delayed a mere seventeen years. In 2012, a gentleman named Skrillex, whose music sounds like a computerized raccoon fight, took home three Grammys, sweeping the electronic categories, and was the first EDM act to be nominated for Best New Artist. Deadmau5 appeared on the front page of The New York Times in his signature mouse head. Forbes estimated that Tiësto was averaging $83,000 an hour for his DJ sets. No corner deli went unthrobbed by a Calvin Harris beat. Why was this happening now? Was this really the rave scene’s triumphant return, another retro 9 |
“You can tell
sometimes by how people are dressed what
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genre they’re into,
We’re “living in a house moment now.” The biggest DJ here this weekend is Avicii, Peter says. Avicii is Swedish and is 23. He first got big at age 18 when the Swedish House Mafia started picking him up and playing his tracks. The Swedish House Mafia is a group of three DJs who perform separately and together. Their name isn’t meant to be ironic. “He was all of a sudden number six in the world last year. Now suddenly everybody’s gotta be house. Like, Deadmau5 is huge now, and he’s house. Tiësto was a trance DJ forever, and he switched from trance to house. Like, Armin—” “Armin van Buuren?” “Can you explain why trance used to be popular and now it’s house?” “The tastes change quickly because it’s easy to know what’s the most popular, and there’s this constant drive for novelty. Free music leads to quick evolution, and the music is like a virus.” It’s beating in our circuitry. | 10
REGULAR ART ISTS
Armin van Buuren is a Dutch trance producer and DJ. He is the number one ranked DJ having won DJ Magazine’s Top 100 DJs fan poll a record of 5 times, including winning 4 consecutive years between 2007–2010 and again in 2012.
David Guetta is a French house music producer and disc jockey. He has sold over six million albums and 15 million singles worldwide.In 2011 Guetta was voted as the #1 DJ in the ‘DJ Mag Top 100 DJs’ fan poll.
Ryan Raddon better known by his stage name Kaskade, is an American DJ and record producer. Kaskade rose to prominence alongside producers deadmau5 and Wolfgang Gartner during the revival of American progressive house in late 2008-early 2009.
Joel Thomas Zimmerman, better known by his stage name deadmau5, is a Canadian progressive-house music producer and performer based in Toronto now in Las Vegas. Deadmau5 produces a variety of styles within the house genre and sometimes other forms of electronic dance music.
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Creator of
Stagecoach
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AUL TOLLETT KNEW HE HAD TO meet some sky-high expectations when he launched Stagecoach: Califor nia’s Country Music Festival in 2007. That’s because this veteran promoter is also the founder of the Coachella Valley Music & Arts Festival, which over the past dozen years has grown into the nation’s most popular and successful annual weekend extravaganza for fans of indie-rock, hiphop, electronic dance music and various offshoots and hybrids. Stagecoach, for which some tickets are still available, takes place April 26-28. Topping the bill this year are such proudly middle-of-the -countr y -road artists as Toby Keith, Lady Antebellum, and the Zac Brown Band. Musical cousins. “If we were going to be judged for Stagecoach a week or two after Coachella, we wanted to be sure the festival could stand up to the comparisons of Coachella,” said Tollett, who is the president of the Los Angeles-based concert production company Goldenvoice. “It’s a different kind of music at Stagecoach, but we didn’t want it to be trimmed or toned down. We wanted it to be Coach 13 |
ella, but for country music.” He chuckled. “I consider Stagecoach the country cousin of Coachella, basically, the country version of Coachella,” Tollett added. “Or, as someone told me: ‘Coachella, with songs!’ ” Make that Coachella with songs, plus a more relaxed vibe and a lot more room to roam, since the 55,000 attendance cap at Stagecoach is about 30,000 fewer than at Coachella. Stagecoach has grown steadily in popularity since its inception in 2007, when the lineup included Alan Jackson, George Strait, Willie Nelson and San Diego’s Nickel Creek.
“To this day, people come up to me saying: ‘I saw you at Stagecoach (in 2007), and that’s when I became a fan of yours.’
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National footprint “Stagecoach has been remarkably successful, especially considering the general lack of radio stations that play country music in California. There are some country-music festivals in other states, but none of them seem to have the national footprint that Stagecoach does,” said Gary Bongiovanni, the publisher of Pollstar, the concert industry’s leading weekly publication. Last year’s edition, which featured Brad Paisley, Miranda Lambert and Jason Aldean, was the first to officially draw a soldout crowd of 55,000. And, like Coachella, Stagecoach can provide invaluable
even thought about (next year’s) Coachella yet,” said Tollett, who cites watching “Hee Haw” on TV as a kid as his first exposure to country music. What sets Stagecoach apart, though, isn’t its superstar country-pop headliners. Rather, it’s Tollett’s thoughtful inclusion of bluegrass, alternative-country and vintage traditional artists, many of whom are ignored by most pop-oriented country radio stations. This year, that includes Texas-swing veterans Commander Cody & His Lost Planet Airmen, left-of-center country band The Little Willies (whose lead singer is Norah Jones) and the acoustic balladry
exposure for rising young artists eager to make a big impact. Jason Aldean, who performed at the first edition of Stagecoach in 2007 and has since become a major star, can personally attest to that impact. “To this day,” he said in a 2011 U-T San Diego interview, “people come up to me saying: ‘I saw you at Stagecoach (in 2007), and that’s when I became a fan of yours.’ We made a lot of fans that day.” Those fans are growing increasingly younger at Stagecoach, a phenomenon Tollett attributes in part to the popularity of Taylor Swift and other fresh-faced country-pop artists. And, he noted, the Stagecoach audience likes rock music -- more than a few Stagecoach acts each year include a classic-rock cover in their sets -but not the kind of proudly left-of-center rock that is Coachella’s bread-and-butter. “I already have two headliners booked for Stagecoach next year, and I haven’t
of Nickel Creek alum Sara Watkins. At previous editions of Stagecoach, Tollett has carefully mixed in such bluegrass greats as Sam Bush and Jerry Douglas, rockabilly pioneer Wanda Jackson, the San Diego-bred country-swing band Hot Club of Cowtown, and rock and country legend Jerry Lee Lewis. “Just in general, we like the diversity when we’re putting a festival together,” Tollett said. “Even if the main stages are where the majority of people are going, we like having bluegrass, alt-country and cowboy storytelling.” Ultimately, though, Stagecoach owes its existence to Tollett’s bigger and better-known annual festival in Indio. “I think Coachella cut a path to make Stagecoach easier for us to build,” he said. “Because of the success of Coachella, we gave it a shot.” - Paul Tollett | 14