Coachella is a sad, boring excuse for a festival

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Coachella is a sad, boring excuse for a festival

Let’s be honest with ourselves, it doesn’t even look fun

What do you think of when you think of a festival? Good music. Mud. People scandalously fucked up falling into each other’s tents. Pictures of you and your friends, red-eyed and toothy, that will be sent down your group chat and loooool’d over extensively but never reach the light of day in your tagged Facebook photos. Wellies. Glitter. Good times.

None of that exists at Coachella, and if this year’s coverage of the so-called festival proved anything, it’s that that doesn’t exist at Coachella because Coachella is a fucking boring shithole.

OK, admittedly, I have never been to Coachella. I don’t own a flower crown anymore, it’s 2017 (I guess it would be fine if I did), and more importantly than that, I’m poor OK? Tickets for Coachella cost up to $900, and that’s not including your travel costs there and accommodation (nobody stays in a shit tent they borrowed from home, obviously). So no, I’m not basing my hatred of the whole thing on any kind of personal experience. And yes, it might sound a little bitter for that reason. But hear me out.

Even if you did have a grand to blow on the high-end Coachella experience, it’s not a huge stretch of the imagination to say that it is definitely not worth the money. Coachella is not a festival, it’s a sanitised, diluted version of what a permatanned, horsey-vaneered LA exec thinks a festival should be like. Festivals are supposed to be hives of debauchery and mistakes and you, alone, dying Alcatel phone buzzing with 25 “where r u!!!” texts, swaying slightly under one of those flags of someone’s memorial to a dead friend while watching Future Islands, thinking oh my god I’m so fucked what if I end up as a dead friend on a memorial flag next year. 

That is not the vibe at Coachella. Look, for instance, at the Snapchat story showcasing the ~~wildest~~ bits of the whole extravaganza.

Here is rapper Tyga smiling for the camera while holding what looks to be a small vodka lemonade Here’s a girl eating cheese puffs LOL so random! Here are some women who appear to have been superimposed on this backdrop from a Missguided ad Travis Scott and Rae Srummurd have one whole bottle you guys! Drake playing golf like a wild motherfucka!

Alright fine, fine. Not everyone goes to festivals to get fucked up. OK, fine, some people go for the great music. And there was great music at Coachella right? Sure, we had to put up with Lady Gaga in place of Beyonce (in the most “no we don’t have Coke, is Pepsi OK?” moment of all time) Kendrick Lamar headlined! And if you missed Kendrick, don’t worry, there were some other legitimately great acts to watch right? Yes there is! If you enjoy the musical stylings of Martin Garrix and Bastille. It’s not that the Coachella line-up is particularly bad. It’s just that it’s filled with the kind of acts you could see for less money, in a better atmosphere somewhere else.

And yes, one of the main appeals of Coachella is arguably the celebrity endorsement. The place is crawling with A through D-List stars. And that’s not weird in itself – celebrities like to party, they like to party at festivals. We all know someone who swears on their mother’s life that they got wasted with Kate Moss and Cara Delevingne at Glasto and lived to tell the tale. But compare, for a second, pictures of Kate and Cara, to the pictures flooding your Instagram feed this weekend from Coachella (shield your eyes from the fun they are definitely having in these sponsored-by-huge-companies themed tents)!

Imagine spending time with people who take photos like this in clothes like this AT A FESTIVAL.

Coachella ???

A post shared by hailee steinfeld (@haileesteinfeld) on Apr 14, 2017 at 9:49pm PDT

Day 3 #vintage #imisscoachella

A post shared by Vanessa Hudgens (@vanessahudgens) on Apr 17, 2017 at 9:20am PDT

OK, OK. For argument’s sake, let’s look past the bland, clinical atmosphere and the dead-behind-the-eyes celebrity guests and the mixed reactions line-up and say that apart from those things Coachella is alright. It’s unproblematic. If you look past, that is, Kendall Jenner telling reporters that if they asked about her tone-deaf Pepsi ad they’d be immediately shut down and banned from speaking to her forever. Oh and Drake saying that he was racially profiled while staying at a hotel for the event (alright, whatever, the hotel wasn’t officially affiliated with Coachella, but still). If you ignore that, and the fact that the owner of Coachella funds a company which has allegedly donated to the Institute of American Values – which in case you can’t guess by the name, fucking hates gay marriage – then it’s fine. 

Oh, and all those white girls in feather headdresses obviously.

If you like sun-soaked corporate sponsored fun where cultural appropriation abounds and everyone’s asleep by 1am then by all means, go for it. Remortgage your house (ha ha who am I kidding nobody owns a house), take out a payday loan and pretend you partied with Kylie Jenner (even though her entourage kept you at least fifty feet away). Go to Coachella.

But it’s a trash festival for garbage people and you won’t have fun. That’s all I’m saying.

@rosielanners