Maybe, a cynical observer would say, Coachella 2024 also proved that the future might not have much to offer. If you followed the festival online, you’re aware that
Grimes’ Saturday evening DJ set in the yawning Sahara tent went less than smoothly. It would, in fact, be difficult to communicate to anyone who wasn’t there what an utter disaster it was: The music kept lurching to a halt, with Grimes going on extended rants about how the people to which she’d outsourced all her prep work had not properly prepared her tracks. (“This actually isn’t my fault,” she said at one point.) The third or fourth time she complained about the displayed BPMs being incorrect, she warned the crowd that she would have to simply listen to tracks as they played and try to match them with others in real time—prompting the woman beside me to say, “Yeah, that’s DJing.”