I’m literally not supposed to be typing a whole lot until I get my desk set up better because I’m 85% sure I’m developing a repetitive strain injury in my right wrist but Coachella went and made me mad, y’all.

Frank Ocean came as close as he could to a Friday news dump considering that Friday is basically the Monday of the music business world, so Wednesday is the weekend. That man …

A little before 6 pm ET, Coachella announced that he was dropping out of his headlining slot on Sunday after a myriad of issues during the first weekend of the festival: his livestream getting “cancelled” (or apparently never supposed to happen to begin with??? unclear!) mere hours before his set, then taking the stage an hour late, apparently scrapping an entire ice rink from his stage production, getting cut short due to noise ordinances (everyone who’s confused about “the curfew,” see me after class), but as the official PR reason goes, it’s all because of fractures in his leg.

(Frank, did you not read where I said I wasn’t supposed to be typing this right now…? Sometimes we gotta do things that physically hurt us. For the sake of the art! Or in my case, the rage. The joke. Anyway.)

Listen, for all the heartache over Frank Ocean in the last few days, I don’t really care about all that. I like his songs well enough, but I wasn’t going to stay up that late trying to find a bootleg stream. I love myself. I set reasonable boundaries and expectations about things. Also when Blonde came out, I was busy working two jobs, one of which was at the 9:30 Club, and also crying around campus because my GPA sucked so bad I was on academic probation. If I didn’t get these damn grades up, I wasn’t going abroad! So there were bigger fish to fry than Frank Ocean (and to be honest, there still are).

I had listening homework for my music theory class, and my music history class, and I was for some masochistic reason trying to take a class that taught French to people who already spoke Spanish and this was after a year of studying Italian, so when I tell you my brain was a jumbled mess, if it was fall 2016 it probably would have come out something like “Mon…mente? Cabeza? Comme dirait…c’est une…minchia! I mean…c’est roto. Rota. Spezzata. Whatever, you get the picture.” But like. All the time. About everything.

But like. Frank. No time for Frank! I missed the bus. I missed it the first time around, too, which is crazy because I was on Tumblr (and still am!) and had friends who were super into Odd Future but something else must’ve been fucking me up back then. As we’ve learned through experience (me through Romance languages and presumably you all through Twitter): Our brains are only equipped to process so much new information at a time.

My open tabs right now are like: calorie-dense meals. SUGA ALBUM PR email. Two articles I’m noodling on reading because they’re related to a pitch I’ve sent out five times in the last week but I don't want to pre-write any more about this than I already have if it’s never going to get greenlit. (It’s about how Frog and Toad became queer, cottagecore, anti-capitalist icons in the last few years for my demographic. Have you seen these videos?) Several tabs of different types of keyboards I might buy. (My achey, breaky wrist, you guys…) A birth chart calculator because I finally, after years of asking my mom to look it up for me, went and dug through my parents’ hoard of papers to find my PRECISE birth time on my birth certificate. (2:06 AM — I had thought maybe 2:02-2:05, although no one could ever tell me whether it mattered significantly if it was a few minutes off — these people treated it like it did — and also it turns out they do not list the time of birth for Florida babies in the ‘90s on the official certificate! Evidence was gathered elsewhere.) Um, Angelica Jade Bastién’s piece on Brangelina that I meant to read when it came out in the fall except I’d run out of free Vulture articles (I’m still out of free Vulture articles FWIW) because it relates to the not-even-halfway-finished 3000 word draft of my Lana Del Rey essay that I meant to send out via this newsletter three weeks ago. IRS form 1040-ES, baby! (Because even though Q1 estimated taxes for self-employed individuals were due Tuesday, I still have not decided if I want to pay them, lmao. Listen! My income varies wildly month-to-month, how am I supposed to know how much I’m going to make this year!!!!! IRS!!!!!) And I would have more tabs open but the Zoom meeting I used to record New Music Friday with Robin crashed when I was talking about the unifying theory of Suga’s songcraft (a man who loves to ask a question in the first verse and spend the rest of the song coming up with different answers, perspective adjustments, and clarifying questions on a theme!) for this week’s episode so I had to close them all.

And I’m truly resisting the urge to edit this newsletter to make it #cohere but every time I clean one of these drafts up I never end up sending it out so I’ll just keep going! Is this what the early digital media blogger days were like? #UNFILTERED. A peek inside my mente spezzata.

Livestreaming to hell (and we never came back)

Frank Ocean! I ain’t reading all that. (This is what the people who opened this newsletter to a giant wall of text said before exiting back out.) I’m sorry that happened to you. Really why I’m tempting the carpal tunnel gods tonight is because Coachella is replacing him this Sunday with Blink-182 and I cannot abide by that.

This is the first year that Coachella is livestreaming (ALLEGEDLY) the whole festival of performances, but we already know that’s a lie because Sunday night when 10 pm (ET) rolled around, suddenly Björk and Frank were no longer on the menu. I don’t have time to get into all that. My point is that this streaming format is actually my ideal scenario because I’ve only been to two arena shows, Sia (thank you, Jeff, who is reading this!) and — DON’T LAUGH — Harry Styles (KACEY MUSGRAVES WAS OPENING, OKAY!? If you want me to hate on that man again, I will, just say the word, there are DRAFTS). And I did not like them. I’m an audio snob. And like, however I feel about the way that 9:30 hates Ticketmaster but has done its darndest to create a similar monopoly over the DC music scene without establishing avenues to lift up local musicians or play a part in the local scene … the Club sounds good. They got that right. I spent more time in that room and tabling the lobby of Lincoln Theatre in 2016 than I did writing my damn papers which is probably why I was stumbling around campus listening to Norah Jones and crying in basements so much and ignoring Blonde.

Arenas shows do not sound good. I do not like them. And if you’re going to be so far away from the stage that you have to watch the screens to know what’s going on (maybe you see where I’m going with this), you might as well be at home watching it on YouTube and hearing the music captured through professional recording equipment from the source, rather than echoing around a cavernous space and muddled beyond comprehension. Coachella livestreaming their sets? This is how I win.

So as someone who painstakingly combed through the schedule, wrote down a personalized agenda for what streams to watch and when, and caught 17 sets over the first weekend, all I have to say is: Who in their right mind would pick Blink-182 to headline the second weekend over Rosalía????

Put Rosalía in the game, Coach(ella)

Man, I almost wish I took notes on Motomami when it came out but I decided "this one's for me." Something that a lot of people are, understandably, not sympathetic to is that when you criticize music for a living at the rate I do (I've written and spoken about 40 albums so far this year, have taken notes on many more that I wanted to write about, and have evaluated many, many more than that that I didn’t), it becomes hard to turn off the part of your brain that turns listening to music into work. Homework. The fucking hustle. How can I leverage my instinctual reaction to this to make enough money that I can stop checking my banking app every hour like it’s the world’s slowest moving social media app? It’s honestly why I’ve had 20 ideas for this newsletter in the last three months but sent out none of them: Because I believe my ideas are worth money. I probably could have been paid to tighten this up and write my core idea as an op-ed! Rosalía deserved to headline Coachella. Eh, the word “deserved” is a little loaded, but you get the idea. It would generate some conversation, at least. That’s half the game.

Sometimes even when I decide I want something for myself I can’t stop it from happening. The interrogation. But Motomami is so wild and complex, a series of contradictions alchemized into new shape, where do you even begin to question it? That’s a rare gift for me. I didn’t really want to. I thought I would wait for the shine to wear off before I picked it apart, but then it never did. And then I wondered if breaking off parts of the album to examine was antithetical to its vision.

I’ve said this a thousand times and I’ll say it a thousand more: The best albums of 2022, and I would bet the best albums of this decade to come, argue for the multiplicity of the self. Just try to fucking define me! Put me in a box! You can’t! Rosalía was the first artist to put this into perspective for me, and then I couldn’t stop seeing it. Yo me transformo. I am not just one thing. I am many things. I transform.

Rosalía’s live show gives weight to this credence. It's a pop performance moving at the speed of social media, which you knew from the jump if you saw her TikTok live video — 29 minutes, 14 songs, discrete concepts fluidly rolling into one another, and I do mean "roll" if we're talking about flipping your phone upside down as she changes the angle of the stream, or as some brave twink throws the camera up into the air and we watch from the lens as it spins back to earth.

This is the foundation of her Motomami tour, too: A challenge to the traditional perspective. The camera shadows her, not as a voyeur but as a performer itself. It’s interactive. There feels like a delineation happening in real time between an older mode of performance and a newer one that she's creating, bringing the audience on stage with her. Not you-out-there and me-up-here. Rosalía said “What fourth wall!!!”

My friend Sarah, who saw Rosalía at Lollapalooza Argentina as an unsuspecting festival-goer, points out that this show is flawless without feeling produced, and I know what she means here. An audience member should feel that sense of risk when a performer takes the stage, that sense of spontaneity, that anything can happen. There is a very real line, in my opinion, between the kind of show where everything is rehearsed into conformity, where you lose the excitement of being in the room where someone is bringing art to life, and the kind of performance that is highly crafted but loose. Confident. The kind of show that runs at the pace of the performer, not the other way around.

Black to the … well it’s still black out here because the girls haven’t gone on stage

That’s the exact issue that plagued Blackpink’s performance for me: the performer ran at the pace of the show. I really just couldn’t understand why it was taking them so long to transition between songs. You could feel the weight of the effort it takes to put on a show like this dragging behind each one, which is maybe not something I would have minded as much if:

1. They hadn’t been 30 minutes late to take the stage
2. It hadn’t been past 1 in the morning — YES it was a weekend but I’m an adult! I have a bedtime! If I’m staying up past 11:30 pm, it better feel like it was worth every minute because I’m going to be feeling every minute when I wake up at 7:30 am, no matter what, as if commanded by god!
3. Rosalía hadn’t just delivered an astounding sprint through almost every single track on Motomami and her singles and a few covers (“Blinding Lights”? A novelty pick. Enrique Iglesias’ “Heroe”? Waterworks-inducing, people!), with a hot mic, low-to-no backing vocal track, blasting through complicated choreography in a way that just about matched the skill of her back-up dancers, with her stage presence incandescent.

There were a few moments over the weekend where the pace of the show made itself felt. Ethel Cain, who writes rapturous music that rewards patience with catharsis, had only gotten through four songs by the time she was 30 minutes into her set. (She managed seven overall. This is not an indictment! Maddie and I drove through Big Cottonwood Canyon blasting “American Teenager” this fall and I know girls on Tumblr who claw the flesh from their cheeks when they hear “Sun Bleached Flies” and I’m not not one of them.) Realizing that Rosalía had whipped through Motomami, brought out Rauw Alejandro for two songs (love is REAL), and still had more to go was another moment. (I think she clocked 24 overall.)

But it did not escape my notice that although Blackpink started with “Pink Venom,” the single from their latest album Born Pink, it would be another hour before we heard more music from it, and they didn’t go out on any of those songs to close the show. This is not a strong vote of confidence in the new material. To be frank, I didn’t enjoy the new album, which is a shame. Blackpink really nailed this signature formula of the anti-chorus: building up all this anticipation and power to a peak on the verse and pre-chorus and then sucking the air out of the room instead of a beat drop, like on “DDU-DU-DDU-DU” or “Let’s Kill This Love.” I could forgive that these songs had a whole lot of nonsense lyrics, onomatopoeia choruses, for the sake of the banger. But the new album attempted to replicate this without succeeding at the banger aspect. “Straight to your dome like whoa-whoa-whoa,” I can’t do it. I get that with a global, multilingual audience, they might want to keep it simple and singable no matter if you speak English, Korean, or whatever but when you can hear the business decision in the music — if that’s what it is — it really takes away part of the joy of hearing a good song. If the song’s any good.

I did enjoy getting to see each member take a solo turn because I like all these individual songs, but aside from Lisa, who seems to rise to whatever occasion (like, do I wish she worked to nail more words in these songs live? yes. does the fact that you cannot look away from her on stage make up for that? if she can dance like that, then yes), I think the stage production for Jennie, Jisoo, and Rosé was too overwhelming to really showcase their talents. Jisoo’s mic slipped down her face during “Flower” and there was so much nonstop hand choreo she couldn’t even take half a second to pull it back up. And “On The Ground” was one of my favorite songs of 2021 and I think that choreography is clever, but it does not work if you do not have an overhead camera angle! Who in the stage adaptation thought this did not need to be adjusted for a concert audience so people could see what was going on! And my girl can hit that high note live — it literally gives me goose bumps when she does it — so if she didn’t feel comfortable going for it here, something’s wrong.

But also, good god. The decision to change outfits, the stage production between each songs, and then again after the solo section ended…is this really what people want from a concert these days? Maybe Taylor Swift is running a tighter ship and can provide some insights since she’s managing many more outfit changes and executing a much larger setlist, but it took forever. I almost went to bed. But it also stirred up some thoughts on…

A state of the pop performance union

Watching several pop star sets over the weekend — Blackpink’s among them, but also ones from Charli XCX, Jackson Wang, and Becky G — was to observe a collective list of priorities that ranked stage production above setlist, dancing above singing, and the legibility of the lead vocal over live singing. Backing tracks were riding high. The impression you’re getting from this paragraph isn’t fair to these artists, so what I mean to say is that they represent an interesting spectrum of these ideas.

Becky G might have had the best of these sets: she obviously loves dancing, she’s good at it, and when her mic abruptly cut off 30 seconds into her third song, the only thing you could hear besides her band was the crowd. Her album ESQUEMAS from last year didn’t do much for me, which was a shame because — to borrow and adapt some vernacular from Issa Rae — I’m rooting for everybody Mexican. (Listen! Me and Caribbean Spanish are not friends. What do Puerto Ricans have against the letter ‘R’!? Nobody ever talks about this, but we can’t let them keep lapping us, culturally, because I am struggling.) But anyway, Becky G’s performance was so well done — or it’s a testament to her charisma as a performer — that I came around to some of those songs, which is its own kind of achievement.

Assessment: She danced, she built the damn funhouse, but ultimately, Becky G prioritized her music and especially, her live singing.

The same thing happened to me with Jackson Wang! Lowkey I was convinced a friend of mine did not fuck with him ergo I did not fuck with him (#solidarity) and felt myself having an “uh oh” moment when songs from his 2022 solo album Magic Man were kind of hitting. I only ended up watching his set — he’s an idol from Hong Kong who’s part of the k-pop group GOT7 btw — after Björk’s stream was not forthcoming because his album also didn’t do much for me. (Except maybe “Cruel,” and even that was scratching a bit of a 2014 blues rock itch more than anything else.) But then it turns out my friend doesn’t hate him and he brought out Ciara and Netflix jumped the shark with the live Love Is Blind reunion and Coachella kind of fucked up the rest of the lineup with delays and technical issues so I think Jackson Wang won Sunday night? Did I mention he brought out Ciara for like four songs? Please listen to this. This duo does not make sense on paper but it worked on stage: brash, sensual, smooth. Chemistry! Every so often I remember that male pop stars used to dance and I despair for the American music industry.

But to get back to the larger question of priorities for pop performance right now: I love a good dancer and you will never hear me complain about a good dancer which is why this set gets such a glowing pass because Jackson Wang is an Excellent Dancer. This man goes to dance practice, but again, there is spontaneity. There is spirit. But also in some sections the lip syncing was so egregious I got secondhand embarrassment. Like, lips incorrectly forming the shapes of the words. I read only 20 minutes ago that apparently The Linda Lindas were having issues with their audio syncing on stage so maybe that’s the same problem here and the audio was coming faster than the image or vice versa but. It was distracting. It soured it just a little bit. Or if he was singing live some of the time, the backing track for his vocals was so loud that I couldn’t distinguish between the two, which leads me into…

Assessment: If you only learn one thing from this newsletter I hope it’s that Ciara performed at Coachella. There was spectacle. And I didn’t even touch on how creepy (but good!) his makeup and the dirty, demonic thing is, so he had a production vision. But ultimately, Jackson Wang prioritized dancing.

Charli XCX. Babeyyyy, I wish I could say I was on the Right Side of History from the jump and was always annoyed with Jack Antonoff but actually I had a grudge against Charli for several years because I had tickets to see Bleachers in summer 2015 and the tour got canceled because Charli pulled out for mental health reasons. I’m still kind of like “??? Why couldn’t you just have replaced her as the opener???” which actually swings this back around to Jack being the party I am exasperated with.

Charli can fucking sing — and did! — but the mix favored the backing track over her live vocal for reasons I don’t understand. Charli’s set was looser than Blackpink’s, had more intense choreography that Becky G’s, and had more raw singing than Jackson Wang’s, and about the same level of stage production as Rosalía’s (minimal) if we dont count the cameraman. It really seemed like this was a set meant to highlight the pop versatility of one of our best topline writers who’s been going for gold this past year as a bonafide star. And yet that damn backing track…it was distracting. It took away from hearing the nuance of her live voice. I don’t mind imperfections! If I wanted to hear the best take of a song, the pre-selected version of it, I’d listen to the recording. I’m still confused about this. (And I don’t want to be greedy, but Charli has a collaborators list miles long and the only person she brought out was…Troye Sivan. I like Troye! But “1999” is mid at best. Chris fka Christine and the Queens was at the festival so when Charli sang “Gone” and he didn’t come out, I was kind of scratching my head. And what, Carly Rae Jepsen was too busy for “Backseat”? Kim Petras had an appointment at the body shop? Sky Ferreira has to sit around and look busy so Pop Crave has a fresh photo the instant they need it the next time she says the new album is coming soon? Anyway.)

Assessment: Spurning material spectacle on stage and too many celebrity appearances, Charli XCX prioritized classic pop showmanship and sing-along-able backing tracks (but it felt like it was missing something).

Before and after Rosalía

And obviously Blackpink prioritized stage production. I wish there were decent videos for either of these two performances to show you how stark that difference is, sheesh. But the feeling I can’t shake from watching Weekend 1 was just how amateurish everyone looked after watching Rosalía perform. Her set checked all the boxes. And then it invented more boxes.  It said “actually, all these boxes are a priority.”

I don’t really remember anymore what it felt like to consciously learn a new language for the first time, at the very beginning. I guess I used to think of my mind as this floating entity, and when I was searching for words in Spanish, I was pressing my torso against the floor and sweeping my hand down below to pull the words out of the darkness. But this was all one environment. One circle that encompassed my whole mind.

Learning Italian, my third language, wasn’t like that at all. It felt like the sphere of my mind sheltered the English and the Spanish, and that the Italian was outside of it all, an assault, the words battering themselves against the exterior. And then one day the shield fell down when I wasn’t paying attention, but instead of integrating — Italian, Spanish, and English all together — my mind cracked in two. No, cracked isn’t right. It duplicated. It grew. Two spheres, squished against each other and porous, but unevenly so. When I reached for a word in Italian I didn’t know — in that new, blank space — my mind would let the Spanish one slip across the membrane from the other side. The pathways in my mind, “reach for foreign word,” had to be relabeled. There were more pathways to come. I talked about it like a joke earlier, but really what all of this felt like was that what I was capable of learning and knowing was larger than I ever knew it could be. Watching Rosalía perform felt like that, in a way. An expansion of what feels possible. Something new, alone in a sphere to itself, waiting for the scales to balance.

Insanity to see that show and pass over it for Blink-182.

Nobody likes you when your *checks notes* 47,  47, and 51

If you watched a movie made between the years 1998 and 2005 you have heard the best of what this band has to offer without having to interact with anything this band represents and for that I'm grateful.

I tried, guys. I watched two songs' worth of Blink-182’s set on Friday because everyone was making such a big deal out of it and I know Travis Barker is treated like a god these days even though he hasn't successfully created the next big emo act for all that he's apparently tried to! But I had to tap out. I love reading about what this band meant to people who don't normally get to make their voices heard in these scenes, but I cannot forget my gut instinct when I first saw the Enema of the State album cover and thought "I don't…think I like that." Everything I've ever learned about this band — and the way boys who loved this band behaved around me in school — carries out that feeling. Here’s an excerpt from Dan Ozzi's chapter on the band in SELLOUT that made me so mad I had to abandon my sunny little front porch reading spot, pace my room for a few minutes, text several friends, and eventually go on a furious bike ride to calm down.

Plenty of people stuck their necks out for Blink-182 in their first five years. The band had been taken to Australia as a favor, added to Warped Tour as a favor, and signed to Cargo as a favor.

I wonder who made Blink-182 Coachella headliners as a favor. You guys enjoy it because I will not.