Festivals are sort of the Costco of live music. Take, for example, the upcoming 2012 edition of Coachella. If you purchased individual concert tickets for every artist on the lineup, the cost would far exceed the festival's more-or-less $400 fee.
But when you visit Costco to buy a swimming pool's worth of mustard or a 1000-box supermegapack of Cap'n Crunch, you're not expected to eat it all before you even walk out the door.
The modern music festival -- built upon excess (more bands!), cheap nostalgia (more old bands!!), and straight-up selling you shit (better bring more money!!!) -- is a bloated, fiendishly trend-oriented marathon of total overkill. And after the last few days of status updates and retweets hyping its recently announced lineup, we here at Crossfade need to let the world know why we think Coachella totally sucks.
10. Why Have One Bloated And Boring Music Festival When You Can Have Two?
We would rather listen to Ben Stein yammer about voodoo economics than sit through one day of Coachella. But guess what? In 2012, the festival has expanded into a two weekend extravaganza, completely reproducing its entire musical lineup for two separate audiences. We don't have complete confirmation, but we're sure there are fartknockers out there going to both weekends. And we hate them.
9. The Economy Collapsed Because Everyone Was Paying For Music Festival Tickets With Space Bucks
We understand: Coachella is a once in a lifetime opportunity to see wash-ups perform alongside a very-2012 smattering of dubstep guidos and Starbucks-ready "indie" adult contemporary. But let me ask you this: Which was the better Woodstock? The one where everyone parked their car in the road, knocked down the fences and had an extended mind orgasm while peaking on toad venom during Jefferson Airplane? Or the one that cost a bunch of money and devolved into nu-metal mutants starting a greasy riot?
8. A Turkey Leg Costs 3 Years of Indentured Servitude
Coachella boasts free water stations set up throughout the event, so you can bet your life's-fucking-savings that you will likely have to pay to piss. The few times we've made a mistake of going to one of these jumbo-sized shitshows, we've only ever got enough scratch for, like, one rib.
7. tUnE-yArDs Is A Good Band Name, But Only For Assholes
Arbitrarily writing your band's name in alternating caps lock is the kind of mistake that will haunt you forever because it turns your band's name into a mistake. At least you can't say that shit out loud? But we have to see it on the poster and its bad enough that we're required to mine this garbage dump of a lineup for jokes about if anyone really listens to the Arctic Monkeys, or whatever, so, please, just spell Tune-Yards like you're a friggin' adult.
6. Too Many Bands
Yeah, Camping, partying, and so on is great. But who seriously wants to watch that much continuous live music surrounded by a bunch of dingleberries? Do you think Coachella is the only time of year that mimbo in the above video hears music? Please let us know in the comments.
5. The Internet And Daylight Are Killing Music
Everyone knows that downloading has eviscerated music sales, and our culture of oversharing has saturated the market to the point where it's people's job to desperately make up genres like seapunk and moombahton so they can sell you money flavored liquor. Artists need to rely on live shows for income more than ever now, but look what happens when you try to get a band like Salem to play 3pm in the middle of a field. Kinda makes it suck, doesn't it? Stop making it hard for these people to live, Coachella. Bring music back inside and in the dark where it belongs.
4. More Shitty Bands Reunite To Cash-In
It's one thing to be disappointed because your favorite band from back-in-the-day is making music again and it's just not the same. But now you're going to try to re-sell us shit we didn't wanna buy the first time? At The Drive-In killed indie rock and Refused are about as politically sincere as The Sex Pistols, but we'd still rather listen to Johnnt Rotten's drawl on Nevermind The Bollocks than the pleghm-bark vocals on The Shape Of Punk To Come
3. Three Straight Days of Amateurs Getting Wasted
Coachella is essentially like New Years Eve. All the time. For three days. And no party hats, just drunk girls screaming, overzealous squares taking too many hits and more sloppy hornballs than should be legally permitted to lustfully congregate in the same space.
2. "Professional" Festival Attendee
The tragic descendents of Dead Heads and The Unincorporated Federation of Losers That Follow Phish on Tour, there is a miserable, whippet-huffing, hula-hooping, pube-dresaded subset of humanity that stands for no cause, has no vision, but instead has fashioned an entire lifestyle out of always knowing where there's a keg and who's holding.
1. Industry Douchebags and Smart Phones
Which brings us to the two most absolutely intolerable facets of Coachella that were both so equally infuriating we couldn't break the tie. Get this fact straight: the more deeply embedded you are in the music industry, the less you listen to music. Additionally, we typically have no patience for crowd-surfing, but we'll gladly hoist you up and toss you that way if it'll get you off Words With Friends for a minute, you asocial dishrag.
