If I get one more e-mail from some holier-than-thou hipster who believes he’s got his finger on the pulse of music who ogled babes and got within spitting distance of Madonna at Coachella I’m gonna hunt down Randy Phillips and the Goldenvoice team personally and slit their throats so this festival can never take place again.

Coachella is a brand name.  THAT’S what Goldenvoice did best.  They created a festival with such cred in the art/indie/future rock world that they can sell tens of thousands of tickets advertising NO headliner.  They call this concert promotion.  They DO NOT call this MUSIC!

In case you haven’t noticed, we’re in a crisis of exposure in the music world.  For every asshole agent crawling clubs looking for new acts he can sell to Mr. Phillips and Michael Rapino there are tens of millions of Americans who are completely out of the loop and don’t give a shit.  This IS NOT the eighties.  When MTV blew up some band and they sold out arenas.  Ever notice that the bands selling out arenas on a regular basis are all in excess of ten years old?  And that those that do sell out for a brief period, like the Spice Girls, like Coldplay, leave a bad taste in your mouth?  Come on, admit it, that last Coldplay CD was mediocre, if you hear Chris Martin’s voice one more time you’re gonna scream and if you see another picture of Gwyneth and Moses and Fruit and whomever else is in the brood you’re going to go postal in your SUPERMARKET!

On one hand we have overexposure.  If anything catches fire the record labels and the media flog it ad infinitum, just THRILLED that people want it.  They don’t give a shit that it’s good, they don’t give a shit that they’re burning it out, they just want to get paid/get good ratings TODAY!  FUCK tomorrow.

On the other end of the spectrum we’ve got MySpace.  Where wannabes, people with no traction, like to build friend lists and garner plays of their tracks to prove that somebody actually cares, even though most people DON’T!

And in between?  WHO THE FUCK KNOWS??

Coachella is not Woodstock.  What blew everybody’s mind with Woodstock, why hundreds of thousands of people went, was because they had ALL the bands.  You just couldn’t believe it.  And, music drove the culture.  If the shit at Coachella drives your culture you’re a drug-addicted dancer or you spend so much time in boutiques shopping for clothes you HAVE no life.

Recapping, there AREN’T enough mainstream headliners today to have a Woodstock-style festival.  God, you’d have to include bands going back FORTY YEARS before people would scratch their asses and say I’VE GOT TO BE THERE!  Coachella is niche.  And there’s nothing wrong with that.  It’s just that it’s being trumpeted as something quite different.  With all the press coverage you’d think it’s mainstream, it’s the future of music.  Well, it’s not.  God, they had to add Kanye West and Madonna to the bill because they were lacking headliners?  Isn’t that like driving a busload of white teenage do-gooders and a van of grandmothers to Compton so the police will patrol the city?  Isn’t that like putting Lauren Bacall and Ben Kingsley in "The Sopranos" so the oldster and hipster demographics will be enticed?  Oops, they did that, and although you might have laughed, that was the series’ creative nadir.  Just like Kanye and Madonna was Coachella’s creative nadir.  I don’t GIVE A SHIT how much money you made.  I don’t GIVE A SHIT that you featured new bands.  How did it work ARTISTICALLY?  How does it fit into the musical landscape of America?  THAT’S what’s interesting to me.

I know that may be too much for you dollar-hungry pricks who believe the buck triumphs over everything to comprehend.  I believe artists want to get paid, but that DOES NOT mean they only do it for the money.  Shit, despite his denials, even GENE SIMMONS isn’t only in it for the money.  This year’s Coachella has about as much meaning as a doorknob.  It broke no bands.  And it’s irrelevant to the musical landscape at large.  God, "High School Musical" means more than Coachella.

Hell, listen to some of those "High School Musical" tracks.  Stuff like "Breaking Free".  God, there’s melody.  The singers have good voices.  The music’s PALATABLE!  And blowing out at retailers everywhere while aging dicks who e-mail me needing to believe they’re hip are purveying ever more outside stuff.

It’s a murky world out there.  No one knows exactly where it’s going.  Used to be there was a bar.  You got over the hurdle and you had made it.  What is making it today?  Being on TV?  PLAYING Coachella?  Shit, a lot of these acts can barely WORK outside of Coachella.  Unless it’s clubs.  And there’s nothing wrong with that.  But don’t think because somewhere between 50 and 100,000 pricks gather in a polo field in the middle of the desert a band is broken, that people care.

Same deal with SXSW.  So you saw some old friends.  Drank a bit of beer.  Heard some left-field act.  Well, you don’t even have to LEAVE TOWN for that.  You went on vacation.  Good for you!  But is there cultural significance for those who didn’t attend?  NO!

Oh, there used to be.  SXSW was where you got a toehold in the popular consciousness.  It spread from there.  I’m not sure ANY prepackaged event put together by the usual suspects can have this effect anymore.  It appears that buzz is created on the Web.  But we’re not exactly sure how this is done.  What sites matter.  How to gauge interest, never mind success.

It’s a cable TV world.  But worse.  In cable, there are 300 channels vying for one’s attention.  In the music world, instead of 5,000 albums being released a year, now it’s closer to 60,000.  And, the Arcade Fire proved that those acts on indies you used to ignore, maybe some of them are good.

Are we building a healthy mid-level business.  Acts that can sell out theatres?  Is the Wiltern gonna be filled every night of the week?  Well, this is DEATH for LiveNation and AEG.  They need to sell out ARENAS!  They need to have FESTIVALS!  So they can make the BIG BUCKS!  Maybe there just won’t be big enough acts TO DO this anymore!  Just like hit network TV shows used to get a thirty plus rating and now they almost never break twenty, with all the eyeballs glued to a myriad of cable channels.

Yes, it’s a long tail world.  There is demand for everything.  Maybe there’s just not a big mainstream anymore.  THAT’S the interesting question.  What it takes to reach critical mass today.  And how you achieve this.  And how do you massage/manage your career to SUSTAIN this.  Questions which those in power seem to not give a shit about.  Which is why the meek SHALL inherit the earth.

Coachella was not "Sgt. Pepper".  It was not "The Godfather".  It was CERTAINLY NOT Woodstock.  It was more like an aging NBA club struggling to win a championship one more time before the team falls apart and everybody loses interest.  Oh, AEG/Goldenvoice has got it all down, they’re firing on all cylinders.  It’s just the MUSIC that’s a question.  Maybe in the next twelve months new headliners that will insure this festival’s future success will emerge.  But I highly doubt it.  Because it appears that the new superstar acts are going to take A VERY LONG TIME to develop, to reach critical mass.  And there are going to be A LOT fewer of them.