The Whitest Fest You Know

Went to Coachella this weekend and had a pretty good time. There was one thing though that bothered me a lot about the direction of the festival. For a "hip" festival it ain't very hip, and it's not open to any really adventurous acts.

In the first years of the Coachella Festival there was definitely an attempt to bring in acts from all of the music spectrum. Over the years DJ and Hip Hop acts like the Chemical Brothers and Black Star played the main stage while more exotic fair like Tricky and the Nortec Collective played in the tents around the grounds.

Now the only acts that one might consider soul or R & B are either British bands featuring mostly white performers or older acts that have long ago been given the "whitey" hipster stamp of approval. Acts like De La Soul and Jay-Z who might have been radical choices when they first came out are hardly adventurous choices in 2010.

Even the couple of older acts that peaked my interest, Sly Stone and Gil Scott-Heron have both long been the kind of artists that old hippies point to proudly in their record or CD collections. Proof that whitey white white folks have a little subversiveness in them. Let's face it. Sly Stone was a headliner at Woodstock and Gil Scott-Heron played on the original Saturday Night Live a generation ago.

Oh, sure their were some DJ's on the bill. But even the dance music was mostly played by white British folks and hippie types. There were no underground hip hop acts, no jazz and other than a couple of hipster Latino acts like Aterciopelados and Calle 13 very little Latin flavor. Considering SoCal is a mostly Latino enclave that was pretty much a big middle finger to the people that live in the area.

Coachella isn't about the people of Southern California. It isn't even about music at this point. It's about making a buck.

I've always said the album that kills a big act isn't the one that sells poorly. It's the album that sells a ton of records and CD's that really stinks. You know the album I'm talking about. That real stinker that you and all your friends purchased and now the Used Record Store won't even take it back. That's the one that kills a career. Not the well regarded follow up record that no one buys after being burned on the last record.

The same is true of big events. No one went to Sundance last year despite some of the best films the festival has shown in years. Why? Because of all the years of crappy films made by a small handful of filmmakers. The years of crappy mumblecore, big actor vanity projects and the political screeds masquerading as documentaries have made Sundance a pale shell of the festival that once defined independent film. Sundance lost the adventurousness that made it a top festival and now people are turning their back on it.

The same thing will happen to Coachella unless they go back to the things that made the festival great.