The Weeknd performs on stage at the Coachella Stage during the 2022 Coachella Valley Music & Arts Festival on April 17, 2022 in Indio, California. (Photo: Kevin Mazur/Getty Images for ABA)
Less than two weeks before this year’s Coachella festival was finally due to return to the Southern California desert after a three-year COVID hiatus, Sunday headliner Kanye West suddenly withdrew — leaving panicked promoters Goldenvoice rushing to get around to find a suitable large poster. replace font. According to TMZ, Goldenvoice was initially after Silk Sonic, but the Grammy-winning retro soul duo of Bruno Mars and Anderson .Paak declined the invitation because 13 days wasn’t enough time for them to organize some kind of main stage extravaganza, normally required to close the largest music festival in the United States
But another artist couldn’t resist the call — or the reported $8.5 million paycheck, the same fee Ye would have insisted on. “Coachella, you know how much I love you! I have your back I’m here for you,” Abel Tesfaye, aka The Weeknd’s three-time Coachella veteran, assured the packed Indio field on Sunday as he stormed in to save the day. “I will always be there for you. You are always there for me.”
Admittedly, the situation was far from ideal. The Weeknd’s performance was essentially powered by reunited EDM trio Swedish House Mafia – already on the Coachella 2022 bill and topped up for West’s Sunday spot – and then Stockholm house music supergroup Axwell, Sebastian Ingrosso and Steve Ans Set pinned Angello pulled a fairly Kanye-esque move and didn’t take the stage until 35 minutes after their advertised 10:20 p.m. start time. Then it was another 50 minutes before Tesfaye even showed up. Frustrated fans watching the “Couchella” YouTube live stream took to Twitter to express their impatience, and the Weeknd/Weekday puns practically wrote themselves.
Also, with Tesfaye busy filming his HBO series The Idol (of which he stars, co-writes, and co-directs), he wasn’t able to scrape together a large-scale production at the last minute either. So tonight there would be no facial prosthetics, no surprise Daft Punk or Jim Carrey performances, no mummy-bandaged backup dancers, no mirrored Super Bowl Mardi Gras maze — just Abel (eventually) falling into the desert for a few of his to sing hits.
The story goes on
But… the Canadian superstar has a lot of hits. And he breathlessly raced through most of them – starting with the live debuts of Dawn FM tracks “Sacrifice” and “How Do I Make You Love Me?”, with the Swedish house mafia still on stage. His unmistakably sharp lyrical tenor cut crisply through the inland air, and all was forgiven: “Abel” immediately became the top trending topic on Twitter, and with good reason.
And the hits kept coming: “Can’t Feel My Face”, “Blinding Lights”, “The Hills”, “Party Monster”, “Heartless”, “Often”, “Starboy”, “I Feel It Coming”, a the hauntingly slowed down/taken back “Save Your Tears” and another never-before-played single from Dawn FM, “Out of Time”. Tesfaye even threw in partial covers of Future, Drake and Ty Dolla $ign and – in a cheeky nod to the absent Kanye – a bit of his recent Grammy-winning collaboration with West, Hurricane.
“I said we’re moving on,” The Weeknd promised the audience as his set broke the midnight curfew in the Indio area by about half an hour (he presumably used part of his seven-figure Coachella salary to look after one afterwards fine of $1,000 per minute). However, the show stuttered to a somewhat abrupt, encore-free, whimper-not-a-bang stop after the Swedish House Mafia returned to Tesfaye for their recent collaboration, Moth to a Flame. While The Weeknd’s upcoming stadium tour will certainly take things to several other levels compared to this relatively small affair, the crowd-pleasing pop star proved on Sunday that sometimes a uniquely great voice and great songs are more than enough.
Among the other standouts of Coachella’s Kanye-free Sunday was masked mystery man/queen of rodeo/bespoke cowpoke Orville Peck, whose American gothic set majestically channeled Johnny Cash, Charlie Sexton, David Lynch and Roy Orbison — and an amusing tribute to Queer paid tribute to trucker culture with “Drive Me, Crazy,” which Peck wryly introduced by pointing out, “Truck Stops were the original Grindr.” Apparently off the festival grounds to play her part in Peck’s Show Pony EP duet “Legends Never Die”. However, Peck’s guitarist Bria Salmena filled in well, and overall this was indeed a legend’s breakout Coachella performance.
Earlier in the day, a very un-Swedish house-mafia-esque act also hailing from Stockholm — pissing garage rockers Viagra Boys, the self-proclaimed “Nordic’s worst band” — really got the Sonora Tent day drinkers moshing in earnest to their skronky, dingy, sax -y Kill City-era Stooges-damaged thugs. Rock was also represented by glamorous Italian Eurovision winner Maneskin, who at one point covered Iggy & the Stooges’ ‘I Wanna Be Your Dog’ and actually did it justice.
“I bet your favorite rapper can’t do that,” growled Damiano David, the Maneskin frontman, who was undeniably charismatic as he took the stage. Pretty Woman’s thigh-high PVC boots and a pair of sheer open-back panties he wore underneath. (The whole picture was very Miss Havisham…if Miss Havisham lived in an S&M dungeon rather than an attic.)
“If you see a girl with better hips, let me know,” the skinny rocker quipped, before he and his leather-and-lace-clad bandmates debuted a ramshackle remake of Britney Spears’ “Womanizer,” then ended their wild tour of the show with them David’s surprising solemn recitation of a famous speech by Charlie Chaplin in honor of the Ukrainian people. It was a set that clashed worlds and perhaps best embodied the gender-bending and genre-bending spirit of Coachella 2022.
Really, Kanye wasn’t missed at all. And maybe, just maybe, Silk Sonic can leave the door open to headline Coachella in 2023.
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