Weekend Two of Coachella opened Friday night in Indio under air that did not move. The wind that blew through Weekend One's Friday and cancelled Anyma's main-stage debut of his ÆDEN production ended up being a gift, because it gave the festival an extra week to think about what it had lost. Matteo Milleri, who records as Anyma, has been building ÆDEN for the better part of eight years — a marriage of operatic electronic composition, robotics, and a set design whose rumored production costs ran above fifteen million dollars. [1] Billboards along Interstate 10 from Palm Springs to Los Angeles have carried nothing but the ÆDEN typography since Monday. The main stage Friday was his night. He got it.

The set itself ran eighty-six minutes. [2] The installation — a towering articulated geometric form whose LED faces move in kinetic sequences synced to the music — performed without the interruption that had grounded it the previous week. The crowd, as a body, held. The production's rumored guest — a cameo by Lisa of Blackpink, which has been circulating on fan-account X for a week — was reported by several attendees Friday night, though neither Anyma's team nor Lisa's has confirmed. Variety's overnight reporting describes "a possible surprise appearance" on the song "Bad Angel" without independent verification. [3] The paper will report the cameo if it is confirmed and notes here only that the rumor, if false, has been usefully false for promotional purposes.

Sabrina Carpenter headlines Friday. She arrived at Week Two under obligation to clean up a moment from Week One — a stage interaction in which she referred to a fan's zaghrouta, the Arabic ululation of celebration, as "yodeling." The comment was not hostile. It was tonal. It did not land. Over the week between, Carpenter issued a short video apology, circulated an Instagram story about the zaghrouta's cultural meaning and history, and — most pragmatically — negotiated with Coachella production for a ten-minute set extension to re-stage the moment. [4] She took the extra ten and used it to bring out David Lee Roth for a Van Halen cover that turned "Jump" into something the festival had genuinely not planned for.

The repair was professional. A pop star made a mistake. She apologized. She used her apology's attention to stretch her set into a generational pop-rock moment. The critics on the festival desks Friday night treated the recovery with the mixture of respect and weariness the situation invited. What the critics did not treat — and what the paper finds more interesting — is the parallel conversation happening on Arabic-language TikTok during the Carpenter set. The zaghrouta is being re-litigated in real time by users in Beirut, Cairo, Amman, Detroit, and Dearborn. Some of them accept Carpenter's apology. Some of them frame the original exchange as a minor inclusion in a week of bigger American misreadings of Arabic cultural signs. Some of them are posting their own zaghrouta tutorials alongside slowed-down Carpenter vocal clips. The attention is not hostile; it is participatory. It is also, unusually, not being read by the American festival press as a second story.

The Rezz pullout was the other Week Two adjustment. Isabelle Rezazadeh, performing as Rezz, withdrew Thursday for health reasons; Coachella replaced her with Jack White, whose Indio debut in that slot happened to be an act that the festival's older demographic had been asking for since 2022. [5] The substitution was clean and timely. The press covered it as news. The stan economies on X covered it as a favor White had owed Paul Tollett since Saturday Night Live fell through in 2009.

What the weekend is, as a cultural moment, is small but visible. Coachella is not a political festival. It is a brand festival, an advertising festival, a destination-for-the-rich-and-beautiful festival. It is also, every April, the only American entertainment event at which half a million cellphones train their cameras on the same stage at the same hour. What happens on that stage matters less than whether it leaves footage that circulates. Anyma's footage will circulate because the production is photogenic in a way nothing on the main stage has been since Beyoncé in 2018. Carpenter's footage will circulate because David Lee Roth is the kind of guest that defines a festival year for the generation that knows him. The zaghrouta re-litigation on TikTok will circulate because Arabic-language internet is very good at keeping small things usefully small.

The paper's position on Coachella has always been that the festival's function is not the music, which varies in quality year to year, but the apparatus of attention the music produces. Friday night produced attention. Anyma got his eight-year buildup. Carpenter got her ten-minute recovery. White got his cross-generational nod. Rezz got her rest. Lisa, if she showed up, got her rumor. The festival continues through Sunday. The headline slot Saturday belongs to Karol G. Sunday closes with Billie Eilish — a festival closer the paper has covered in its own registers elsewhere — whose concert film is opening in theaters next month and who will be using the Coachella set as an obvious promotional platform for it. [6]

Pauline Kael, writing once about the difference between a festival that matters and a festival that merely happens, argued that the festivals that matter are the ones where the audience is allowed to be different from the audience the marketing department imagined. Indio's audience Friday was exactly the audience the marketing had imagined. The difference was in the performers, who found their own ways, during a week of cancellations and apologies and substitutions, to deliver a night that felt a little less staged than it was. That is what Week Two is for. Anyma waited eight years for it. Carpenter bought it in ten minutes. The crowd, for once, did not know whose night it was.

-- CAMILLE BEAUMONT, Los Angeles