All photos by Timothy Norris
Pro tip: Never try sitting during a Calvin Harris set. I learned this the hard way while camped with a friend at the edge of the beer garden bordering Coachella’s main stage, a half hour before the DJ-producer would take the stage for his headlining debut to close out the festival’s final night.
Through the fence, we watch fans sprinting towards the main stage to join the mass of fans who, for hours through multiple sets, remain pressed against the guard rail; within an hour, many will be lifted over it and carried by security, unable to withstand the forthcoming crush of bodies.
“Don’t you want to stop to get food?” a stumbling blonde asks her friend, who tows her through the crowd hand-in-hand like a mother dragging her kid through the mall.
“NO I CAN’T MISS THIS; WE’RE GOING NOW,” she snaps, looking back for just a moment before trudging onwards.
As we sit, the spotlights overhead are gradually dimmed out by the bodies closing in around us, the pitchy din of their conversations forcing us to raise our voices to hear each other. The feeling is less of anticipation than high-strung anxiety. Our few attempts to strike up conversation fall flat, met with cold, perplexed expressions as if they couldn’t fathom why I was talking to them, or, more pressingly, why I was not similarly crewed up.
Someone spills—nay, pours—a beer on me, and continues talking to his friend. The smell, mixed with crushed grass and b.o., stings my nostrils, and I have to check for a moment to make sure it’s not vomit. It’s not, although in a few minutes I’ll step in a fresh puddle on my way out.
The stage dims, signaling the start of the set, and Florence Welch’s vocals for “Sweet Nothing” pipe in acapella from the walls of speakers. For a moment, the crowd tenses in hopes that she might actually be on stage to kick off the set; she’s not.
But Calvin Harris is, kind of. The bass comes in, and a wall of light ripples outward from the center of the stage across the 360 degree LED panels that are more spectacular, technologically speaking, than anything the main stage has ever offered up, and which were almost certainly custom built for his set.
The man of the hour descends the stage in a giant LED-lit cube, the top of his head peaking out like an Ibiza-toasted Killroy as the set glows alternatingly red and white hot around him. This feels important, like something big is about to happen, but no. Things get pretty straightforward from here: Harris takes us through a set of bass-warped radio bangers like “Sweet Nothing” and “How Deep is Your Love,” dipping in between into dubstep and drum n bass wobbles.
For the next two hours, it will be more or less the same ham sandwich set he plays in Las Vegas ad infinitum. The bass drops arrive with Pavlovian bravado; I can almost smell the Red Bull and day club chlorine. A lanky girl in shorts and a tube top stomps on the ground, punching the air and spinning towards nowhere in particular. Her friend lies supine on the ground next to her. I stop in my tracks, fearing the worst, then she raises her legs and starts kicking the air in time with the music. The thing is, this isn’t clubland; it’s the hyperbole of his music finally unrestrained by the confines of club walls or a smaller stage or any semblance of public decorum. From the fringes of the crowd, it’s raging id, unfettered; inside, it’s bliss.
It’s easy to hate on EDM kingpins like Harris for lack of artistry or button-pushing mundanity. But the fact remains that people are out here for it—tens of thousands of people, as much as any crowd I’ve seen all weekend, or at Coachella ever, writhing and pushing and screaming and touching and losing their damn minds.
To critique Harris for his lack of musicianship is to miss the point of his appeal. His fans don’t want to see a star take center stage, or get inspired by a group’s chemistry, or contemplate the music. They just want to feel something extreme; to numb themselves inside of a moment. They want to be overwhelmed by the waves of drum and bass and LED patterns. It’s an off switch, or an on switch, depending whose side you’re on. It’s not about him, it’s about them.
We break through an actual wall of bros who barricade the exit of the beer garden and meander through the crowd. Barring a few peacocking shirtless gym rats, Calvin Harris fans are fundamentally not the fans who make it into the Coachella photo galleries, though many may aspire to. These aren’t the well-connected elite observing at a distance from the VIP, the face-painted neo-hippies, or even the EDC crossover kids gloving and flitting about during Jack Ü.
These are the kids in backwards caps and cargo shorts, in flower garlands and cut-offs purchased from H&M’s Coachella Collection in hopes of being mistaken for one of the VIPs. It’s the USC frat boys sporting Class of 2016 robes over their bare chests, the midwestern law students in baseball jerseys, and the newly-minted CPAs who just moved in with their girlfriends in the Orange County suburbs. These are the fans who save up all year, who plan their lives months in advance, who are caught between growing up in a culture of instant gratification and coming to terms with the reality that their real lives will inevitably becoe more boring, and that maybe that’s okay.
It turns out we’ve been talking about EDM and Coachella all wrong; it’s not a bubble, or something the kids will grow out of, but something to cling to after the big epiphany of adulthood: this is it. It’s the only release many of them will have all year. It’s here to stay. It’s absurd to think otherwise.
But this wouldn’t be a headlining set without a guest spot, and 90 minutes in Harris brings out Rihanna to sing their massive “We Found Love.” She is a vision of fringe and camo, strutting across the stage and goading fans to new tiers of hype between verses. That’s it. She leaves the stage, the next beat builds, and Daft Punk’s “One More Time” kicks off to a burst of strobes. A shriek ripples through the crowd, frozen for a moment in anticipation that the French duo, a long-rumored Coachella reunion act, might be joining the producer onstage for at Coachella. Could this be it? Is this Peak Coachella? It is not. It’s just Harris playing Daft Punk, and it’s fine. We’re fine. We are drunk and high and covered in beer, and we’re satisfied. Time to go home.