Coachella, for the most part, presents a welcome escape from the world – 10-plus hours of live music a day in a corporate-lite fantasy land, time delineated only by set lists and tents. But if there was one band who could speak to our political moment, as they unfortunately but necessarily say – who could bring the feeling of resistance, if not actual change, to the desert – it would be Green Day, the US punk band whose seminal record American Idiot stuck a middle finger to the Bush administration in 2004. Though the album is in fact more rock opera of sweeping adolescent feeling than political commentary, the opportunity for concert catharsis, if not actual change, is high; it’s a historically excellent time to scream along to “don’t want to be an American Idiot.”
Catharsis was intermittently on hand during Green Day’s headliner set on Saturday, a muddled affair that, although performed to punk perfection, landed more awkwardly than one would hope. To be fair, the California-based band, formed when frontman Billie Joe Armstrong and bassist Mike Dirnt were in high school in 1987, was dealt a tough hand as Coachella’s headliner follow-up to Lady Gaga, who transformed the desert into a gothic fever dream with a stunning and instantly canonical set on Friday night. And more pressingly, in following the unofficial headliner Charli xcx, who preceded Green Day on the main stage on Saturday with a larger crowd and a tighter grip on middle-finger energy and the color of puke green.
