Searching for Sweetness at Coachella
An investigation from hedonism beat reporter Reece Sisto
Cake friends,
A few weeks ago, I received every editor’s dream text: “No pressure to accept or deny but I diiiid put your name down as an editor because I applied for a Coachella press pass lmao.”
The text was from Reece Sisto, whose screed against the tyranny of “deepcakes” was one of my favorite pieces from our second issue, Wicked Cake. I honestly did not believe that Coachella would issue a press pass to a print, biannual literary dessert magazine. But I admired Reece's chutzpah. And when the press office surprisingly came through with GA tix, we began scheming about a piece that digs into the role of dessert and other “little treats” at music festivals, and what Coachella even means today.
As someone who grew up in Los Angeles but lives in NYC, Coachella occupies a specific place in my cultural imagination. The only time I went was 2013, when I was a senior in high school. Even then, it felt like we were arriving at the party too late, when kids whose parents worked in the industry sighed about how much cooler it was in 2006 (I guess they were 11 at the Daft Punk show??). Still, we had a great time dancing to Major Lazer and Two Chainz, narrowly avoiding getting groped in the Sahara Tent, and searching for Vanessa Hudgens in the crowd of flower crowns. I’m sure we ate something, but any record is lost to my deactivated Facebook account.
Over a decade later, Coachella is still selling a fantasy of the best weekend(s) ever. The reality? Well, I’ll let Reece get into that. —Aliza
Searching for Sweetness at Coachella
By Reece Sisto
Coachella has long positioned itself as an influencer’s oasis, though I’ve always thought it more a mirage. The illusion began before I even set foot in the desert when Coachella’s PR team CARVINGBLOCK delivered a gargantuan tote bag to my doorstep last Wednesday. Take care of this bag, the delivery note read, it was hand-stitched with recycled picnic blankets! Inside was a slurry of non-essentials—Evian “face mist” that I mistook for sunscreen, a silk bandana, boutique vegan gummy bears, and enough glitter foam to drown a child in a kiddie pool. Read: A recycled bag stuffed with trash. An aspiring bi-coastal elite, my environmentalist ethos is also best described as hypocritical, but at least I’m aware of it.
Contradiction seems central to Coachella’s identity, and seeing as I more or less grifted my way into it, I decided to lean in. A weekend that typically runs thousands of dollars was lavished on me for next to nothing. I thought the gratis of it all would smooth out my fellow attendees’ spiritual and literal bankruptcy, but it had the opposite effect. Choking down the festival’s sorry, $17 excuse for lemonade in the 100-degree heat, dust and desperation clinging to the ghosts of Instagrams past, I kept returning to the question that ultimately inspired my quest: Is this worth it?
No sense asking. Coachella is generally anathema to curiosity. Ask a staffer how to get to the press tent, a vendor if you can sample a dish, or an attendee how much they paid for the Deadmau5 after party in an air hanger, and I promise you they don’t know. Mounting questions buzzed around in my head like mosquitoes frenetically seeking exit, and I sought to squelch them with drugs and complex sugars. The food at Coachella is distinctly bimodal, either palpably unappetizing or designed for your feed—cheese fries that even my hometown baseball field would scoff at versus, yes seriously, Nobu omakase. The festival doesn’t allow outside food into its venue, so this dovetailing in quality seems as much about survival as it is an augmentation of the experience, though I’m not sure it succeeds on either count.
Leaving Fcukers’ set, I ripped enough ketamine to kill a dog and wandered over to Afters Ice Cream, a “one-of-a-kind dessert experience” with 25 locations across Southern California, for one of their storied milk bun ice cream sandwiches—ube-and-brownie-bits blasted with Fruity Pebbles. “It’s definitely the most visually appetizing,” the woman working the counter told me when I explained my motivation was partially content-driven. Evidence to the contrary below.
Despite the melange of flavors its multi-hyphenate name suggests, the sandwich was entirely saccharine. Where the ube’s earthiness had an opportunity to provide some sweet relief, it instead doubled down, carpet-bombing my tongue with sugar. In lieu of adding any textural dimension, the Fruity Pebbles devolved into a melted, variegated goop, glistening in the blazing sun. A rainbow of sludge spilled down my mouth and hands with impressive speed and stickiness. I got what I asked for rather than what I wanted. Then again, serving a scoop of ice cream on a warmed bun in the middle of a heatwave is hardly safeguarded for visual appeal.
The sandwich felt like a stand-in for Coachella’s general MO: spectacle over substance. Musically speaking, seemingly solvable tech issues plagued Bambii’s and others’ sets at what my friends and I disaffectionately called the Don’tLab, and long lines for the litany of product activations stymied the flow of pedestrian access to, well, actual performances. The immersive “Hi-Chew experience,” in which participants try trend-forward flavor experiments like yuzu and mango-chamoy, was a welcome reminder that brand stupidity is fun when it’s intentional. Ironically, the best food pageantry was entirely unintentional: a gauntlet of illicit hotdog vendors storming the premises, desperate to glean some of Coachella’s absurd profit.
Coachella’s most obvious contribution, a time capsule for social media’s hey-day and the sartorial aberrations of the early 2010s, felt less like nostalgia than mourning for a bygone era. MARINA’s (like, and the Diamonds) set was more a funeral for than a revival of her career, and the festival’s suite of throwback acts—Missy Elliot, T-Pain, Green Day, et al—felt disconnected from the crowds that were actually watching them. (It doesn’t help that the two main stages’ audio brazenly interfere with each other.) Even Gaga’s performance, by all accounts, including my own, a legendary Coachella headline, felt curiously mediated. Consistently out of view and performing mostly for the camera rather than the audience, I realized the ideal way to view these sets was not live, but from the livestream. Back-to-back auteurs Arca and Kraftwerk stand testament to the fact that spectacle and substance are hardly irreconcilable; that in fact, done right, they enhance each other. But ultimately, Coachella is best attended from your living room, where at least your grocery store ice cream sandwich has a fighting chance of holding together before you eat it.
Coachella is full of contradictions—music for TV, consumption as experience, a hotbed for influencing best characterized as stale. It didn’t cost me a dime, but the emotional and physical tolls were astronomical. Ultimately, I did get the answer I was looking for: There’s no sweetness to be found at Coachella. You have to let the sweetness find you.
Follow Reece on Twitter and Instagram.
Bake: A towering princess cake from Nicola Lamb.
Feast: Friend of the zine Woldy Reyes is popping up at Commune in Brooklyn on Saturday with bibinka waffles and more treats from his new book In the Kusina. No reservations required.
Enter: Daily Bread contributor Rachel Sperry is raffling off two woven bread collages to support the Immigrant Farmer Fund as part of a larger raffle from Night Moves Bread in Portland, ME.
Read: A special one-year anniversary newsletter from The Cakewalk’s Khuyen Do, featuring quotes from cake friends including yours truly.
Pitch: Mixed Feelings is soliciting pitches for The Medievalist — “a month-long digital and print series all about medievalcore, tracing its interwoven threads through fashion, literature, pop culture, food, idolatry, and more.”
thanks for curing me of any lingering desire to attend haha!
now i REALLY feel for the 'buy now, pay later' folks