When your name is written with the largest lyrics in the most famous music festival poster, you have a mission. And Lady Gaga (New York, 39 years old) knew how to fulfill her. The singer and actress returned to her origins on Friday night in Coachella (California), putting the brooch of gold to the first day of the three of the festival to present her new album, Mayhemwhich launched just a month ago and saw the light on stage for the first time. But it was not only to sing an album. It went much further. The artist reviewed almost 20 years of career and many of her great successes, in a grandiloquent and melodramatic staging and she likes them both.
Of the more than 120,000 attendees to Coachella, many of them congregated on the main stage to see the first show by Stefani Joanne Angelina Germanotta, as the singer is called, with her brand new album, which from July will walk on a tour with almost everything already sold. They were lucky. They were aware of the privilege of seeing the artist to give birth to a new stage of her career, in which he shows how she has cost her to live with herself, but also that, as she knows, she will always be there. He said it at the end of the concert: “The monsters never die”, in reference to the name, “monsters”, who give their followers, but also their themes, their stories, their demons. Those do not leave. In the immense scenario shaped like an old theater, with its boxes and colonnatas, Lady Gaga killed Lady Gaga. He killed Lady Gaga of the past: every so often they appeared on her double stage, exactly the same, dressed and hairstyles of her times of Bad Romance o Alejandrothe songs that launched her to fame. And she fought against those alter egoI liquidated them with a clean fist and left them Ko. But always, like her, they resurfaced from their ashes to give a new version of itself.
Lady Gaga did much more to present Mayhem. He placed it inside his discography and his biography, dissected it and showed what place it occupies in his life: she is proud to publish her own and original music, something that (without compilations or soundtracks) did not do for five years. He divided the concert into half a dozen events, and in all of them he placed songs from this eighth studio album (opening with, of course, Abracadabra), but also from other albums. He danced with skeletons and dead dead, climbed and lowered stairs, stood, touched the piano, the battery and even the electric guitar, walked along the catwalk that linked the main stage with a smaller quadrilateral (sometimes turned into a chess board), he went down from him and greeted his followers for a long time. And, with that spectacular staging, designed for the public, but also for the camera, implied that this was not a concert to save Coachella and convert it, which is, in viral showcase: it was a snack, probably something more cut (it lasted an hour and 45 minutes), of the 48 concert tour.
What viewers from all over the world will see, from Las Vegas in July A, at least, Sydney in December, through three recitals in Barcelona, it is a splendid Lady Gaga in the vowel (although something sometimes drowned in the physical, both imposed, with a lot of sigh, as sometimes real) and determined to demonstrate what it is: an artist of the stage. In the absence of knowing the configuration when it reaches the stadiums, the show is almost a musical, a vital review with dozens of musicians, dancers, changing rooms, lights and fireworks. Yeah The Eras Tour, From Taylor Swift, he managed to raise 2,000 million dollars (1,761 million euros) worldwide for about 20 months, Lady Gaga has managed to follow a very similar rhythm (career review, mix of old and new successes, immense staging) and can lengthen and stretch it as much as he likes. Give for that and more.
Concerts in the middle of the heat wave
Before Germanotta stayed with the ears of the festival’s public, the day was loaded with concerts, heat and tails. Coachella is immense and leaves anyone exhausted, more when South California suffers a heat wave these days. Up to 42 degrees were reached in Indian, the town that hosts two weekends in a row to hundreds of thousands of people and that makes their August in April, with exhausted rooms and crazy prices (where, for example, one night for $ 1,000 is not out of the average). Only the first day 61 concerts were held, from one in the afternoon until one in the morning, in its 2.6 square kilometers. Really unbarkable, even for the most expert festival.
One of the first strong dishes of the day was the British Lola Young, with only 24 years – of those people already born in the 21st century and that, in a blink, have triumphed – and her unstoppable theme Messy. Thanks to him (already a dozen more) he filled the Mojave stage (there are eight clues in total) despite being the peak time of embarrassment of the day. Young, from Tiktok to the world. But it is not alone. This, as has happened for a few years, seems to be one of the maxims of the festival. There are no poster heads (last year, thanks to Lana del Rey, Sabrina Carpenter, Chappell Roan, Weight Feather or J Balvin seemed to be more connected to the moment), but or there are old glories that appeal to nostalgia (such as Green Day, The Prodigy or Kraftwerk) or those viral phenomen one hit wonder– And they fill the stage, even in small stripes of 50 minutes: from Young to Benson Boone (his Beautiful Things It has 2,000 million reproductions in Spotify), arties (with i like the way you kiss me), Tyla (with Water), Rema (with Calm Down) o DJO (con End of Beginning).
Although Boone, meanwhile, gave the public a little more. In the second largest scenario and enjoying the sunset, he threw himself to sing on the stage and with solvency no less than Bohemian RhapsodyQueen. But the astonishment came when he also took the guitarist Sir Brian May. These types of surprises go crazy to the public. For example, Tyla went up to Becky G. By the way, Lady Gaga did not go out with Bruno Mars in her Die With a Smilefor which they won the Grammy together a couple of months ago.
In the Latino chapter, this year is far from the brightness of 2023, when Rosalía and Bad Bunny were poster heads, or even last year. But there is variety and quality. On Friday, two very different bands presented their music. First, Los Mirlos, the first Peruvian group to act in Coachella, with its fun and danceable Amazonian cumbia, as they call it. Later, at an hour already very noble (from eight, when the sun falls and the stages are quoted more), the uncover with Ca7riel and Paco Amoroso came. The two Argentines also became viral thanks to their tiny desk, the recorded mini -centers of the NPR, the American public radio. But instead of with a single success, they present themselves with a band with a dozen musicians and a staging and a variety of themes that intend to reach beyond. The public gave everything with their catchy choruses and even with the rave They mounted, full of green lasers. In the end, the virality is in how each one knows how one hit wonder or an unstoppable musical diva. Coachella knows a lot about that.