Doja Cat at Coachella review:

Festival headliner delivered an A-game set, ignoring some of her mainstream hits yet bringing enough energy to power what some have called a middling year

Toward the end of No Doubt’s Saturday night performance on Coachella’s main stage—a performance that was the subject of near-endless rumors about the presumably astronomical fee the long disbanded group must have commanded for a pair of one-off gigs—Gwen Stefani offered the night’s lone detectable lie. After knocking out 10 quick push-ups, and before launching into “Just a Girl,” the 54-year-old Orange County native observed, “We are absolutely in the future right now.” A nice thought, maybe, but one that was tough to square with the onslaught of nostalgia that defined their set, the rest of Saturday’s bill, and post-COVID Coachella writ large.

Earlier this spring, much was made in the press about the festival’s slower-than-usual ticket sales. Usually, the first weekend routinely sells out within hours of wristbands being made available, all before the lineup is even announced; this year, it took almost a month. Last week, Billboard reported that only about 80 percent of the 250,000 tickets available across both weekends of Coachella had been sold.

With that in mind, Coachella staked this year’s lineup on a certain longing for the past. The festival has, of course, welcomed AC/DC and Guns N’ Roses as headliners, but those bands evoked the past by blasting it in the crowd’s face. No Doubt, in contrast, went for sentimentality, playing soft-focus footage of their early days as they performed onstage. And Billie Eilish, in a surprise DJ set on Saturday night at the Do Lab stage, spun some late-2000s/early-2010s pop hits. Performances like these might become suffocating, especially when scheduled close to one another, but it didn’t necessarily scan as regressive. As ubiquitous as “Don’t Speak” or Tyga’s “Rack City” were when they were released, they still sound odder, more alluringly alien than much of the music emanating from the big stages.

At the weekend’s very end, though, this element became oddly depersonalizing. Doja Cat’s headlining set was thoroughly choreographed and executed with precision—but seemed tailored for the audience at home. The visual language became that of an awards show performance, with low-angle shots from the stage interspersed with drone shots showing the expanse of the crowd. Doja barely spoke to the audience; in the set’s final third, each song was separated by a dark stage and dead air, not quite long enough to signal a break between the set proper and an encore, but long enough to make the crowd wonder, every three or four minutes, if that’s what was happening.

The Friday night headliner, Lana Del Rey, was in stark contrast to Doja Cat, though not always for the better. Her set was hampered by poor sound in her microphone, presumably due to the high winds at that time. Because of that, it never quite achieved the hermetic quality that benefits Del Rey’s music—the sense that all of history, American and her own, is happening at once, violently but slowly. Instead, this illusion was punctured, replaced by a smaller, concentric circle of history, one that only looped as far back as the beginning of her career, including her maligned 2012 Saturday Night Live performance. It was frequently engrossing and, as could be expected, a pointed comment on how celebrity corrodes. But unlike in her recorded music, it was complicated by the unshakeable sense that it was missing something that can never be recaptured, no matter how well we think we remember.

Coachella’s global popularity as a set of live-streamed performances has further incentivized acts to bring out surprise guests as a strategy to cut through the din, both in the desert and online. On Saturday, Vampire Weekend pushed this to an absolutely excruciating degree, inviting Paris Hilton and then an Abraham Lincoln impersonator onto the Outdoor stage to play cornhole—affected twee colliding with affected folksiness to create something truly grotesque. But the practice also creates genuine excitement for young fans: take the girl beside me at Lil Yachty’s set on Sunday night, who at the first, barely-audible syllable of a new vocalist screamed, “IS THAT FUCKING MAC DEMARCO?” Reader, it was.

Be it out of necessity for those live streams or simply because technology marches forward, we are living in a golden age of video and stage design. On the main stage Sunday night, J Balvin took pains to communicate his superstardom, changing between a half-dozen equally extravagant outfits and utilizing constantly shifting camera setups. At one point, he stood in the center of a circle of men, each of whom was outfitted with a lens on his head, and bounced from one to the other, rapping into a series of fish-eye views, as if caught in one of Kool Keith’s dreams. (The set-spanning alien motif paid out like a rigged slot machine when Will Smith appeared in full Men in Black to perform his song from the soundtrack.) In the same place the night before, Blur’s excellent set was backed by eerie real-time surveillance footage of Damon Albarn and the band—which, when the setlist got to sporting-event staple “Song 2,” shifted to a feed of empty stadiums. A lone lawn mower drifting across a soccer pitch, women sweeping the edges of a basketball court, energy implied but never explicated.

Doja Cat took the Coachella main stage as the last official act to perform on Sunday’s bill, becoming the first female rapper to headline the festival. (She’s also only the second Black woman to do so, after Beyoncé in 2018.) Her closer rounded out a Sunday showcase of powerhouse female performers such as Reneé Rapp and Kesha duetting the recession banger TiK ToK – changing the opening line to “wake up in the morning saying fuck P Diddy” – and Victoria Monet grinding through a slick and ultra-sexy set, at one point receiving artfully-simulated oral sex from a background dancer.

It would be diplomatic to say that Doja maintains a distant relationship with her fans, who call themselves kittenz, though their fave does not sanction this moniker. Doja has told those who engage in parasocial relationships with the idea of her to “get off your phone and get a job” and “rethink everything” about their lives. Such boundary-setting has cost her some Instagram followers – around 300,000, to be exact, after going off on them in a social media tirade – but she could care less. “I feel free,” she wrote in an Instagram story after the snafu last year.

So it’s not surprising that Doja kept the stage banter to a minimum; about an hour in, she allowed a cursory, but seemingly genuine, “Thank you everyone.” That was about it. Still, Doja didn’t need to give us the cliched “it’s always been a dream to perform on this stage” monologue to show a deep respect for her audience. She did so by putting on a tour de force of a set, one that merged her musical talents with a clear knack for spectacle. I suspect it will become a staple on best-of-Coachella lists for years to come.

Doja first appeared by popping up on the stage’s extended catwalk, opening the night further back in the crowd, so those of us who hadn’t made it to the pit got a good look at her, too. She first wore an all-white hazmat suit. I thought it was a little Patrick Bateman; the girl next to me remarked that Doja looked like “a whole-ass sperm”.

Whatever the inspiration, she took that off pretty quickly, revealing extra-long blonde hair that went well past her butt, and a matching tunic also made of hair. Her background dancers matched in their own full hair suits, and when paired with their syncopated moves, the vibe was a little Bob Fosse meets Fraggle Rock. The South African a capella group The Joy encircled Doja during Shutcho, a diss track for haters that the group turned into a melodic, choir-like crescendo.

Though Doja is a very 2020s pop star, terminally online and well-versed in the meme ecosystem, she didn’t rely on many gimmicks to make it through her set. The stage design was sparse and industrial. Her numerous outfit changes kept the same off-white palette, very Virgil Abloh-esque aesthetic: sculptural, sleek, architectural. My favorite look was a shaggy bikini set by Entire Studios that could have been a reference to Jane Fonda as Barbarella, or just a sartorial nod to the concept of merkins.

Doja tapped A$AP Rocky, 21 Savage and a giant recreation of a T-Rex fossil for guest stars. During her penultimate song, Paint the Town Red, which samples Dionne Warwick’s 1963 hit Walk on By, I wondered for a moment if Doja was about to make my entire life and bring out the octogenarian legend herself. Instead, she did perhaps the opposite of that and rolled around in a sapphic mud pit with her background dancers for the finale, Wet Vagina.

Though Doja found mainstream success in the pop arena with early pandemic groovers like Kiss Me More and Say So, her Coachella set stuck to rap. Understandably, much of it came from her latest release, last year’s Scarlet. She described the album as a“masculine” response to her desire of moving away from pop princess-dom.

This meant that the fans who were there for Doja’s more accessible fare may have been disappointed by the exclusion of those songs – when the set ended, many mulled around the stage as if they were sure she’d come back rearing into Say So. (Again, she didn’t.)

But to me, it didn’t matter: Doja followed her gut, performed the songs she felt represented her best, all presented in an energetic, top-of-game triumph. For all the endless chatter this year about a lackluster lineup, Doja proved she’s worthy of a headline spot, so long as the people in charge – and, crucially, her fans – trust her to do it her own way.