[Article] Thoughts On The 2020 Coachella Poster (+ line-up stories)

Wrote a lot of dumb stuff about this year’s Coachella poster, as I love to do: https://t.co/Qi3YUM3X6X

— Tom Breihan (@tombreihan) January 3, 2020

There’s this dumb thing I do every year: Coachella unveils its poster, and I write a way-too-long thing about all the little narratives hidden in that lineup, and in the way the poster lays that lineup out. It’s not something you should take too seriously, but I love the way this festival — the biggest of them all in America — gets cold-blooded and mercenary with its font-size discrepancies and its lineup placements. Every year, that poster shows us an of-the-moment music-business pecking order, or at least the music-business pecking order as it’s perceived by the extraordinarily successful festival bookers at Goldenvoice.

Coachella’s lineup also gives us a pretty good idea of what we’re going to see during the entirety of the American 2020 festival season, since most American music festivals are now slight, off-brand versions of Coachella. This year, a bunch of those festival have already unveiled lineups. But Coachella remains the big dog, the ruler by which all others are measured. Nobody cares about the font sizes in the Shaky Knees or Hangout posters. Coachella still matters.

This year’s lineup is out now. So let’s get into this year’s stories.

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7. BIGBANG! The coolest thing about this year’s lineup might be the inclusion of K-pop overlords BIGBANG. You could make the argument that the group is the most important boy band of the last decade, though One Direction might have something to say about that. (Calling it now: The reunited One Direction will headline Coachella 2027, and it will be lit. We will dance all night to the best song ever.) Coachella got BLACKPINK to play last year, and this one is a bigger, cooler deal than that.

BIGBANG made a lot of extremely catchy music and a lot of wild, vivid music videos during the mid-’00s. Then they went on hiatus so that the members of the group could serve their compulsory South Korean military service. They’ve finished that, and now they’re back. K-pop moves fast, so it could be tough for a group even as big as BIGBANG to come back. But leader G-Dragon is a maximal pop futurist of the highest order, and he knows the power of a big stage.

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