It’s the Sunday afternoon of Stagecoach, and I’m standing beneath a Fireball canopy of sweaty, star-spangled bodies grinding to “Humble” while a pair of Trump and Blue Lives Matter flags wave overhead in the waning sunlight.
I hear a lot more rap than country in the campgrounds. Much of it is the kind of predictable party ubiquity you’d expect from tone deaf suburban white kids—”Palmdale,” “California Love,” Juvenile (so much Juvenile) at camps with strippers poles, of which there are several. But a lot of it fresh Rap Caviar fare, too—Kendrick, Migos, Drake.
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Stagecoach is everything you’d expect it to be, and nothing you’d expect it to be. There are T-shirts that read “LGBT: Liberty Guns Beer Trump,” and there are cowboy hats adorned with cheeky devil horns and rainbow-striped triangles. I talk to a guy at the campgrounds in ass-less leather chaps and a chest harness, and, a few minutes later, I bump into another cowpoke in a Bernie T-shirt that says “Kill ‘Em All.”
“Kill whom?” I ask, confused.
“The terrorists!” he shouts, pointing at Bernie’s mug.
If Coachella felt, in the wake of the election, almost a little too business-as-usual—though what else should it have been?—Stagecoach is where this surreal new time rears its impish, willfully nonsensical head. It is, essentially, an enormous tailgate for America’s id. But it’s also not all that different from Coachella. There are still plenty of kids peacocking—just swap out the LA elite and fashionable mass-produced mysticism for Orange County Republicans and cornfed American flag-print garb.
At Coachella, you have the inclusive techno ecstasy of the Yuma dance tent; at Stagecoach, it becomes the anything-goes hoedown of the Honky Tonk. Where Gucci Mane called out the Migos to help preside over an enraptured sea of pumping fists and glowsticks in the Sahara, the immortal Willie Nelson would stand a week later for his 84th birthday, prompting fans to stand atop bales of hay as Neil Young emerged for a closing harmonica solo in the Palomino. I also met plenty of people at both fests who didn’t know much about the music—they were just there to party. In the end, everyone’s just out here to find release, hang out with their friends, and listen to some great songs.
When we talk about Coachella and Stagecoach, we’re not really talking about the festivals themselves—well-oiled, high-production events with bands and security checkpoints and Ferris wheels. The festivals and their organizers know exactly what they want to do and be, and to their credit (and as last week’s Fyre Festival underscored), they do it extremely well.
When we talk about Coachella and Stagecoach, and any major music festival, really, we’re talking about the people that go to them—a sort of shorthand for cultural reference points, three-day stretches when various factions of young people emerge to reveal themselves like corpse flowers of youth culture: beautiful, rare, and disgusting.
Stagecoach is no different from the rest in that way. Bigoted attendees notwithstanding, it’s also a helluva lot of fun. It may make you feel uneasy about these United States, but it will sure as shit make you love country music—and square dancing, and barbecue, and a deeply American sense of community and generosity of spirit that I encountered just as often as any “Don’t Tread on Me” flags (though that’s easy for me to say as a young white woman). You won’t find much by way of Instagram-ready self-consciousness or name-dropping here; just, for better or for worse, 40,000 people looking to have a good time.
Andrea Domanick is Noisey’s West Coast Editor. Follow her on Twitter.
