Part 1 of Coachella Festival Wraps Up With Few Surprises

Damon Winter/The New York TimesA member of Pulp performing on Friday at the Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival in Indio, Calif. More Photos »

INDIO, Calif. — Well, in the end it’s a business. But so it is at the beginning, and in the middle.

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An ambient question about the three-day Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival, which ended on Sunday — or did it? — was whether the knowledge that it would be repeated exactly one week later in the same place and in the same order might alter the minute-by-minute feeling of it. You know, make it less special. Take away its aura. Does Coachella have an aura? It did once.

At large destination pop festivals, impressive surprises are experienced as acts of generosity: a balloon rising into the vast desert sky, a three-hour set. This is what unites large numbers of people and makes them feel innocent. Not the weekend’s quick-stop onstage guest appearances, from macro (Rihanna with Calvin Harris, Usher with David Guetta) to micro (the weirdo rapper Gonjasufi with the Los Angeles D.J. Gaslamp Killer).

Moments like those are as much for celebrity blogs and YouTube clips as they are for music fans. They don’t make you, standing in the crowd, feel particularly innocent. This year more than ever, the sets felt like jobs with a bit more self-promotional energy. I don’t remember a lot of shared awe. Will the surprises be better next weekend? Who knows, but it’s unlikely, with much less news media present.

This festival was founded 12 years ago on the premise of indie rock, which is, or has at times been, an art of innocence and skepticism — in other words, ideals. It’s grown out of that to become a festival of popular and semi-popular North American, English-language noncountry music, a megamart of sound for college kids.

It’s strong on Grammy winners, breakout acts from South by Southwest and the CMJ festival from a year or two ago, and, at this point, second-tier reunions. And dance music, which is likely to alter Coachella’s future more than any of the genres it has flirted with over the years. Aesthetically, it’s almost uncontainable, which is neither good nor bad; it’s just breadth, Spotify made real.

The oxymoron of a unique cultural event set to rerun was, obviously, a way to sell more tickets — 75,000 more — without making the festival too crowded. And that plan worked: both weekends sold out, and the crowd felt at capacity but no more. (Except in the dance tent, where many came to stay, and late arrivals squinted to watch house D.J.’s like Sebastian Ingrosso, Avicii and Kaskade.) The security felt nonintrusive and often invisible, as it should; this is a calm audience.

I saw violence only once, during the Death Grips’ set on Friday. That band, from Sacramento, has a great idea: nonidiomatic digital dance beats (sort of Southern hip-hop, sort of reggae, sort of hard-rock) with Zach Hill’s hypercreative, improvised live drumming on top, and Stefan Burnett’s mostly unintelligible yammering raps and chants. It’s bad-dream music, strong and strange, with dirty rock riffs occasionally drifting in: Pink Floyd’s “Astronomy Domine,” Link Wray’s “Rumble.” It’s music that can start fights, and it did.

The two-part festival is a big deal for music on the West Coast, and not just at the festival site, the Empire Polo Club. It means that a lot of these bands play other club and theater shows in Los Angeles before or after the festival weekends — many of them also booked by Goldenvoice, the festival’s promoter — and some of them run up to San Francisco in between the shows.

In 2012 the headliners didn’t define the festival or, on the face of it, lure concertgoers to spend money specifically here — as opposed to, say, Sasquatch or Lollapalooza, in May and August, each of which has about two dozen of the same acts as Coachella in its lineup. Most of the names in the biggest type were acts that have been seen a lot in recent years, in touring circuits and wherever else: the Black Keys, Swedish House Mafia, Bon Iver, Radiohead.

Anyway, innocence. You saw it projected onstage rather than felt by the audience, as part of the music’s artifice, in band after band with cool eyewear, retrospective yearnings and the trebly sound of Fender Jaguars and Jazzmasters: Girls, Yuck, EMA, Ximena Sariñana, M83, the Shins, Real Estate and even the R&B singer Frank Ocean, beset with sound problems, singing beautifully and moving diffidently.

It was left to Dr. Dre and Snoop Dogg, on Sunday night, to work the surprises. They performed wall-to-wall hits from 10 to 20 years ago with a pile of guests: Eminem and 50 Cent; Wiz Khalifa as rap’s present; the Los Angeles rapper Kendrick Lamar (who performed “The Recipe,” a new Dr. Dre production) as its future; and, as its past, a full-body holograph of Tupac Shakur, digitally pacing the stage and appearing to ask Coachella what was up.