Empire Polo Club, Indio, California
The pop superstar makes an electrifying return to the desert for a career-spanning two-hour show, one of the best the desert has ever seen
In 2017, Lady Gaga took on an unenviable task: filling in for Beyoncé, who dropped out of a Coachella headliner slot due to pregnancy. Gaga’s replacement performance, in her country-tinged Joanne era – as usual, she was years ahead of the pop curve – more than sufficed; perhaps only Beyoncé can hold a candle to her in terms of true-blue live performance ability, and she delivered the set of a consummate entertainer and generational talent. But Gaga felt that she had unfinished business. “I’ve had a vision I’ve never been able to fully realize at Coachella for reasons beyond our control,” she wrote in an Instagram post announcing her return to the desert for another headliner slot this spring. “I have been wanting to go back and do it right, and I am.”
Did she ever. Gaga, more than any other contemporary pop star, has approached pop as transmogrification, live performance like a hunter – the piercing gaze, transparent hunger and annihilating focus of an apex predator. And with Gagachella, as her fans have already termed a thesis statement of a set, she goes in for the kill. You knew from the minute she appeared in full deranged queen regalia, the head of a multi-story hoop skirt that opened to reveal a birdcage prison of backup dancers, that the vision was nigh. The nearly two-hour performance, covering 22 songs from her dance pop catalogue, joins Beyoncé’s postponed Homecoming in the pantheon of seminal Coachella headliner sets – a fully realized vision of a pop master, a testament to years of hard-earned experience at the highest level, and a banger dance party with production and delivery in a league above her peers.
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