My Official Thoughts on the Four Tet / Skrillex / Fred Again.. Coachella Headlining Set
What's My Age Again?
The most pleasant experience I’ve ever had at a Four Tet show was last night at my desk. Sitting there, alone, exporting a video. The kids out on the polo field were as carefree as I can kind of conceptualize I once was. Now, age 31, I capped off a pleasant air-conditioned Sunday indoors cramming freelance work before the impending final weekend sleep could lead me straight back into the 9-5 nightmare, then I put on the Coachella stream as background noise while waiting for an hour-long render to finish.
The opening act was Old Blink-182. Not “the old Blink-182.” Old Man Blink 182.
I popped on the stream midway through “I Miss You,” not realizing how much I still didn’t miss them.
Tom Delonge was back, as back(wards) as his fitted hat. Rocking out while rocking his UFO merch. Somehow still singing like that.
I blinked and missed the band’s Matt Skiba years, but after the recent spy balloon missile bonanza it’s nice to see Tom up there with the other two playing “Aliens Exist” to a massive crowd who no longer considers him a complete wackadoodle, or no longer cares. Mark Hoppus is still hopping around like a graying bunny, doing his thing in a distinguished punk Johnny Knoxville kinda way, bantering with Tom about the size of his penis. That Guy From The Kardashians is still behind the kit, shirtless tatted and pounding skins like his life depends on it. Watching him is a reminder of how we’ve depended on him for so much of our lives to be this incomprehensibly talented, and how we shouldn’t take for granted that his life, like anyone’s, was almost taken suddenly and tragically. It’s great to see the three of them together getting old.
It would be easy to hate Blink-182 for not knowing what their age is again, but criticizing them for carrying on would be an act of self-denial. A betrayal of reality. If they’re getting older that means you are, too. It took me like 20 years, until I had a random realization in a TSA line, to understand that Take Off Your Pants and Jacket was a pun. In rare occasions, aging is beneficial. It gives you perspective. From my perspective, at home alone in my room watching them, Blink-182 performed hit after hit to an adoring crowd of all generations. They at least appeared to be having fun. It’s the small things, all of them, that count.
But Blink-182 is Old.
Fred Again.. is new.
Skrillex has undergone so many transformations he might as well be new again.
Four Tet is old, in that Kieran Hebden is around the same age as Tom DeLonge. His career—appreciated for as long as it has been by the true enjoyers—is just now reaching the relative likes of where Blink was when they were 23. He is the wise and proven elder who’s just now getting his mainstream flowers, thanks in part perhaps to the wub wub former screamo kid and the new pad basher who smiles too much. This is his new reality. Like Blink-182, he is still doing what he’s always done. There are just a lot more people watching. Never in his wildest dreams did Four Tet think he’d be walking the catwalk of the Coachella main stage like Ariana Grande.
That’s how the trio’s Sunday headlining 2023 Coachella Week 2 performance began. They walked out to Frank Ocean’s converted ice skating rink together, soaking in the moment. Kieran in shorts, like a dad. Skrillex with a towel draped around neck, like a boxer. Fred bounding around and laughing too much, like Shrek’s donkey. On the stage screen, beneath the swell of lights and sounds, a scene from Fred Again..’s Actual Instagram played. A candid clip of Kieran Fred posted earlier in the day: as he walks past the extender part of the stage where they’re set to perform later that evening, Kieran marvels about how he’s about to do what Ariana’s done. At times Fred’s social media can feel too much like he’s trying to be a reality star like Travis Barker. Seeing Kieran hanging out and laughing with him takes away some of the mystique an audience feels in the crowd at a Four Tet show, as a glowing mad scientist levitates above, observing them with wide eyes and a stoic gaze. But perhaps getting a glimpse into Kieran’s weird but seemingly genuine mentorship/partnership role with Fred and Sonny is what’s made me like him a little more. Opening the show with that clip definitely did.
I’ve seen so many Four Tet shows I can’t keep track. I’m always going with friends who like his music. Always having panic attacks when the bass rumbles deep in my IBS. I am a hater. I have carried for decades the misguided opinion that electronic dance music and modern rave culture are intertwined abhorrent trash emblematic of society’s descent into a distraction-fueled avoidance of decrepit ineptitude and mass contentment with self-inflicted disillusion. I don’t know if that sentence makes sense, and I know there is more history and context to electronic music, but like Slug I know that I mean it. Four Tet seems like he makes music for the mind as much as he does for the body, but at the end of the day (or the end of the all night warehouse party) people at his shows are often just dancing to rhythms that don’t appeal to me. I just can’t get into it and don’t know why people like it so much. Or at least that’s how I felt before I became Old.
It might have been Sound Ancestors, or morning side / evening side, or just the personal evolution I’ve experienced with age, but I appreciate Four Tet now. I like him more than I dislike him. Maybe I just like him a lot in comparison to Skrillex and Fred Again.., the former of whom I associate with a douchey style of music from the 2010s and the latter of whom is way too damn smiley. But I like him and I liked the way he and those two guys opened up their Coachella headlining set, which evolved out of the buzz from before and after the MSG show but came together in under a week.
I don’t feel like I need to know more about this kind of music to understand why Fred Again.., Four Tet, and Skrillex have such an odd but enthralling dynamic. It is clear that Kieran is the one they respect most. But Skrillex also has a level of, for lack of a better word, clout that Kieran doesn’t. I liked, but didn’t love, From First To Last’s Dear Diary, My Teen Angst Has a Body Count, and “Scary Monsters and Nice Sprites” was in heavy rotation when it came out until every ensuing dubstep song and the associated fratty culture around it ruined it forever. But for some reason people love him and now he’s kinda an Old Guy too. Fred Again.. had a sudden rise over the past year, starting with a Boiler Set that led into another album and a Tiny Desk concert and a friendship with Sonny and Kieran which leads us again back to social media clips of the three of them having way too much smiley fun together. Fred is good at hitting pads and playing keys and is only unlikeable because he’s so genuine and likable, which like Blink-182’s age is no valid reason to criticize the music or hustle.
It was just super cool to see Four Tet with that much attention and adoration being livestreamed to so many people in what those people can generally agree was a relatively significant moment. Four Tet’s appearance on the main stage, more than the other two’s, is a testament to his enduring impact on music for the past however many years. Skrillex’s too, I guess, but Skrillex already had that previously-mentioned lack-of-a-better-term term. The last time I saw Four Tet at Coachella was in an indoor tent. During Sunday’s main stage performance, when he finally stopped lingering behind Sonny and Fred’s knob twisting and stepped up to the tangled cords of shared gear, illuminated by two warm lighted lamps, he had the same mischievous look that captivated me as I was standing cross-armed in that tent however many years ago, rolling only my eyes, probably wishing one of my friends would roll with me to watch Bright Eyes or whatever. In a style of music where the most anticipated move can elicit the strongest crowd reaction, Four Tet deviates. He knows the best transition isn’t always the big Skrillex drop, but the subtle misdirection that gets the inside of your head bobbing its head. He guides the audience on a journey, fully in control even when it feels like the beat is careening off the edge of the table him and his frazzled hair hover over. I don’t have to dance to like it. I don’t even have to like it to appreciate it. It took me a long time, like the mainstream audience of ageless humans who attend Coachella, but now I really really respect it.
Four Tet did something funny. I smiled as wide as Fred when it happened, despite not understanding the full context.
“He did it,” one of my semi-IRL friends sent our group chat.
In that moment, watching from a distance together, we all agreed this was generally significant.
When Four Tet stepped up to the decks, he played a sped-up version of the “Smells Like Teen Spirit” riff and went straight into what Twitter quickly informed me is a song by Hol! called “Country Riddim.” It sounds exactly like what I imagine a Skrillex song sounds like. But my semi-IRL friend informed me that Actual dubstep fans don’t like the alleged subgenre called riddim. It’s too hard and generic and unoriginal. Maybe in an ironic, troll-appreciatey kinda way, the whole Coachella went nuts when the beat dropped. But they went nuts nonetheless. The song is undeniably good, like Call Me Maybe and another Taylor Swift song I heard Four Tet play with wild percussion under it, before I turned off the stream and went back to editing a video.
I’m going to transition out of this article as poorly as Fred Again slapping the shared equipment. Frank Ocean’s performance inspired a lot of thoughts and commentary, in part because it wasn’t livestreamed. This one inspired a lot of thoughts within me because it was livestreamed, and I felt compelled to organize them in a manner about as coherent and logical as Nirvana into that big bassy song. I just wanted to take a moment to acknowledge that that stream felt like a big weird musical moment to the relatively small select group of people who considered it a big weird musical moment, and that it was a wholesome grand Old time.
As much as I’ve hated on all three of these individuals over the years, witnessing a livestream of Four Tet, Skrillex, and Fred Again.. closing out Coachella was a genuine joy.