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Among them were, certainly, Odd Future, teenagers rapping out harsh adolescent sexual urges and dire self-diagnosis. The day after their own show, they ended up onstage again in the globelike Oasis Dome with Lil B, the young Bay Area rapper who held forth constantly on sex and his YouTube numbers, assuring the crowd that he likes women but announcing that his next album will be called “I’m Gay” because (to paraphrase what he said in a torrent of words) words are meaningless. And Gayngs, from Minneapolis, with half a dozen singers, two bassists and a saxophonist, played a version of ’80s soft-rock and blue-eyed soul as deep, slow and serious meditations on love, a smart and beautiful recoding of a hated-on genre.
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The installation piece by J. Spaceman and Jonathan Glazer. More Photos »
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Yelle, also on Saturday. More Photos »
Off!, a new band with an old punk-rock eminence — Keith Morris — played a lean, smoking 25-minute set. These new songs find within Mr. Morris the guy he was in the late 1970s when he was Black Flag’s first singer, squirmy and paranoid and disempowered; with graffiti guitar solos and fast, swinging rhythm, they’re studiously close to the sound and songwriting from the first Black Flag EP, “Nervous Breakdown,” which deserves a place in the National Recording Registry.
Dreadlocked, balding and worn, Mr. Morris, 55, is a great Southern California artist, one of the few at this year’s Coachella. Most of the weekend’s acts weren’t regional; they represented only styles and periods of pop since the early 1980s, states of mind, or degrees of ambition. Which brings us to Kanye West.
Through the weekend, rumors grew of his potential onstage guests, including Katy Perry, Rihanna, Kid Cudi and Justin Vernon of Bon Iver. Mr. Vernon, as it happened, emerged three times, silencing the crowd with lovely autotuned solos; Pusha T rapped a verse on “Runaway.” But that was it, and Mr. West, who first emerged on a hydraulic riser, midaudience, introduced neither.
For most of his two-hour show, under a full moon and aided by the main stage’s impeccable, giant sound system, he stood alone on the enormous platform, singing and dancing through dozens of hits and looking serious. (Halfway through, near midnight, he smiled, briefly.) He allowed that he wasn’t “the greatest singer in the world,” but sang a lot, bravely and badly enough to mar the last part of the show, which was separated into three “acts.” And before a giant backdrop of a Roman frieze, he seemed to argue with the sky and the floor beneath his feet: in the absence of Jay-Z, perhaps his only two reference points.
