Elder stateswomen ranging from the Breeders and Bikini Kill to Sarah McLachlan and Stevie Nicks were a key part of an event that offered contemporary lights as different and superb as Doechii and Mitski back to back. You know an inaugural festival has been a success when, after the temperature reached 95 degrees, humidity topped 80%… perspiration stains were so pervasive that it was the odd dry spots that looked like stains… constant 12-minute trudges back and forth between two action-packed stages threatened to sap what few excess pounds hadn’t been sweated off… and you realized that, amid those conditions, you had not sat down in more than 10 hours… and, sitting in a gridlocked lot waiting to get out, all you could think was: The answer to that, at the end of the Daisy Chain Fields festival Saturday in Irvine, Calif., was some time around this year in 2027. Festival creator and headliner Olivia Rodrigo told the 45,000-strong crowd the words they wanted to hear: that this was not a one-off, and that we’d reconvene next year for another thrillingly curated, expertly executed and altogether spirit-rewarding all-female-led bill. (Flowery adjectives ours, not hers.) Now if they could just find a way to schedule future editions of the festival at a more meteorologically reasonable time, some period of the year where it is reliably warm in SoCal yet not prone to insanely long heat waves, because climate change has abated and… well, never mind, fine … August probably is as good a time as any.
What a distraction from all that the 14-act bill (plus three guest stars) managed to provide over a 10-and-a-half-hour day of music, with one killer act after another representing a wide gamut of styles and eras, bearing a sold amount of diversity except for the very un-diverse main criterion for booking. Of course it ended with Sarah McLachlan, the instigator of the obvious inspiration, Lilith Fair, taking the stage to implicitly give her blessing for carrying on the tradition, as she joined Rodrigo’s stage for duets of “Building a Mystery” and “Angel” (the latter dedicated to Dolly Parton, with permission given to cry, because McLachlan knows she’s good at that). Or not literally quite the end, actually, because it was inevitable when Stevie Nicks was announced as one of Rodrigo’s guests that you don’t follow that.
As an ambassador from the 1970s, Nicks was an outlier in this company, where nearly all of the acts were either fairly newly minted stars or heroines of the Lilith era. There was a case being made here, without stating it quite so bluntly, that the two greatest decades for women in pop music were the ’90s and the 2020s. History isn’t quite that simple, but for 10-plus hours Saturday, I was ready to jump in and readily make the case that the respective eras of Alanis Morissette (who also showed up as a surprise guest) and Rodrigo really were and are the greatest generations, whether it can be empirically backed up or not.
At the very least, the two climactic main stage sets, by Rodrigo and Chappell Roan, set out a pretty indisputable case that we are living in a golden era. Between the two of them, they are responsible for four of the dozen greatest albums of the decade (i.e., Roan’s lone effort so far and all three of Rodrigo’s, peaking with her best achievement to date, “You Seem Pretty Sad for a Girl So in Love”). It would have been lovely to see them share a moment on stage together, and we didn’t get that.
But it was enough to have them performing superb sets back to back in an effective coronation and celebration of these two as the greatest pop figures currently in their 20s. But if you were looking for the secret heart of the festival, it might have been over on the second stage, where some of the artists who inspired Rodrigo as a nascent rocker got their moment to shine. It would be hard to imagine a more heartwarming moment than when Bikini Kill revved through some vintage punk and the entire crowd of young ‘uns in front was singing along.
Kathleen Hanna was at least as agog as any of the rest of us at the realization the band was playing to a pretty full and definitely engaged field of (primarily) women, something that would have seemed like science-fiction in their heyday. Hanna said that when they played Orange County in the ’90s, they were lucky if three women showed up to one of their gigs (and then she brought out three Irvine-ites who did form their own band after getting into Bikini Kill). Not all good things come to those who wait, but occasionally poetic justice prevails.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
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