Coachella Lineup Poster Parodies

About

Coachella Lineup Poster Parodies are photoshopped variations of the promotional lineup posters for the annual Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival in Indio, California.

Origin

On May 25th, 2008, Coachella Forums^[1] member Xenocide submitted a thread titled "Coachella '09 Lineup Announced!", which highlighted a photoshopped lineup poster with the classic rock bands Led Zeppelin and The Doors headlining (shown below).

Spread

On January 20th, 2010, BuzzFeed^[5] highlighted an edited Coachella poster containing artists and bands that were relevant in the 1990s (shown below, left). On April 19th, comedian Julia Segal posted a parody containing fictional artists and bands from films and television shows to her Tumblr^[6] blog (shown below, right).

On January 19th, 2011, writer Ned Hepburn posted a parody Coachella poster on his Tumblr^[2] blog (shown below, left). On the same day, the Tumblr blog The Clearly Dope^[7] posted a photoshopped "Brochella" poster, with music acts associated with stereotypical "bros" (shown below, right).

On January 20th, the Internet news blog Urlesque^[4] published a compilation of notable fake Coachella posters, which included an Internet meme variation (shown below, left). On April 17th, 2012, Redditor mtthwhdl submitted a parody poster filled with deceased artists and disbanded groups to the /r/Music^[3] subreddit (shown below, right). Prior to being archived, the post gained over 2,800 up votes and 280 comments.

On January 25th, 2013, the Tumblr blog Pleated Jeans^[9] highlighted a Coachella poster featuring a lineup consisting of actors, fictional characters and several bands performing a "Police Cover Set" (shown below, left). On January 13th, 2014, a Facebook^[8] page for the rapper Lil B posted a photoshopped Coachella poster with "Lil B" repeated for each act (shown below, right). In the first 24 hours, the post accumulated more than 5,300 likes and 300 comments.

Philip Anschutz Controversy

In early 2017, after the year's Coachella lineup was announced, Afropunk (here quoted in Uproxx^[10]) reported that the owner of the festival, Philip Anschutz, was a climate change-denying conservative who had donated large sums of money to anti-LGBT groups. This inspired the creation of poster parodies that lampooned the festival's tie to Anschutz.

A.I. Generated Parodies

On January 23rd, 2018, Botnik Studios,^[11] the same studio which created the Harry Potter Predictive Text Chapter, produced a fake Coachella poster by running thousands of band names through a generator, ending up with band names like "Fanch," "Billions of Mario," and "John x4." The poster went viral as many found the names humorous, and it was covered by publications including The Verge,^[12] Complex,^[13] and Digg.^[14]

2019 Parodies

On January 2nd, 2019, the official @Coachella^[15] Twitter feed posted a lineup poster for the upcoming festival (shown below). Within 48 hours, the tweet gained over 229,000 likes and 69,700 retweets.

In the coming days, several new Coachella poster parodies began circulating on the social media platform. On January 3rd, a Twitter Moments page titled "These fake Coachella lineups look incredible" was created, highlighting several new examples of the meme.

Various Examples

Search Interest

External References