Why is the dance music world in an uproar over Grimes’ Coachella 2024 faux pas? EDM Identity explores.
Update, Thursday, April 18: Grimes’ manager, Daouda Leonard, has posted a statement on X intended to “clear some false narratives” about her Coachella weekend one performance.
Previously: By now, anyone with access to the Internet has heard about Grimes‘ misadventures during weekend one of the 2024 edition of Coachella. During her Saturday evening DJ set on the festival’s Sahara stage, the Canadian singer-songwriter-producer stopped playing music for several minutes to troubleshoot technical difficulties.
“Never seen no shit like this in my life!!” wrote Detroit techno pioneer Eddie Fowlkes in a Facebook post. “Apologizing because she don’t know how to mix, but she said she is a DJ!!“
“This is nothing new,” wrote Swedish DJ and producer Christian Smith on X. “Many famous acts these days are not good at the craft of DJing. I wish people would go to events to LISTEN rather than look at the DJs.”
DJs make mistakes all the time, though. Some might argue that it’s how you know they’re not playing a pre-recorded set. So what happened during Grimes’ performance that has so many old school DJs flooding your social media feed with longwinded rants? Let’s take a closer look.
The biggest thing is what Grimes (real name Claire Boucher) said during the pause. She got on the mic and told the crowd, “Okay, before I start any more songs, I just wanna say, in very classic Grimes fashion, I’m having the — this is very hard to explain, it’s a complex technology, but everything has been put to a double tempo, so I’m doing a lot of internal math in my mind to make the tracks go together.”
Basically, Boucher was saying that the beats per minute (BPM) display on one or more of her CDJ players was showing twice the number it was supposed to. This may have been caused by rekordbox (the industry-standard track prep and export software) not being set to only analyze tracks within a 100 BPM range beforehand. If a DJ depends on these visual cues to mix, the added calculations can be distracting.
Where longtime DJs take issue with this is that Boucher, an acclaimed musician, couldn’t simply put on headphones and mix the tracks by ear. Vinyl turntables had no BPM or waveform displays, and DJ schools often teach that any new technology should be used more so as a tool than a crutch in case it fails and you have to resort to old methods.
Then came Boucher’s own statement on the matter. “I wanted to come back rly strong and usually I always handle every aspect of my show myself — to save time this was one of the first times I’ve outsourced essential things like rekordbox bpm’s and letting someone else organize the tracks on the sd card etc.” part of it reads.
Experienced DJs have called this out as well. Elsewhere in the statement shared via X, Boucher wrote that she had “spent months on this show, making music and visuals.” If she did, many have asked, then why didn’t she check the card to make sure there were unanalyzed files added as a backup? Half of DJing is simply being prepared for things to go wrong, after all.
Grimes has assured her fans that the second weekend of Coachella will be different. “I will personally organize all the files next week,” she wrote. “I will not let such a thing happen again.”
