Shortly after singing the closing notes of her indie pop gem LES Artistes on Saturday afternoon, Santigold gazes out at the sweat-laced crowd at the Daisy Chain Fields festival – a benefit concert hosted by Olivia Rodrigo for charities focused on women and girls – in disbelief. “I can’t believe she pulled this shit off!” Santigold cries into the microphone, beaming.
The inaugural festival, in Irvine, California’s Great Park, has drawn in 45,000 people to see artists as varied as the legendary punk agitators Bikini Kill, kicky pop phenom Chappell Roan and kinetic superstar rapper Doechii, all of whom agreed to perform for free; Rodrigo herself closes out the night with a career-spanning setlist and starry guest appearances. The festival raised $10m to be distributed evenly among 10 non-profits, including Baby2Baby, which distributes supplies to children and parents in need, and the National Women’s Law Center. Later that night, Melinda French Gates joins Rodrigo on stage and matches the fundraising, bringing the donated total to $20m.
The 23-year-old Rodrigo is an anomaly in the pop music world. She has gone beyond sharing uncontroversial onstage platitudes and worked toward actionable change at a moment when Donald Trump’s government is actively stripping away rights from disabled people, women, people of color and LGBTQ+ citizens in the US. Her festival drew on protest movements of decades past, particularly the scrappy activism that punctuated punk rock circles such as riot grrrl and the landmark touring women’s festival Lilith Fair, reflected at once in its programming, the presence of non-profit partners on the ground and in its aesthetic language. With activist buttons decorating both stages, a printed zine available at the merch table with a suggested donation and a curated show about global musical protest movements at the park’s in-house art gallery, the festival recalls the floral burst of the 60s revival that punctuated the 90s, with a decidedly gen-Z twist.
The festival shimmers with muscular performances. Save for a few technical hiccups that plague 90s rock stalwarts Garbage’s set in the evening, the shows on both of the festival’s two stages go smoothly and are thoughtfully spaced to ensure no clashes. Daisy Chain Fields boasts perhaps some of the clearest sound I’ve ever heard at an outdoor festival: the Austin punk band Die Spitz’s chugging riffs resound like gut punches, and Mitski’s crystalline vocals are sonorous and full. Rodrigo’s vision for the festival – she wanted it to feel like a place women and girls could kick back and listen to music together on a lackadaisical afternoon outdoors – manifests in the umbrellas, large beanbags and couches arranged under fringed lampshades in the vast park.
Rodrigo also takes great pains to position the festival as a place of radical dreaming. She invites visitors to jot down their hopes on small white cards and tether them to branches, a recreation of Yoko Ono’s Wish Tree. The walk from the Marigold Stage to the larger Dandelion Stage features stripes on the gravel that nods to galvanizing efforts of women including Shirley Chisholm and Gwendolyn Brooks. And a new piece by the graphic artist Jenny Holzer emblazoned on a wall urges attendees to mine scraps of joy within the ongoing fight for survival.
But the festival’s advocacy efforts and thoughtful conceptual approach are somewhat blunted by how ill-prepared it seems for the elements. The organizers couldn’t have predicted an unseasonal bout of humidity in typically dry southern California, nor that temperatures would creep into the mid-90s. But basic resources seem somewhat scant for a sold-out crowd. One festival employee told KTLA earlier this week that they were concerned that the festival wasn’t prepared to supply a crowd of this size with adequate resources given the sweltering weather, and reportedly brought it up to the festival’s promoters (C3 Presents, a subsidiary of Live Nation, put on the show along with the city of Irvine and PSQ Productions, the company that manages the park’s amphitheater shows).
Throughout the hottest parts of the day, five free refillable water stations strewn throughout the festival grounds have long lines and, as some people reported online, so do the medical tents. The queue to buy food stretches for an hour or longer. Compounding the heat issue is a lack of shaded areas on site, as well as the festival’s strict policies that do not allow attendees to bring in non-aerosol sunscreen bottles over 3.4oz or umbrellas.
Still, attendees make do amid the sweltering temperatures to enjoy the music while taking care of one another. Jostling happens seldomly; when people need to scoot past someone, they politely ask as much. During one heat-dazed instance in the late afternoon, I accidentally leave my wallet on top of a grassy hill; when I sprint back to find it, it is still there, not a dollar missing. The festival seems to encourage a sense of unselfconsciousness – a rarity at a time when younger people have expressed fear of expressing themselves fully, lest they be embarrassed by someone capturing an unflattering video of them and uploading it online. Friends scream-sing to Roan’s Hot to Go!, do interpretive dances to the woozy set of Not For Radio, play patty-cake sitting underneath trees and dole out friendship bracelets in a state of reverie.
The day’s emotive peak, though, arrives at the end with Rodrigo’s headlining set. She runs through an array of songs, including buoyant renditions of Bad Idea Right?, a song about the mental gymnastics of meeting up with an ex, and Good 4 U, with vocals more biting than on the studio version. Hewing to the lineage of Lilith Fair, and directly acknowledging the artists who came before her, Rodrigo brings out Sarah McLachlan – who had organized the successful 90s festival at a time when songs by women musicians could not be played back to back on the radio, due to their supposed commercial nonviability – for a resplendent duet of Building a Mystery. The rapt crowd swells with heartache during the pair’s bare-bones Angel, dedicated to the late Dolly Parton, sways to Rodrigo’s rendition of Landslide alongside Stevie Nicks, and joyously yells along to Ironic with Alanis Morissette, a surprise addition to the bill after Karen O canceled due to a last-minute personal matter.
Shortly before she waves goodbye (perhaps just a farewell for now?), Rodrigo urges the crowd during her ripper All-American Bitch to think of something that infuriates them and scream along together. The crowd bellows in unison in a wail that stretches on and on. It seems aimed at a world that seems to be going backwards, a world that makes the seething songs of Garbage, Bikini Kill and other performers at the festival – penned decades ago – upsettingly prescient, a world where so much more needs to be done and where a concert is a call for change.
