One year after his onetime Odd Future collaborator Frank Ocean headlined the Coachella main stage on weekend one (to general bafflement from the public), Tyler, the Creator took a crack at the festival’s Saturday headlining slot with a fierce, visually arresting performance of some of his best-loved tracks.
Throughout the rapper’s roughly 80-minute performance, he held the assembled crowd in the palm of his hand thanks to a potent combination of down-to-earth real talk, a liberal dousing of (typically racy) humor, passionate performance intensity, hard-charging rap flow, eye-catching visuals and a bevy of special surprise guests.
For the performance, which rivaled Lana Del Rey‘s Friday set in terms of theatricality, the main stage was transformed into a desert vista, centered by a broken-down trailer flanked by two rocky hillsides — one topped by a green tent and adjacent sign that ironically read, “NO CAMPING.” The projection behind the physical set was a thing of ever-changing beauty, hosting such arresting images as a desert rainstorm, a giant silvery moon against a purple sky, a fiery hellscape and a sci-fi tableau complete with flying saucer.
“Thank you for staying. I know you all are tired [after] being here all day, so thanks for staying to watch my tired ass up here,” said Tyler near the beginning of his set. But the amped-up crowd was anything but tired, energized by the rapper’s impassioned renditions of songs like “See You Again,” “EARFQUAKE,” “NEW MAGIC WAND,” “WUSYANAME” and “RUNNING OUT OF TIME.”
The impassioned performance was marked by pyrotechnics in both the literal and figurative sense, as sparks flew not only from the literal stage but between Tyler and his fiercely loyal fans, many of whom could be heard belting out the brainy rapper’s often complex lyrics right along with him.
Check out all the highlights from Tyler’s set below.
Following a prologue video in which Tyler wore a park ranger uniform and explained how he’d given up his life as a music star to live inside a camper, the harnessed rapper materialized onstage by “crashing through” a wall of the trailer parked in its center, wearing the same ranger uniform seen in the video. It was an attention-grabbing entrance that nicely set the barometer for the remainder of the no-holds-barred performance.
The “This Is America” singer (a.k.a. Donald Glover) became the night’s first special guest when he came out to duet with Tyler on “Running Out of Time,” a track off the latter’s 2019 album IGOR. At one point, the two dipped and swayed around one another as they harmonized, with Tyler later explaining, “I used to hate that n—a. Seriously. I don’t know why, I gotta go to therapy to figure it out.” He added, “but this n—a put this song called ‘Urn’ out…I was at conflict with myself, like…how could a n—a I hate so much make something so good?” Clearly, that particular beef has been squashed.
The rapper joined Tyler for the performance of two tracks — “Potato Salad” and “Who Dat Boy” — after which Tyler admitted that once upon a time, like Glover, he also considered A$AP a nemesis: “I used to hate that n—a too…we thought we had beef,” he began. But, he went on to explain, “it was the n—as around us” that caused the issue — “and then me and Rock was like, we got love and now we friends.”
In one among many moments of candor during Saturday’s set, Tyler reminisced about his first performance at Coachella in 2011, as part of the Odd Future collective. “It was terrible,” he described of the set — after which he and his bandmates were famously kicked out of the festival by security for shooting Super Soakers at other guests. Clearly, Coachella has forgiven him: In addition to Saturday’s performance, Tyler was invited back as a performer in 2015 and 2018.
The evening’s least-known special guest, 71-year-old singer-songwriter Charlie Wilson, also just so happens to be one of its most lauded, with 13 total Grammy nominations and a BET Lifetime Achievement Award, among other honors. For his cameo, Wilson joined Tyler at the piano (perched atop one of the on-set “mountains”) for a charmingly low-key version of “Earfquake.” Even in his brief appearance, the music veteran’s onstage chemistry with his much younger duet partner was palpable.
The rising singer emerged onstage for a brief appearance during Tyler’s performance of “See You Again,” a single from his 2017 album Flower Boy, released long before Uchis became a star in her own right. While it was a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it moment, it was another welcome show of support from Tyler’s long list of industry friends and collaborators.
After warning that he had only four minutes of performance time left before Coachella’s 1 a.m. curfew on Saturday — a bit of news that caused the crowd to erupt into a round of booing (“B—- don’t boo me…boo [Coachella founder] Paul [Tollett], he put this s— together,” he said) — Tyler donned a harness once more for the grand finale, a gravity-defying performance of “NEW MAGIC WAND” that saw him caught in a “windstorm” (a coming tempest hinted at earlier in the set) while clutching desperately at some boulders. In a final bit of drama, the rapper soared swiftly off stage just a minute before midnight — a gorgeous bit of stagecraft and a fittingly epic end to the cinematic set.