Bad livestreams

Dirt is a daily email about entertainment.

Terry Nguyen, Dirt's senior staff writer, helms our dispatch, a running recap of the latest digital culture news. This week: Frank Ocean at Coachella, Love is Late, and the HBO rebrand.

The first sign that something was off came from YouTube. A few hours before Frank Ocean’s highly anticipated Coachella performance on Sunday, the video platform announced that his set was “not scheduled to appear on the livestream.” No other explanation was offered. Ocean showed up nearly an hour late to headline the show, his first live concert in six years, and left abruptly, after delivering a performance that Variety’s Jeff Miller described as “messy, loose, and a near-disaster that will likely go down as one of the most divisive in Coachella history.”

To paraphrase the scene report I got from my roommate Alexa: Ocean was “super weird” and “only sang sad songs.” The lack of a proper livestream did little to hide the fiasco. A “no phones'' strategy might’ve worked at a smaller venue, but such a policy would’ve been impossible to enforce at such a large music festival or even at, like, Brooklyn Steel.

Footage of Ocean’s disorientating concert was broadcast live by Coachella attendees on TikTok, Instagram, and Twitter. The meme Not a cell phone in sight, just people living in the moment is, it seems, an impossible state of concert nirvana, unachievable without a massive security apparatus surveilling and scolding concert-goers. But the risk of giving attendees too much phone freedom? The situation could end up looking like this clip of Ice Spice’s performance at Rolling Loud. Either way, there’s no way out of the surveillance state—not for pop stars or fans.

The fan livestreams were all pixelated to oblivion (and the subject of many memes last night), but it was obvious that Ocean’s performance was uncoordinated, as if the set list itself was ad-libbed. A new album is coming, Ocean said at one point to an eager crowd, before adding that it wouldn’t be any time soon. People perked up, then boo’ed. Maybe one day, he said.

As I conducted my day-after investigation into FrankChella, I came across a few videos of a security guard (or a man in a security shirt) twerking on an unidentifiable stage to a heavy beat. I wasn’t sure if this was from the concert, a video taken out of context, or a deepfake of sorts. Then, I encountered the same video as part of a livestream, with the user falsely claiming that Ocean was late because he was stung by a bee backstage. There were lots of memes and pop culture clips taken out of context to be repurposed as jokes. Someone posted a clip of Druski and Jack Harlow driving in a convertible playing jazz and captioned it: “frank ocean and his manager dipping from coachella right before the set.” Anyway, after an hour, my sense of reality felt frayed. There was too much to wade through to piece together a coherent picture of the night. Knowing Ocean, we probably won’t get a clear explanation—and it’s unclear whether he will return for Coachella’s second weekend.

PLAYBACK

Snippets of streaming news — and what we’re streaming.

• Ocean’s performance wasn’t the only disastrous thing on Sunday. Mercury is not yet in retrograde, but chaos in the streaming world at least is picking up. Netflix’s Love Is Blind live reunion failed to air on Sunday night. Filming continued, but Netflix opted to release it on Monday instead. For some, this blunder bled into their Succession viewing slot and caused some mild Twitter outrage.

• I am choosing to not acknowledge the bad HBO Max rebrand…

• An investigation into whether certain Spotify songs are actually following you around (Vulture)

• Delia Cai on Netflix’s BEEF (spoiler alert), jealousy, and bad feelings.

• I am expecting a (gore-y) visual feast with Park Chan-Wook directing HBO’s The Sympathizer. Am I supposed to say MAX now? Sounds ridiculous so I won’t.

MIXTAPE

Good links from the Dirtyverse.

• Rachel Syme on the films of Preston Sturges. I recently saw The Lady Eve on a flight; it was delightful! (New Yorker)

• Lauren Oyler goes on the Goop cruise. (Harper’s)

• An underground-ish book club curated by Los Angeles librarian Alana May Johnson, who has incredible taste. (Alta Journal)

• The big business of cuteness: A look into Hello Kitty and Sanrio, the only IP “universe” other than Dirt that I can wholeheartedly endorse. (Trung Phan on Substack)

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