If you scroll through the TikTok page of Linda Cuadros, a social media strategist and podcaster based in Miami, you will see viral videos of what she calls the “pre-influencer era’” of Coachella. There are images of flower crowns, the occasional celebrity sighting, and, most notably, way fewer social media influencers.
The Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival, taking place in Indio, Calif. and now entering into this year’s second three-day weekend, has changed since Cuadros attended in 2014, 2015, and 2016. According to the comments on her videos with nearly 1 million views, she’s not the only one nostalgic for the Coachella she once knew. “This is what made me want to go, but now it’s a money pit for mostly influencers,” writes …
Last November, Jordyn Williams posted a TikTok of an original dance set to a song called “No Love” by J.K. Mac. The 19-year-old from Birmingham, Ala., thus inadvertently set off a dance challenge that came to be named, for that song, the #NoLoveChallenge. This, in turn, spawned another challenge, the #HerWayChallenge, when the choreography was set to a sped-up version of a PARTYNEXTDOOR song of the same name. In the dance, Williams can be seen swinging her hair around and sensually moving her hips, clearly drawing influence from the majorette tradition.
Williams has been a majorette dancer since her freshman year of high school, her coach a former Sensational Stingette in the danceline at Alabama State University, which appeared in Beyoncé’s Coachella docu…
Determining the most influential pop-culture figure of the 20th century is probably a fool’s errand. But if you truly had to choose one, your best bet would be Louis Armstrong. He was one of the forefathers of modern jazz, shaping that art form as we know it today. The story of America, one of both resplendent hopefulness and inhuman oppression, was written in his bones—he turned the Star-Spangled Banner into a fractured anthem of pride and frustration long before Jimi Hendrix did. And to hear and see him—singing in his incomparably expressive purr, hitting one of his famously sweet high C’s on the trumpet, dishing the dirt with amiable savoir faire on a TV talk show—was to love him. Through a career spanning more than half a century, the world came to ador…