A cultural pundit’s perspective on Coachella

Peace, love, respect and a virginal unity manifested in a non-commercialized womb of arts and music.  Listen up all of you pseudo-flower children, caught up on 60's nostalgia…drop it already.  
The suits of big business have moved in, for all practical purposes robbing us with ticket prices sizeable enough to feed at least three impoverished Sub-Saharan villages. Festival organizers had the nerve (and the proper business sense) to grant their on-site venders permission to sell basic means of hydration for $2 a bottle in the middle of the least Ozone-protected three square miles of real estate America has to offer.  
So hear me now and hear me before ever again scrawling soap paint peace signs all over your hardly fuel-efficient SUV's back windshield and adorning yourself with glow stick accessories purchased from mass retail outlets allowing us to "Save Money. Live Better" by exploiting rural China's menial standards of living.  It ain't 1969 and this ain't Woodstock.  So take a quick gander at that $309 slight to your bank account and realize that indeed, once and for all, everything (even the fabled idea of an all-for-one, one-for-all musical gathering) has become not much more than a marketing ploy.
Question: Why did you, the young and impressionable college student, go to Coachella? Earlier this semester, I considered handing out a survey that might once and for all provide a general, quantifiable answer to this question.  Predictable and unfortunate all at once, I let the usual distractions of a virile social charlatan such as myself take priority and the vision never rendered itself.  But in this situation, let a man hypothesize: April 16 to 18 of 2010 provided the youth of Southern California a unique, interactive social environment.  One where they could share valuable experiences with friends as well as people they normally wouldn't hang out with, granted with a little help from socially accommodating chemical substances.  Oh, and maybe they'd see that one band with that one song who their one friend told them about once.        
But let's not get too overly hostile here.  Beneath an unsavory crust of infrastructural disaster, brought on by car loads of festival-goers merely looking to take advantage of yet another excuse to ingest irresponsible dosages of level 1 narcotics, there's still really good, truly singular musical performances to be seen every mid-April in Indio.
Immersed within the seas of anonymous faces bordering the main stage, I saw LCD Soundsystem brandish his craft with accessible indie-pop hits, whose lyrics transcend their own backing music's ridiculous genre designations.  Under the overhead lights, which helped bathe the Mojave tent's interior four corners in opaque blues and yellows, I saw tears of joy stream from the eyes of discerning music fans as beach balls branded with Miike Snow's mysterious jackalope logo descended upon an enraptured crowd, all while the Swedish foursome played that song we all knew we were waiting for. I nearly regurgitated my own lungs in excitement when 2manydj's capped off yet another remarkable DJ set with a surgically edited dance version of Joy Division's "Love Will Tear Us Apart," all while myself and all the friends and strangers around me leapt in syncopated harmony, reaching for the shreds confetti twirling from all angles.  And has anyone seen Thom Yorke prance around a stage, guitar in arms and bizarre eyelid positioning on face, with such cat-like moxie, ever?    
So what affords John/Jane Sucker an "authentic" and "meaningful" experience out of the $309 fleeced from their fleeting clutches?  The answer is purely a matter of subjectivity, to each his own opinion.  To my right as a journalist I say this: Coachella warrants a higher level of investment in the actual music, an ear appreciative of distinct cooperation between original and borrowed sound, a willingness to, as an active fragment, permeate yourself into the bridge between raw human creativity and its well-deserved celebration.
Though seemingly abstract, these things are real and present at the core of live musical exhibition, free of external influences whether they be social or chemical.  But if you hadn't heard of any scheduled bands before they were played on KROQ, fine.  If your decision to attend was primarily based more on hedonism than recognition of worthy creative product, okay.  If you found Tiesto's performance to be "life changing," dandy.  Just try not to block my path towards the bathrooms with a drum circle and quit asking me whether or not "I feel the love." I'm busy letting the entire reason I traveled 200 miles drown out you and all of your silly distractions.