While Sunday (April 14) was the coldest night of the first weekend of Coachella 2024 — with many attendees keeping warm by wrapping themselves in silver emergency blankets — you wouldn’t have known it by looking at Doja Cat.
Closing out the festival as its Sunday night headliner, the rapper performed a lot of her show while wearing a white fur two-piece outfit, looking hot in every sense of the word despite the fact that temperatures were in the high 50s and a biting wind was blowing across the polo field.
No matter. With the performance, Doja squashed debate about whether she was a big enough star to headline Coachella — not by pandering to the audience, but just by embracing her signature strangeness. Think playful wigs, a mud pit, a fake Tyrannosaurus rex skeleton, dancing yetis and other elements presented with total dedication to the bit. This performance happened upon an industrial, multi-tiered stage rig built from scaffolding and multiple walkways jutting out into the crowd, a setup upon which Doja and her crew of dancers prowled.
Altogether, they not only filled the space — a significant task on a stage that size — but made it their own. The performance (which was very short on crowd banter) was a touch theatrical, but never felt inauthentic, ultimately functioning as either a reminder of or introduction to Doja’s charisma, talent and oddball sensibilities.
But it wasn’t a greatest-hits set, with Doja totally avoiding smashes like “Woman” and “Say So,” and instead focusing on more recent material, much of it — “Demons,” “Fuck the Girls” “Acknowledge Me,” “Gun” — from her 2023 album, Scarlet, and its deluxe edition, Scarlet 2: CLAUDE, that dropped earlier this month. With the performance, Doja became only the second Black woman to headline Coachella, following Beyoncé’s landmark Beychella set in 2018.
Below, find five of the best moments from her Coachella 2024 headlining show.
