A documentary was being made at the desert festival, by one of the headliners.

He apparently wants to make it look like everything that happened was the organization’s fault and not his own, to show how big business never sees an artist’s true vision.

Coachella 2023

Frank Ocean

Coachella files cease-and-desist to hide Frank Ocean footage

Few musical performances in recent history have been as controversial as Frank Ocean’s headlining set the first weekend of the 2023 Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival. Ocean supposedly scrapped an ambitious ice rink concept the morning of the show, shifting to a stripped-down concert in which he appeared an hour late and was largely obscured from the audience.

Coachella surprised fans by pulling Ocean’s set from the livestream schedule, so amateur social media videos are the only documentation that exists of the divisive concert. Brian Kinnes, a 26-year-old NYC-based film editor, followed along live as videos popped up, and while Ocean was still onstage, Kinnes began downloading them to stitch into a cohesive 73-minute concert film.

After eight days of work, he uploaded the video to YouTube, and it was removed in less than two hours. This wasn’t too surprising, as Kinnes had made a similar video of Ocean’s 2017 FYF Festival performance that was also taken down. But then came an email from AEG, Coachella’s parent company.

“I did not expect a legitimate cease-and-desist from the head of legal at AEG,” Kinnes told SFGATE over the phone, speaking about 150 yards from Ocean’s jewelry retail store in Manhattan. “Just the tone of that letter really put me off guard. I didn’t realize how much they didn’t want that being seen in a quote-unquote professionally recorded way.” (AEG did not respond to a request for comment from SFGATE.)

Ocean’s set was brilliant musically but often confusing for those in attendance. His stage setup was obscured from fans, and he was only visible on the video screens. There were long pauses between songs where he huddled with a stage manager. It seemed like each song might be the last. In a purposeful decision, Kinnes removed these excruciating moments.- Source

Why Was Frank Ocean’s Coachella Set Such a Disappointing Mess?

UPDATED: Artists spend months rehearsing for — and years dreaming about — headlining the Coachella festival, the biggest in North America. So the fact that Frank Ocean’s festival-closing performance — his first in nearly six years — was so shambolic left many concertgoers distressed, depressed, annoyed and other similar emotions (and left exponentially more people feeling similar kinds of ways when his set was unexpectedly not livestreamed). Ocean and his band delivered strong, often dramatically rearranged performances of many songs, and even closed with a cover of the Isley Brothers’ “At Your Best (You Are Love)” (later covered by Aaliyah). But overall, the energy was low; he and the band were obscured by a battery of people walking in a circle around the stage; and the pacing was bizarre: a seemingly random DJ set was dropped into the the middle, leading many fans to think his performance was over. It also started an hour late. – Source

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