My Morning Jacket's Jim James / Photo by Mark C. Austin

After a time, the stress level lessened backstage, though the numbers of security seemed to increase, and the crowd outside appeared to get more and more anxious to go off. Simian Mobile Disco's James Ford and James Shaw huddled around a futuristic DJ kiosk and cranked out a well-paced and occasionally spine-tingling barrage of Big Beat blast-offs. Chromeo's tongue-in-cheek, Zapp-derived nursery rhymes faired less well, despite the mob's appetite for anything remotely funky or freaky. They're a hoot in a dive, but the enormity of the scene overwhelmed them.

There's not much more that can be -- or should be -- said about Justice these days. They're French, they're bankrolled by Daft Punk's manager, they're marketing a line of leather jackets, their records are funny and catchy and sleazy. And oh yeah, their fans like to get massively fucked up. And if the blindingly goofy nature of the entire operation wasn't obvious enough, before the duo of Gaspard and Xavier took the stage, the PA blared Supertramp's "Logical Song," Ozzy Osbourne's "Crazy Train," and most revealingly, Neil Diamond's "Sweet Caroline," which is synonymous with the Boston Red Sox and Fenway Park (it's played every game before the bottom of the 8th inning).

Let me be clear, the most significant difference between the Justice crowd (which enthusiastically belted out the songs's chorus) and the Fenway faithful was that you were much more likely to get groped by a creep on drugs in the Justice crowd, which was pretty ironic considering that Coachella started in response to the 1999 Woodstock festival, which was a sunburned grope-athon that quickly turned disastrous and tragic. Luckily, most riots aren't started to the strains of "Do the D.A.N.C.E. / Just as easy as A.B.C." I'm not necessarily blaming Justice for any of this -- the Coachella staff needs to do some reassessing before next year -- but having experienced, say, Daft Punk in a similar setting, and having watched the childlike smiles they inspire, as opposed to this array of leering desperation...

Maybe robots really do know what's best for us.