Snoop Dogg Played Records at a Pool Party While Beyoncé Was About to Change Coachella Forever

Coachella weekend used to be about the music, and maybe it still is somewhere in the middle of that desert, but the gravitational pull around it—the brand activations, the hotel pools, the complimentary denim—has become its own parallel event. Same heat, same weekend, completely different reason to be there.

Levi’s threw a pool party at the Colony Palms Hotel in Palm Springs while Beyoncé was preparing to do what would become arguably the most talked-about festival performance in the event’s history. Snoop Dogg and Heron Preston played records. There was brunch. There were celebrities—a lot of them, from Bella Hadid to Brooklyn Beckham to Moses Sumney—who wandered through, grabbed a drink, picked up some free clothes, and then presumably drove twenty minutes east to watch Beyoncé assemble a homecoming concert out of thin air.

I find these events hard to be cynical about, even when they deserve it. The corporate logic is obvious—get the right faces near your logo, make sure someone photographs them—but the results can be genuinely good parties, and Snoop Dogg has never once played a bad pool set in his life. The absurdity of the brand apparatus is real; so is the pleasure of being in warm sun with good music before a festival. Both things coexist in Palm Springs in April without any apparent embarrassment.

The party that actually mattered happened after dark, a few miles away, on the main stage. But this one had better catering.