Coachella: Let The Rampant, Ill-Informed Speculation Continue!

So we’re only a few weeks away from the announcement of this year’s Coachella Festival, which is like the Burning Man for people who own Treos and name their pets after Radiohead songs. A handful of acts have already announced they’re playing (including Air, Hot Chip, LCD Soundsystem, and Lupe Fiasco), but perhaps we should go in for one more guessing game before everything’s official. To come up with the following names, we broke acts down into now-established Coachella archetypes, factored in some outside-force variables (i.e. whether they have an album coming at around the same time, whether they’ve been rumored before), and glanced at our record collection. After the click-through, our barely educated guesses:

COACHELLA 2007 POSSIBILITIES

THE ACT WE ARE NINETY-NINE PERCENT SURE IS PLAYING The Arcade Fire

THE BIG-NAME RETURNING HEADLINER Beck Modest Mouse Morrissey

THE ’80s ALT-ROCK REUNION Hüsker Dü The Replacements The Smiths

THE ’90s ALT-ROCK REUNION Jawbreaker Rage Against The Machine Smashing Pumpkins

THE ’00s ALT-ROCK REUNION Danger Mouse & Gemini (not rock, but still) The Libertines The Postal Service

THE MID-TIER MODERN-ROCK GROUP WHO WILL FEEL VALIDATED BY THEIR INCLUSION, BUT ARE ONLY THERE BECAUSE OF MAJOR-LABEL MOOLAH Louis XIV The Sun Morningwood

THE WHITE GUY THAT ONLY THE PEOPLE FROM CALIFORNIA WILL CARE ABOUT Jack Johnson G. Love & Special Sauce Pete Yorn

THE BIG-NAME MAD GENIUS WHO’S BEEN RUMORED BEFORE BUT NEVER PLAYED Prince Brian Wilson Neil Young

THE ELECTRONICA-ERA HOLDOVER The Chemical Brothers The Crystal Method The Prodigy

THE BRITISH GUITAR-ROCK ACT THAT WILL PLAY TOO EARLY ON THE BILL FOR ANYONE TO SEE The Fratellis The Horrors The View

THE SEMI-FAMOUS SPOKEN-WORD ARTIST THAT EVERYONE WILL POLITELY LISTEN TO FOR 10 MINUTES BEFORE BUYING A CORNDOG A.Song Tatty Tatz WordWarriorThree