Think Woodstock meets the Burning Man during the last weekend of April, with 90 bands and 60,000 fans.

Most ‘creative freaks of the night’ Daft Punk (Saturday). Daft Punk boasted wicked beats with sweet rhythms and most exemplified the heart of Coachella, dance club in a tent.

Alice in Wonderland award for giant superstar in a tent with microscopic proportions to the crowd trying to squeeze in: Madonna (Sunday). Doing the math, one realizes of course only maybe one-kazillionth of the fans that wanted to could see or hear any of her set… fortunately nobody was hurt too bad, apparently nothing the beer garden across the field couldn’t heal!

Most ‘unifying hero’: Kanye West (Saturday). His set was the exact opposite of the Madonna debacle. He was on the big stage, the biggest star having the second most popular album of 2005 in the US. The crowd for him spread across the desert all with room to dance and a view of the huge screens. Kanye is energy, love, and defiance all rolled into one! Starting with a string quartet, he jammed through a whirlwind of his influences which spanned from Al Green’s ‘Let’s Stay Together’ to Aha’s ‘Take On Me’ showing us that sometimes hip hop and rock are all really just music and we are all really just people as we sang and danced along at the top of our lungs as if our life depended on it! Somehow he was singing to and for all of us.

Most ‘uplifting moment’: when Matisyahu the Jewish rapper was imploring the Lord to “Lift me up!” (Sunday). His cross between reggae and rapping combined with his traditional Jewish garb and beard sound like the set up of a joke (“the Rabbi, the Rastafarian and the Rapper all walk into a bar…”) but completely work for no reason that makes any sense to the logical mind, he just happens to rock the house and you just have to be there!

Most ‘Latin rhythms get the hips moving just when you think you will sit this day out’: Los Amigos Invisibles (Sunday). Latin rockers from Venezuela, Los Amigos Invisibles, were clearly at home on the Main Stage. Their lively percussive rhythms & charismatic performances by lead singer, Julio Briceno, and guitarist, Jose Luis Pardo, woke up the crowd still a little sleepy from Day 1. They quickly got everyone within hearing distance dancing to the beats.

Most ‘cheerfully still doing what they do, but we just can’t take them seriously’: Franz Ferdinand (Sunday). One of the biggest names of the festival: they sing, they dance, they have great stage dressing! Their updated eighties white dance music sound all but defined the last two years, and they have been given credit for kicking off the new Brit invasion. Somehow they are still happy fluff, like a sitcom that makes you laugh but you forget the next day.

Most ‘complete opposite of its name’: the ‘VIP section’ (as always) with walls of people waving their ‘VIP wristbands’ in the face of the guards demanding to be let into the VIP area gate like obnoxious lemmings… hoping to catch a glimpse of some of the band members — whom of course all generally avoid that area like the plague! Most of the lemmings got their wristbands passed out at the DKNY corporate sponsored pool party or simply paid a few hundred extra bucks. The real VIPs were the workers scrubbing and cleaning the outhouses throughout the day (a first in festival history).