When the Coachella folks announced Roger Waters’ headlining slot tonight, accusations of a dad-rock coup ran rampant. In a world of albums known only through Rapidshare links and concerts experienced entirely through a camera lens for Flickr purposes, what kid is going to sit through two-and-a-half hours of back-to-front Floyd?

Well, judging by the morass of gently-crisped young things splayed on the lawn right now for Waters’ set, plenty of them. We asked a few what Floyd means to the Kids These Days, and if their dads would be pleased to see them gape-jawed at the Giant Pig all over again.

Ellis Marte, 18, from San Francisco: “I watched the Dark Side of Oz, so that’s how I know most of Floyd. I like it a lot, over the last four years a lot of kids got into classic rock. They think it’s cool again, especially kids who play music. They look to classic rock for inspiration.”

Caitlin R., 21, a USC student: “I texted my dad to tell him I’m here. He said he was jealous. Roger Waters proves that people who are older can rock out too. There’s a lot of new technology in music today, but there’s also a lot of appreciation for what this meant at the time.”

Vanessa Madrigal, 19, favorite band — Metric: “I think all the old people came just for this. I know Roger Waters but younger people don’t really listen to him. This sounds like it has a lot of emotion, we usually listen to more poppy stuff, but these lyrics are more deep.”

Kaitlin Binnewies, 20, Sacramento: “I’ve never heard any Pink Floyd, but I’m surprised it’s this good. None of my friends knew who [Waters] was. I think it’s great fun. It’s bringing all the people together, I feel there’s something for everyone here. ”

Bettine Nguyen, 20, Irvine: “The lyrics and stuff are really chill. I was here last year for Red Hot Chili Peppers and Rage, and this is so completely different.”

– August Brown and Jessica Gelt

“We’re going to take a little break,” Waters just announced just before the first in-set intermission in the history of the festival.

Related item: Waters is, at age 64, the oldest headliner in the annals of Coachella.

 – Geoff Boucher

On Saturday night, Prince was still playing when a sizable percentage of his audience started streaming toward the parking lot. On Sunday, some Coachella organizers were saying privately that one reason might have been the excruciating traffic jam on Friday night when a boneheaded blunder by some staffers had a key exit point closed when it was supposed to be open. 

The result: Some people sat in their cars for two hours before even getting out of the lot. “I think on Saturday night some people were just so burned by the night before that they left early,” one mid-level staffer said. ”I think it hurt Prince. On Saturday night the situation was much, much better. ”

– Geoff Boucher 

The new speaker towers that line the perimeter of the main stage were added specifically for the Roger Waters set that’s sending waves of thunder and shimmer across the Empire Polo Field right now.

Production-wise, the set by the Floyd auteur is the most expensive in festival history. Major pyro, smoke, lasers and huge screens showing slick montages of images from the Floyd dreamscapes. Oh, and backstage there’s an inflated pig the size of a school bus, and a floating astronaut.

Coachella founder Paul Tollett predicted this would jump to the top of his personal “best Coachella set ever” list, joining Rage Against the Machine’s reunion last year and Saturday night’s purple party with Prince. Classic rock at Coachella? When pigs fly.

– Geoff Boucher

The L.A. outfit Autolux (Eugene Goreshter and Carla Azar) play gauzy, inward rock held together by Azar’s steel-bolt drums. For their 5 p.m. set at the Outdoor Theater, when the sun pretty much morphed into a death star hell-bent on burning every exposed square inch of skin, Autolux held their own but didn’t wow the somewhat dazed crowd. At their best, these guys can sound like a long lost cut off of Sonic Youth’s “Daydream Nation,” but after so much mannered fuzz, you just want them to destroy something, take a bat to their own work.

Emily Haines, the passionate frontwoman of Metric, seems like the kind of girl who probably stained at least one diary page in junior high with a speck of her own blood (some sort of oath, surely). It’s that edgy, vulnerable quality that makes her a little scary and magnetic, a perfect singer to keep your eyes locked on. And how could you not when she’s wearing a silver one-shoulder leotard? If last year’s lady performer attire was the gauzy white dress, this year’s is the leotard.

Haines says the craziest stuff, especially when buying time during technical difficulties, such as this narc-baiting line: “Who’s a stoner? I think acid is coming back, I keep hearing about it.” Then she launched into a new song, “Satellite Mind,” tense and focused and a good sign that Haines has ironed out some of her inconsistencies. She closed with “Monster Hospital,” the paranoid disco-punk single off the album “Live It Out.” The five girls next to me, who sang every lyric to each other, couldn’t have been happier — one of them, wearing a tie-dyed toga, covered her sweaty friends in glitter, their own sticky, sparkly finale.

– Margaret Wappler

At first, you didn’t know whether to laugh or cry at Jason Pierce’s audacity. Spiritualized was mounting an acoustic show, with a lovely string section and everything, as the sun set on the Mojave Tent, at the time unfortunately flanked by thumping dance music. Ear-shattering feedback plagued the first couple songs, and it seemed a train wreck was imminent.

Spiritualized recovered with aplomb, finishing with a long stretch of sublimely beautiful pop. Anyone who witnessed the band’s recent shows at L.A.’s Vista Theatre knows the power of Pierce’s music to transport, and for nearly an hour Sunday, his two-thirds-full tent was a musical oasis.

All smiles afterward.

– Kevin Bronson

The last sound heard at My Morning Jacket’s Main Stage set was a garbled, terrifying shriek of voices, electronic glitching, bomb-raid guitar feedback and God knows what else. In an instant, it was the total sum of a set from a band that’s looking more and more like it can do absolutely anything.

MMJ shed all the stock “Southern Rock” comparisons on “Z,” which drew from sparkle-eyed disco and James Brown crackle as much as their grain-silo lonesome prairie-rock. The live album “Okonokos” documented the absolute monsters they are live. And if the cuts from their forthcoming “Evil Urges” are any indication, they may make those once-silly “American Radiohead” comparisons apt. The rhythms are sparse and more syncopated, nodding at deep soul and even hip-hop at points. The country songs are more romantic and spacious, and the rockers smoke harder than ever. The band’s been experimenting with electronica rhythms and samples that sound unexpectedly fitting in their high-lonesome wail, and Jim James has never been in better control of his freakishly athletic voice, which has the desperation of Otis Redding with an ethereal purity all his own.

As culture loses more and more faith in new rock bands’ ability to stir bodies, emotions, minds and radio plays at once, My Morning Jacket seems to be one of the only bands that can do each convincingly. No matter your cultural vantage point, MMJ alludes to it with Pentecostal fervor, but one run through with a sadness and majesty that maybe only the Good Book itself gets quite right. It might make them the best American rock band today.

– August Brown

Overall, there has been precious little in the way of political statements at Coachella ‘08 — maybe everybody was too busy in the dance tents? — but Love and Rockets (of all groups) did their part, if only for five minutes, Sunday night at the Outdoor Theatre.

The trio of Daniel Ash, David J and Kevin Haskins opened with a blistering version of “Ball of Confusion,” and, yeah, that’s what the world is today. Uh huh.

To a spectacular light show, the offshoot of Bauhaus (who played a reunion show at Coachella in 2005) stormed through a battery of fan favorites in mostly workmanlike fashion, perhaps regretting the mid-set ballad that was tainted by noise bleeding over from the earache-inducing drum ‘n’ bass area in the middle of the festival grounds.

Of course, the Bubblemen emerged late in the set, the band’s alter egos (and residents of Planet Girl) dancing during “Yin and Yang and the Flower Pot Man.” The show ended with the Bubblemen battling the band in a pillowfight, and feathers were flying — a nod to that song’s video.

The band’s familiar blasts were welcome noise for weary festivalgoers gearing up for Roger Waters’ mainstage show.

– Kevin Bronson

Sean Penn took a drag off his cigarette, stared down at his work boots and conceded that, as political activism goes, he’s not usually on the side that wins. “I am a person who does care,” Penn said, sitting in his trailer backstage, “but I have only ever failed.” He started rattling off his activism resume — candidates he has supported, the war he has opposed, the policies he has protested. “But I am an optimist and this young generation right now is so much smarter than us. That’s why we’re here.”

Penn spoke twice Sunday, including an early evening speech on the main stage, where he looked out over a huge and somewhat puzzled audience. “It was nerve-racking, public speaking is not my thing.”

Coachella founder Paul Tollett reached out to Penn a few weeks ago (mutual pal Rosanna Arquette helped the two connect) to ask him to speak. The reason: Both agree that the MySpace Generation is the most connected ever, but somehow also becoming the most isolated. Penn came to invite them “to turn off their computers and come see some things in the world in person.”

Penn’s plan is to take a convoy of buses to New Orleans on a 10-day tour that will make multiple stops along the way to give his band of Coachella fans a tune-up in activism. They will protest the war, talk up green issues and, in Louisiana, do some construction work to help the still-beleaguered congregation of a church that was destroyed by Hurricane Katrina. As of 8 p.m. Sunday, there were more than 100 people signed up for his Dirty Hands Caravan. “Paul called me up and said he didn’t want the young fans at this festival to be asked by their grandkids someday ‘What did you do during the war?’ and have to answer, ‘I had a MySpace page.’ This generation is smarter, funnier and better than the 1960s generation and the generation I grew up with. This is a chance to tap into their imaginations.’”

– Geoff Boucher

“Everybody, look at the sunset,” exclaimed Kid Sister from her late-afternoon set in the Gobi Tent. “That is some beautful, awesome stuff” (we may have paraphrased a bit for family audiences). That’s the kind of rapper Kid Sister is: in love with simple pleasures like Aqua Net, elaborate fingernails and the sound of her own elastic, hugely charismatic voice. Jacking samples from Cajmere and riffing on Fam-Lay’s corner boy anthem “Beeper,” she spat pure fire in an abbreviated set backed by A-Trak’s virtuosic DJ’ing (the difference between a great DJ and an okay one is huge).

She’s begun to make the rounds on MTV, and it couldn’t come a moment sooner, as hip-hop is in desperate, chronic need of some new female stars. Her electro-infused single “Pro-Nails,” a jump-roping ode to all things acrylic and manicured, has become a calling card of sorts — a shot across the bow to a time when hip-hop was giddy, boastful, fun, and kids wore electric colors while spinning like dervishes on club floors.  It’s coming at just the right time.

– August Brown

Photo by Karl Walter/Getty Images