Lauren Michele Jackson covered Daisy Chain Fields, Olivia Rodrigo’s free, daylong festival in Irvine — fourteen woman-fronted acts plus guests, benefitting charities for women and girls. The obvious ancestor is Lilith Fair: Rodrigo is the first talking head in the 2025 documentary Lilith Fair: Building a Mystery, stunned she only recently learned the festival existed.
Rodrigo is after something more catalytic than a reboot:
- $10 million was already raised before gates opened; by night’s end it doubled via a matching gift from Melinda French Gates.
- Ten nonprofit partners: Planned Parenthood, the Center for Reproductive Rights, Black Mamas Matter Alliance, the National Domestic Workers Alliance, the National Women’s Law Center, and more.
- Rodrigo’s politics are woven in, not pasted on: her last tour raised money for abortion funds (a Missouri politician said she should be “ashamed”), she has expressed empathy for Palestinians, condemned ICE, and wore a dress by the Palestinian label Nöl Collective at the press conference.
- Die Spitz signed off with “Free Palestine! Fuck ICE!”; the crowd mixed kaffiyehs, “FUCK ICE” caps, and mother-daughter pairs who’d been to the original Lilith Fair.
The corporate contradiction was inescapable — Taco Bell activations, sponsor blankets, C3 Presents/Live Nation running the show. One DSA member and union activist’s verdict: “This is definitely a capitalist event… But you have to balance things, I guess, at this point in time.”
Jackson’s generational jab lands on the millennial girl-power set, who “have gone rather quiet at this hour” — all that “run the world” talk “was not for ‘we’ but ‘me.’” Her own closing is guarded: no use sniffing at $20 million of charity — “What’s the harm in feeling good, anyway?” Whether joy plus philanthropy converts into insurgent thought is the question the festival leaves open.