“You are the coolest place on earth right now!”

Prince exclaimed this at the beginning of his much-anticipated, $4.8 million set on Saturday night at Coachella. Looking around, it seemed like everyone believed it.

“From now on, this is Prince’s house!”

And that follow-up statement, that qualification of exactly what he meant, sort of felt like the dagger in the heart of the Coachella magic that I’ve experienced my previous two years going. Yes, the production quality was second-to-none. Yes, the weather (at least on Saturday) was perfect flip-flip and shorts temperature the entire night. And yes, the price tag is still a ridiculous bargain for the amount of acts you can see in one day, considering what many acts charge for their regular shows.

Let me just say first that Boyz Noize, Hot Chip, M.I.A. (at least the first 20 minutes), Aphex Twin, Diplo, The Verve, and the entire Do Lab (especially The Glitch Mob…daaaamn!!) all brought their Coachella A-game. They all had a presence- like they knew they were at something special and were stepping it up a notch to meet the magic of the environment.

And Portishead was simply stunning in their first live performance in 10 years. Definitely the crown-jewel of the entire weekend for me (although I did not go on Sunday). They were epic. Her voice was melancholy, haunting, and utterly overpowering. The guitar-solos took you to another planet (if you weren’t there already). It was the type of seminal performance that people will be talking about for years. A quick check of YouTube yesterday revealed that almost every video across all three pages of uploads were all Portishead. It was captivating, to say the least.

As important as the music is, though, it’s been the little details of Coachella that have always taken my experience over the edge. Last year, all I heard was people remarking about how clean the port-o-potties were. It was such a phenomenon that I actually mentioned it to several people coming to the show for the first time this year. But they were a complete and total disaster. Repulsive. I can’t count the variations of “that was the most disgusting thing I’ve ever seen” that I heard while waiting for someone to stumble out and offer me my own little personal slice of hell for 60 seconds.

The sound has always been the most pristine I’ve ever heard at a live concert, in all tents. And while the Sahara, the main stage, and the Do Lab all sounded crystal clear, I couldn’t watch internet-phenom Santogold strut her Brooklyn stuff in the Gobi tent because her mic was cranked up so loud that it felt like my ear drum was going to shatter. And I’ve done my music-loving duty of systematically suppressing my hearing over my lifetime. I have never had to walk away because something was too loud.

On the opposite end of the spectrum, I went to check out Aesop Rock in the Mojave tent to hear some of those luscious beats off of his latest masterpiece, None Shall Pass, and I was shocked to hear that the beats were so low and his mic so high in volume, Aesop was reduced to just another muffled hip-hop wannabe up on stage yelling nonsensical phrases into the night air.

They also managed to schedule some pretty epic conflicts. Ones that it seems would be obvious to anyone monitoring potential genre-crossovers among fanbases. Like Aesop Rock, Aphex Twin, and Santogold all against each other. Thankfully the sound people made my choice easy for that bloc. Or Kraftwerk, Mark Ronson, and M.I.A. bumping heads on Saturday. Criminal.

Even the art installations this year seemed less interactive. No more zombies spinning you around on carnival swings? And the ridiculous Cubatron was back and badder than ever, but raising it 10 feet off the ground kind of removed the personal element I found last year when it was eye-level for all the gawkers laid out around it.

In the end, I went with great friends and still had an amazing time. It just became less about the anticipation of a Daft Punk or a Rage Against the Machine and more about experiencing the festival atmosphere with good peeps. Despite little planning glitches, Coachella will never, ever be lacking for atmosphere. Check out the pictures I took below for a sampling of the mood there, and the transformation the place undergoes from day to night.

But those glitches just felt link chinks in the impenetrable armor of an experience that was reaching scary gospel proportions whenever someone would ask me about it. It was something that transcended reality because everything came together to genuinely make you feel like you were in the coolest place on earth. This year it just felt like an amazing festival.

Rumors abounded about undersold tickets. I heard speculation about the money-grubbing ways of promoter Goldenvoice spending under-budget, seeing that ticket sales were shit, and then throwing the left-over money at Prince to have a late-game spike. I heard from a friend who works with some Goldenvoice people that one of their main lineup gurus was not consulted this year because of a falling out. Rumors are rumors…until you see hard evidence.

Coachella has always seemed ahead of the game, telling people what’s cool before it’s cool. Manufacturing cool. This year, they just felt right on the curve. Not behind it, not in front it, just squarely giving people some good music for three days and calling it a year.

This was my third and as long as I am in Southern California, probably not my last Coachella. But somehow, someway, I hope that this feeling is just a fluke because good music at a good price is so goddamn hard to come by these days.

And as much as he would have liked to believe it before putting on a mish-mash set of covers and classics (full disclosure:  I left early, and Prince’s music isn’t really my bag anyways), it was hardly the coolest place on earth just because Prince graced us with his presence. It’s about more than that. We’ll see if next year truly marks a decline or recaptures the magic that makes the entire weekend an experience instead of a traverse between occasional greatness and all-too-frequent mediocrity.