SXSW and the New Musical Democracy

I am walking down E 6th Street in Austin, Texas, wearing a goddamn
fanny pack.

Well, it isn’t exactly a fanny pack; it’s more of a
non-specific zippered hiking pouch thing, and I’m wearing it slung
across my shoulders as opposed to nestled up against my rump, but I
still feel like a geeky tourist.

It can’t be helped. I’m packed to the gills as I roam South by
Southwest (SXSW), and my standard practice of shoving everything in my
pockets simply isn’t going to cut it. I am carrying: notepad, camera,
audio recorder, map, earplugs, Chaser hangover pills, hotel key, badge,
and—most valuable of all, and taking up the most room—a
list of the shows taking place over the next four days. So many shows,
so many venues. Pages and pages of them, both in the official SXSW
brochure (a slim 72-page volume) and in dozens of compiled computer
printouts and emails detailing the unofficial parties, where bands blow
through sets like candy, each and every musician trying to get as much
exposure as humanly possible.

It’s a rich, intertwined mixture of exciting and overwhelming. I
feel the English language lacks the vocabulary to describe the precise
combination of sensations. Something like the Chinese shared word for
both “crisis” and “opportunity.”

Austin is perhaps the only place currently giving Portland a run for
its money as the unofficial, arguable, un-prove-able bearer of the
title “Hippest City in the US.” If you think Portland is the end-all
be-all, just remember that we stole our “Keep Portland Weird” bumper
sticker from Austin. The capital of Texas is packed with college
students, government wonks, artsy hipster bikers, and incredible
Mexican food. There’s good public transport, a remarkably sturdy
infrastructure (which SXSW tests to its very limits), and plenty of
nature just a short drive from the city. Most importantly, there is the
thriving—no, saturated—music scene. Austin is
commonly referred to as the “live music capital of the world,” and this
reputation grows out of years of the city being defined by what it is
not—much in the same way that Portland is not Seattle,
Austin is not Nashville, and when outlaw artists like Willie
Nelson fled the music business machinery of Nashville in the ’70s,
Austin is where they ended up.

The city is idyllic in March, before the incredibly hot summer kicks
in. Spring daytime temperatures are perfect T-shirt weather, and the
indoors don’t get too unbearably hot when the music festival draws
thousands upon thousands of musicgoers to Austin’s various clubs and
impromptu venues. This year, well over 1,800 bands are cramming into
the city to either take part in the festival or set up stakes nearby to
attract some of the spillover attention. Make hay when the sun shines,
the adage goes—or in SXSW’s case, make noise when there are as
many people to hear it as possible.

SXSW isn’t just a music festival; it’s also a conference and trade
show, and there’s an entire stodgy element to the whole affair that
takes place within the boring walls of the hulking Austin Convention
Center. Most visitors won’t ever set foot in the place except to
register and pick up the ever-essential bracelet for $165 (or, if
they’re lucky and/or loaded, the $695 badge, which bumps you to the
front of all the lines). The daytime conference is the schmooziest of
affairs, with wheelers and dealers and hangers-on going to hear keynote
speakers like Quincy Jones and mastering engineer Bob Ludwig. There’s
even something called a “demo listening session,” which sounds
absolutely horrifying for all involved. SXSW began in 1987, but it
wasn’t until the early ’90s that it became the mammoth it is today,
adding a film conference, and more recently, an interactive conference.
There’s even an associated SXSW golf tournament, for pete’s
sake.

The huge amount of stuff happening at any given time at SXSW cries
out to be communicated as quickly as possible, and the spontaneous
conduit of today’s internet is seemingly tailor-made for covering it
all. (Actually, this might not be a coincidence: Twitter debuted at
SXSW Interactive in 2007.) Up-to-the-minute reviews are posted live;
photos are uploaded and tagged; Twitter and Facebook headlines provide
succinct assessments of what’s happening at any given moment. This
year, the sheer amount of data being transmitted through iPhones at
SXSW quickly overloaded AT&T’s network, leaving many stranded
without use of their phones for hours at a time, and forcing AT&T
to double their capacity in the Austin area. Even stranger, scores of
people who didn’t attend SXSW this year communicated online via Twitter
to update each other on what they weren’t doing, who they weren’t
seeing, and what wasn’t happening at that very moment, tagging their
posts and Flickr photos with “notatsxsw.” The online coverage of SXSW
is so big it’s spawned a mirror opposite of itself.

I’m in Austin in an ostensibly professional capacity, but secretly I
am just as excited as any fan by the gigantic pudding of live music I’m
plunging into. I’m supposed to see as much as possible—various
friends and colleagues have told me I must see this and I cannot miss
that, having become the vessel for their vicarious SXSW
experience—but more importantly, I’ve been given strict
instructions to blog valiantly about the whole thing. This sounds easy,
but I am not prepared for how exhausting it all is. After standing
upright for one day straight, my legs turn to jelly. After two days of
14-hour drinking sessions, my decision-making abilities become
surprisingly unreliable. After three days of incredibly loud
music—since the bands are all right next to each other, each must
crank the volume in order to be heard—my ears rebel outright, and
cease being able to evaluate what they’re hearing.

But I reckon the bands have it harder, particularly the ones with
multiple shows scheduled each day. There’s nothing easy about finding
the various venues, getting there on time, loading in and out while the
van is parked blocks away, and wrangling other members of the band who
have been distracted by delicious tacos from the nearby carts.

Phil Bauer (AKA Ethic) of Portland hiphop ensemble Sandpeople tells
me what his crew is hoping to get out of this year’s SXSW. “We’ve
created a bit of a buzz locally, and are getting a strong, consistent
draw, so we see an opportunity to take what we’re able to do with
Sandpeople and move that elsewhere. So one of our big focal points for
coming here is to try and link up with a couple independent booking
agents doing showcases here, and see if there’s any availability or any
interest in helping us cultivate what we have, because we feel like
we’re really just a few rungs away from just bubbling up.

“A lot of the opportunities spring from being social,” Bauer
continues, “just having fun and striking up conversations, just finding
a party that people we might want to talk to will be at, and really
just being in the moment and the environment and just letting things
happen. We’re also trying to network, but at the same time there’s a
place for structured networking, and more sort of organic
networking.”

Mike Jones of Cravedog/CDForge, a disc, vinyl, and apparel
manufacturing firm based in Portland, agrees. “The thing that SXSW has
always been good for [for] me has been to establish or develop my
existing contact base by seeing people that come regularly and meeting
new people through my existing network of friends and business
associates. So this is just a good atmosphere for it, because the bands
are here, the labels are here, my competitors are here; there’s just a
lot of opportunity, but it’s not a very organized event where you sit
down and have meeting after meeting, because there’s all this party
activity. So a lot of it’s a bit random in the way it happens.”

Jones has been coming to SXSW for years, and he tells me, “This is
the first year that I haven’t seen people walking down the streets with
badges hanging around their necks. There’s hardly anybody here with a
badge on. Less people are registering and paying the full $700 to come
to SXSW. They’re using it as a place to meet people, but they’re not
using the conference, per se. If I had to do it over again, I don’t
know that I’d really even buy a wristband. Most of the shows, we’d have
been able to get in without one.”

He’s right. The daytime shows are all free, and while some of the
bigger ones require an RSVP, a SXSW badge or wristband is no good. Only
the official SXSW evening showcases require them, but there are dozens
of other shows that fall outside of the organized affair. For example,
the Levi’s/Fader Fort is a huge corporate party palace erected
in an old warehouse; fans who responded to the online RSVP are treated
to free alcohol and sets from, among many others, up-and-comers the
Pains of Being Pure at Heart, established indie favorites Peter Bjorn
and John, and a surprise appearance from superstar Kanye West.
Meanwhile, the dusty parking backyard of Ms. Bea’s, a BBQ shack a few
blocks down from the main drag on E 6th, is host to a huge list of DIY
bands playing for free, including Phosphorescent, Vivian Girls, and
Wavves. Green, grassy Waterloo Park, a stone’s throw away from the
state capitol building, is home to an all-afternoon party called “Mess
with Texas” where bands like the Thermals and Black Lips play nonstop
sets on two separate stages. And most legendarily, there are
underground shows at 2 am, where a generator, a few bands, and a couple
hundred kids all crowd in the dead of night onto the precariously
swaying Lamar Pedestrian Bridge.

These types of shows are, in my opinion, the essence and the true
value of the SXSW experience. With the major-label record industry
virtually extinct, more power is in the hands of the music fan than
ever: Full access to artists’ entire catalogs, be it legal or illegal,
is available with the click of a mouse, and the artists are
subsequently empowered by this direct link to their fans. As Bauer
says, “Especially with the economy being the way it is, the fans are
out here because they love the music. This is a good spot for artists
who’re doing things on their own to really get a connection, maybe with
a booking agent rather than a label, or a publicity company or someone
that does radio. Maybe it’s less about the label and more about the
connections the labels have had historically that artists haven’t been
granted access to. I’m seeing that on our side. It’s like, we’re down
here as our label, we’re not down here with our
label.”

This paradigm shift is no more apparent than when Metallica’s
oversized tour bus plops down outside of the club Stubb’s, clogging up
the already straining thoroughfare. The Mighty Destroyers of All that
Is File-Sharing play a small club show, taking up an all-important slot
that an up-and-coming band could potentially have used to foster
valuable attention, just so these enormous rock stars can glom onto the
fan-generated buzz that a small, hip gig at SXSW can provide. It’s a
publicity stunt, pure and simple, and while the Righteous Enemies of
Napster aren’t exactly giving their music away, they want to look as if
they’re coming down off the mountain to mingle with the masses.

“It’s fun, but it becomes less and less fun with every passing
year,” says Joan Hiller Depper, whose Riot Act Media publicity firm
recently relocated to Portland. “SXSW gets bigger and bigger, and it
becomes more and more difficult to get into shows, more and more
difficult to plan your day or run into people, so as it’s become an
increasingly huge clusterfuck, it becomes harder to actually get the
work done that you’re here for.

“But it’s always fun to see friends,” she quickly adds. “It’s always
fun to see friends’ bands.”

I’m invited up to a plush hotel room on the 15th floor of the Omni,
right smack dab in the center of things. I get the opportunity to stand
on the balcony, overlooking almost all of downtown Austin. Stemming
from the intersection of E 6th and Red River, every bar, venue, parking
lot, and street corner flows out in each direction like blood vessels
swimming with musicians. I finally gain a long-needed sense of
perspective now that I see it all laid out beneath me.

A mishmash of sounds wafts upward to the balcony: crashing drums,
wailing singers, distorted electric guitars, each competing to be the
loudest. A few connected strains are audible, but it’s largely a stew
of noise. And that’s all that is really happening here in Austin. It’s
a giant bath of music, with every hopeful band trying to be heard over
everyone else. Some are more desperate than others; some are looking
for long-term careers, agents, contracts, while others just want to
have a good time. But everything is out there, in a fine, fun mess
that’s only notable for the condensed parameters of time and space in
which it all takes place.

Beyond downtown, the rest of the city of Austin continues about its
business as if SXSW isn’t there. Farther out, the suburbs rest quietly.
Even farther, as the sun sets slowly into the pink, is the long quiet
line of the horizon, and the rest of the world beyond it, none of it
seeming to pay SXSW any mind at all.

But for the thousands of people congregated around E 6th and Red
River, one thing is shared: Music is their very favorite thing in the
world, and these four exhausting, insane days exist to celebrate
it.