As Rome burned, Nero fiddled. And so there had to be music, and lots of it, as the “doom and gloom” of financial ruin, cultural irrelevance and Courtney Love visited the record industry at the 16th annual South by Southwest Music and Media Conference, which concluded Sunday.
There was plenty of diddling and fiddling by industry bureaucrats and detractors. During a multitude of panels populated by a who’s who of record-biz insiders, the chatter about what’s wrong with business as usual was incessant. Hilary Rosen, the head of the Recording Industry Association of America, which represents the major labels, said the organization’s surveys showed that there was “little direct complaint about CD prices,” which hover near $20. It was a baffling comment in what otherwise amounted to a mild-mannered rebuke of a business that has lost touch with its consumers.
Love came with all barrels firing, publicizing her lawsuit against industry staples such as long-term record deals and dicey accounting procedures, but at the same time maintaining her right to be a rock star with the aid of corporate money that goes to the biggest acts with the most clout to demand it.
It all left the majority of artists who attended South by Southwest in a typical position: on the outside looking in. As Love’s capacity-busting appearance in the conference’s main ballroom made clear, there likely will always be a need for rock stars to amuse, titillate and even occasionally inspire. But this conference was all about the fringe characters who push music along the margins.
Here music is made not for any reward other than itself, and distractions are greeted with bemused grins. As Joe Ely sang, “I thought the wreck was over, but here it comes again,” as if he’d heard these tales of record-industry woe before, and lived to tell about them. Ely whooped it up on stage with his fellow lunatic poet-philosophers of the West Texas plains, Jimmie Dale Gilmore and Butch Hancock.
There was a clear divide between performers celebrating the moment and those earnestly climbing the industry ladder for a shot of Love-like stardom. Dividing the wanna-bes from the never-wills was The Hype, which fell heavily on the shoulders of new acts such as the Yeah Yeah Yeahs!, Clinic and Starsailor.
Clinic fared best; despite the quartet’s gimmicky outfits (surgeon’s scrubs), they brought a coiled tension to their tunes, which bridged melancholy and menace. Melodicas moaned, snake-charmer clarinet squirmed, and the beats hissed like a dark, deadly combination of the Velvet Underground, Can and dub-reggae maven King Tubby. Still, the band’s arty soundscapes and evocative tunes do not scream Next Big Thing. Clinic seems better suited to fill the more modest role of the next Stereolab, a cult favorite with cool taste in influences.
Starsailor is clearly aiming higher, and the stakes meant that artistic risk was sacrificed at the altar of stolidly paced professionalism. The quartet is a band in name only, with the angelic voice of singer James Marsh framed by too-similar arrangements: atmospheric, mid-paced drama with pretty melodies. They came across as a lesser version of “Creep”-era Radiohead, the latest Brit band to boast the imprint of the late singer-songwriters, Tim and Jeff Buckley.
The Yeah Yeah Yeahs! blew in from Brooklyn, riding the wave of trashy, ultra-minimalist garage bands who think the bass guitar is for sissies. Singer Karen O flounced in tie-dyed lingerie that looked like it had been lifted from the dumpster behind a drag queen’s tenement, and sprayed the crowd with beers, leers and attitude. The music suggested a B-movie version of the Jesus and Mary Chain, with drummer Brian Chase playing striptease bump-and-grind with Nick Zinner’s two-chord guitar riffs.
There were no rock saviors at South by Southwest, though Ebbot Lundberg dressed like one: a shaggy-bearded Swedish messiah in tunic and scarf, parting the audience to shake some action on the dancefloor. His band, the Soundtrack of Our Lives, lived up to the title of one of its roaring, retro-drenched psychedelic albums: “Extended Revelation for the Psychic Weaklings of Western Civilization.” Acid Mothers Temple melted minds with an overwhelming barrage of space-rock guitars and synthesizers, an effect made even more glorious by the Japanese sextet’s dramatic use of silence, folk melody and the droning Eastern tonalities of throat singing, which suggests several voices moaning at once. The group had more hair than Foghat, more volume than Blue Cheer and nearly as much speed as Hawkwind. Plus, it’s aptly named:This was a church service for acid-rock worshipers, and there’s no better band in the genre now.
From Mexico, Kinky showed the diverse border influences of its Monterrey home, serving up a potent musical Tequila of hip-shaking, hyper-speed Latin rhythms salted with electronic beats and corrosive guitars, and sweetened with Vocoder-enhanced vocals. There was no more explosive act at the conference.
Anti-Pop Consortium, hand-picked by Radiohead to open a portion of last year’s tour, demonstrated why: This was hip-hop futurism at its finest, a mixture of De La Soul’s whip-smart whimsy and the Aphex Twin’s twisted electronic architecture. The trio arrayed distinctive rap styles — Bean’s sidewinding flow, Sayyid’s syncopated fits and starts, Priest’s gruff declamations — over a Future World sound bed conjured by keyboards, turntables and samplers.
The stellar performance was part of a grass-roots hip-hop showcase orchestrated by Chicagoan Kathryn Frazier, also featuring such luminaries as politically tinged rapper Mr. Lif and the precocious Aesop Rock.
The night was capped by El-P, the 27-year-old godfather of New York’s underground, with his boundary-shattering production work and heavy-duty rhyme skills. In one of his first live appearances since the demise of his ground-breaking crew Company Flow, El-P was pitbull-fierce as he leaned into the crowd, even as he pushed the margins of what a rap lyric can say well beyond the current obsession with gangsta materialism. “Stepfather Factory” railed against domestic violence in the guise of an advertisement, complete with disclaimer (“may produce feeling of resentment and worthlessness”), while “Patriotism” asked, “Who’s America?” “I’m America!” El-P, Lif and Aesop shouted in defiant response, street poets in floppy trousers whose art couldn’t be further removed from the corporate hand-wringing that dominated the conference’s daytime sessions.
Backstage, El-P was simply glad to be on stage with his friends, in his first Austin appearance in six years. “My goal,” El-P said in an interview, “is to insulate me and my people from the mood swings and financial whimsy of the major labels. There is a generation of kids out there who are realizing that the golden apple they’re reaching for isn’t what they want.”
At this year’s South by Southwest, just about everyone acknowledged that the golden apple had sprouted worms of discontent and disarray. But ask those who sampled Acid Mothers Temple, the Soundtrack of Our Lives, Anti Pop Consortium or Clinic, and the desperate flailings of the business couldn’t have mattered less. Even Nero would’ve flipped for these tunes.
