AUSTIN, TX — From the moment the scantily clad swag girl leaned over from the back of a pick-up truck to hand me a complimentary Rockstar Energy Drink that I didn’t ask for, I knew everything was going to be OK. No global economic crisis was going to slow down the glorious orgy of musical consumption and wasteful product placement that is South by Southwest.
It’s somewhat difficult to gauge the real impact of the current recession on the music industry, since the industry’s already been in a recession for almost 10 years. Still, even in the face of these failing fortunes, South by Southwest has remained the place where the music industry congregates each spring to drown its sorrows and fears in a tsunami of round-the-clock club-hopping and free tequila. The sheer magnitude of SXSW — this year’s edition featured a festival-record 1,900 artists, spread over 85 venues and four days (March 18-22), not to mention an unofficial day-party schedule that gets more out of control each year — is enough to make the most fatalistic record-company exec forget about updating their resumes and pretend they still have an expense account.
And yet, while SXSW has provided attendees with a temporary sanctuary from the harsh realities of the dying record biz, this year’s festival was rife with reminders of the industry’s ongoing sea change.
The most anticipated SXSW performance — a worst-kept-secret set from Metallica at Stubb’s — was not in service of promoting a new album, but rather the latest themed edition of Guitar Hero. What should’ve been a celebration of Chicago label Touch and Go’s latest signings at the Flamingo Cantina on March 19 felt more like a wake, in light of the recent announcement that the upcoming album from San Diego psych-rockers Crystal Antlers would be the venerable label’s final new release. Five years ago, Justin Hawkins of The Darkness was a festival-headlining superstar in the UK; this year, his new act Hot Leg (essentially The Darkness with the unitards replaced by leather pantsuits) are just another band grinding it out on the showcase circuit. Introducing one song at last Friday’s SPIN magazine party, Hawkins remarked, “This one’s from our album, which is out in the UK,” before adding with an audible whimper, “and nowhere else.”
With prospects for career longevity so uncertain, the knee-jerk response for bands to is to play as many day parties as possible and pray that anyone — label A&R reps, music supervisors, iTunes curators, heck, even some random schmo with a Twitter account — stumbles across at least one of them.
But while the eager-to-accommodate resilience of bands like Brooklyn girl-group garagistas Vivian Girls (18 shows in four days), New Zealand new-wavers Cut Off Your Hands (10) and fuzz-popsters The Pains of Being Pure at Heart (10) is admirable, their ubiquity on party bills highlights a growing paradox: the more shows you play, the less impact they might have. If your only encounter with the Vivian Girls came last Saturday at their 1pm show at the Mohawk Patio — where the clearly exhausted trio were derailed by flubbed lyrics, abrupt endings and broken strings— you would have to wonder why so many hosts were eager to have them.
In the first part of this decade, before the unofficial day-party circuit became just as overwhelming as the official evening schedule, SXSW seemed to produce new stars literally overnight, with bands like the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Broken Social Scene and The New Pornographers maximizing the anticipation for their lone festival showcase and turning it into a career launching pad. Now, it’s much harder to gauge an individual band’s buzz amid the overall din.
Alternately, some essential truths can be gleaned from these survival-of-the-fittest conditions: if a band still sounds good when they’re hungover at 1:30pm in the afternoon — like melancholic San Fran glam-pop quartet Girls — you know there’s something special there.
And if the benefits of playing the festival are becoming more difficult to quantify from a career-advancement standpoint, from a music fan’s perspective, South by Southwest remains an unparalleled experience. At no other music festival do you get such easy and plentiful access to your high-school heroes (Echo and the Bunnymen, Primal Scream, PJ Harvey), resurrected cult icons (The Sonics, Six Finger Satellite, former Drive Like Jehu/Hot Snakes honcho Rick Froberg’s new band Obits) and emerging artists on the verge of big-league breakthroughs (TenoriOn-tapping Britpop siren Little Boots, Australian indie dramatists The Temper Trap and Perez Hilton-approved Toronto electro-rappers Thunderheist).
Even the trainwrecks can’t be had anywhere else: to wit, an ill-advised collaboration between Wu-Tang swordsman GZA and Atlanta garage-rock brats The Black Lips at Emo’s, the novelty of which was scuttled as GZA repeatedly instructed guitarists Ian St. Pe and Cole Alexander to back off so he could feel more bass and drums — effectively coercing the Lips into becoming the worst improvised Wu-Tang cover band in the world.
But then, that The Black Lips found themselves onstage with a hip-hop legend in the first place suggests that the career-boosting benefits of playing South by Southwest may just take a while to reveal themselves. Two years ago, The Black Lips were one of the first bands to take full advantage of the play-anywhere/all-the-time opportunity, earning a New York Times profile for a then-record 11-gig SXSW schedule. This year, they limited themselves to a more manageable four. Never mind, record sales; at South by Southwest, the fact that you can enjoy any time off at all is about as sure a sign as any that you’ve arrived.
Read our daily SXSW diaries at www.eyeweekly.com/music/liveye.