A Tale of Two Festivals

Gregory Krieg, special to ABC News On Campus, blogs:

The marriage of art and commerce is hardly a modern innovation — before Alan McGee, there was Duke Ludovico Sforza, right? But nowhere, at least no place I can think of after five days under the Texas sun, is the union on such perverse display as in Austin, at the annual South by Southwest Music festival.

Brought to you by Miller Lite, Fuze, IFC, Zone Perfect, PepsiCo and The Austin Chronicle, to name a few, SXSW is the logical conclusion to an art culture as diverse as it is completely inured to corporate interjection.  To be fair, the organizers are honest in their advertising and the musicians are no fools.  The newspaper quoted atop the festival’s home page describes SXSW as a “massive, unavoidable media beast.”

And so the beast touched down in Austin town late Wednesday night.  I’ve never spent more than 24 hours on the ground in Texas, but I was immediately put at ease by the flowing hordes of my fellow Brooklyn-brand hipsters.  Together we (the 12,000 of us, organizers reported) would take on this epic fixture congestion.

Luckily, the ABC News On Campus crew had the location staked out.  Like the foreign minister from New York City, I was shepherded from one glorious, virtuoso, breakout, determinant — all of the above — celebration to the next.  Vega, the band we profile here on the site, welcomed ABC News with a blistering 20 minutes of dirty “Dreamwave” dynamism.

Surely, this must be the Holy Grail!  The Lost World!  Pangaea reconstituted! (Actually Pangaea is the club that hosted Graham Coxon’s acoustic set and the Billboard magazine party.)  Surely.

But like I said before, there are snakes in this garden.  Temptation abounds.  The Black Lips, an Atlanta-based group and SXSW fixture known for their chaotic engagements (they stripped naked and set off a stage invasion at a show in London late during the summer), played their feature show at the Blackberry party. 

Because this is a blog, I can speculate that there were more Blackberries than people present for their ‘09 performance.  Blog or not, I can say without the slightest supposition that the musicians kept their clothes on.

A day later, our intrepid team of reporters and hangers-on (the glory!) arrived early for the Graham Coxon set at Pangaea.  All of age, we awaited the former and soon to be current Blur guitarist’s arrival on the lounge’s lovely couches.  My drink was well measured.  The ice: impeccably cold.  Coxon was magic.  The crowd was well-behaved.  That is, we kept our pants on.  Our shouts were whispered.

The Black Lips and Graham Coxon played in the South by Southwest you’ll see in next month’s fashion rock mags.  You probably already know that Kanye West made a “surprise” appearance at the Levi’s/Fader magazine “fort.”  There’s a lot of that surprise business at SXSW.  I’ll have to take the Chronicle’s word for it that Neil Young played a couple private shows before the debut of his newest concert documentary.

Yes, you’ll read about Kanye and The Hold Steady and Metallica (on hand to sell their new edition of “Guitar Hero”) and even some new-to-you acts like Asher Roth and The Pains of Being Pure at Heart.

But if it’s purity you drove 23 hours to get here to see… then sadly, there’s a good chance you were left wanting.  Had it not been for our cunning (and native) On Campus crew, there’s no chance I’d have found the Scoot Inn (Talib Kweli and Hi-Tek?  Who knew?) on the east side of Interstate 35 — virtually inaccessible to the uninitiated.  So too, would The Music Gym and its blistering showcase of Canadian hip-hop remained buried treasure.

South by Southwest, however you want to sell it, is a tale of two festivals.  There are the seekers…and the shoppers.  We kept our space.