MUSIC COLUMN: SXSW 2010 PREVIEW
A Few Notes From A City In A Heightened State of Preparedness
Where am I? Where have I been? It’s 2010? We’ve moved too far into the future. My car still runs on fossil fuels and I’m still unnecessarily spending too many hours in front of the same glowing box my parents flipped their lids over nearly 50 years ago. The Earth is splitting at the seams in a rage. It seems we’re all in a rage. People are dying all around us, and we throw a few benefits and cut a record deal.
I’ve holed up in the apartment, watching college basketball and The Three Stooges.
The Grammys were on. Piss, the whole lot of it. Art has been tied down and nailed up on a plastic cross for all of us to pin dollar bills on after we’ve been spun around dizzy and blind-folded with our iPods in our ears and our iPhones duct-taped to our faces.
Suddenly I feel a compulsion to run off into the woods, to high-tail for the forests in search of humanity, something wild, something real, to make sense of the turning of the times.
In the heat of the Industrial Revolution, the Transcendentalists ran out into the wilderness to find a spiritual enlightening of sorts. Amid the ponds and the flowers and the birds’ chirp-and-singing, they came to the conclusion that all things — the heavens, the Earth, the dirt, the trees, the hills, the very heart of man — was good, inherently good.
Then came the likes of Hawthorne and Poe, who had a very different, more foreboding glimpse into the innermost parts of the human psyche. The ‘good’ was less as much, and the slums, the murderers, the dregs of society mirrored a more honest reflection of nature, human or otherwise. All this was more than a century ago. You’d think we’d have moved on, but we haven’t. Or at least I haven’t…unfortunately.
The sun hasn’t shined in Austin for three days now. That’s too long for gray skies to hang around this city. Something is looming over the horizon. Something dark. Something huge…a massive cataclysm. SXSW hangs over this town in the month of February as if God Himself were dangling an anvil haphazardly by a rubber-band down through the clouds. And we look up and just wait for the big weight to drop.
Yeah, the fruckus brings in the money, but the spirit’s not the same. It’s hard to describe, but, if you’ve lived in this town long enough, you have an understanding. The “industry” seems to have caught on (as it eventually always does and always will) and, where once music seemed to seep and slither out of every nook, crack, and cranny of the Capital of Texas, it is now filtered through the bureaucratic sieve of wristbands, badges, and various degrees of limited access and awareness.
YET!!!! I don’t want to denigrate the glory of what SXSW is now, was then, and will be in the future. The festival, both in music and film, is unparalleled in its comprehensiveness and depth. This, my friends, is a beautiful thing — an otherworldly phenomenon that you have to experience to believe. A baptism by fire into everything you could ever want or wish for in live music.
Of course, you have to dig through piles and piles of sh*t to find the delectable nuggets that you’re looking for (I, myself, only found 30-some bands that I felt were worth seeing out of the near 2,000 that were accessible to listen to on the SXSW website). But even an embittered, cynical hack like me is wise enough to know that one man’s shit is another man’s caviar, especially when it comes to music; so, with that said, consider SXSW a proverbial feast for the eyes and ears of all humanity.
As strong as the pull to the wilderness tugging at my conscience may be, I have lived enough years to know better than to go chasing after that Utopian vision into the forests in search of “something better.” Here I stay, here in Austin. I’ve a glass of Myer’s on the rocks sitting now before me, and there’s sunny weather ahead in the forecast. The Deep Dark Woods by The Deep Dark Woods is playing on the record player, which conjures up a peace of mind and spirit to keep moving onward. They’ve got a showcase at SXSW this year, I hear. Maybe this year I’ll bypass the “official” showcases at night and see what treasures I can find during the daytime at the house parties and the free shows in the cafes and open bars. Maybe I’ll find some humanity there. Something wild. Something real.
Perhaps. ‘Til then, I’m thinking I’ll walk down to the Lucky corner store and buy a case of Lone Star in case you show up early, because I know you’re coming. Everyone does. Everyone.
SXSW 2010 runs from March 12-21 across almost every square inch of Austin, TX
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