The Last Word from the Press on SXSW 2008

My official laminated badge feels more and more useless every year. The Enchanted Forest was one highlight. The three demented, almost downright terrifying Monotonix shows I saw were the others, and each of those events was open to the general public. (Two of the Monotonix shows were also free, as was the beer at them; the Enchanted Forest was B.Y.O.B. and required a ten-dollar ticket.)

For the first time ever, this year, I didn't attend any panels or even set foot on the trade show floor, and those were until three or four years ago one of the main reasons people bought badges. Now, I am far from alone in avoiding them. And it's not that they aren't interesting events — it's just that there is so much more to do out there on the fringes in lower-case South By Land.

Which, when you think about it, is a pretty decent way of looking at the state of the music business as a whole these days. A couple of days after South By wrapped, I got an e-mail from Bob Lefsetz, an eccentric music industry gadfly whose widely read newsletter excoriates the industry's tepid, foot-dragging response to the technological revolution.

"The new music business isn't at SXSW," he railed. "Why should it be? Think about it. If Yahoo and Google sprung up out of nowhere, what makes you think the powers-that-be in the music industry are going to rule in the future?

"So you're gonna make a deal with a major, a 360 deal, because that's all they want. You're gonna put yourself in the hands of the old generation, lock yourself up completely, because it seems easier this way, you can sleep at night, knowing you've got a signed contract locked up somewhere. But when your record stiffs since the label is chasing the product of the good-looker who recorded the songs they wanted them to, the radio-friendly stuff, and you're tied up forever, who you gonna call, GHOSTBUSTERS?"

Sometimes Lefsetz is dead-on. For the most part, this is not one of those times. That's badge-wearing, capital letter SXSW thinking, and it's just as dated as the ideas Lefsetz excoriates elsewhere.

The new music business is out there, just not in that kill zone east of Congress, north of Lady Bird Lake, south of the Capitol and west of I-35. Lefsetz is correct about things like the Blender, Spin and Fader parties and already-famous band gigs at places like Stubb's at Emo's, especially when he says stuff like this:

"All that MTV-era bullshit is done. It's not about your look. It's not even about following trends. It's not about signing on the bottom line for a zillion bucks. It's about making music. Constantly. Not on a one album every three year cycle. The Net audience wants new tunes all the time. A steady stream. Your hard core fans anyway. If you're playing to the casual listener, you're abusing your hard core. Let the casual user find you VIA the hard core."

So far so good. But then he added this: "A single on the radio for nine months may generate cash once, but it turns a hell of a lot of people off. Like Taylor Swift. If I hear about her fucking teardrops on her guitar one more time, I'm going to VOMIT! Just shut up and make another record. I was a fan, now I just see a young girl being raped by the system. A system that doesn't care about the fans, but only about the short-term money."

I just lived through four-and-half days of this year's South By, and Lefsetz's words seem surreal. Who the hell is Taylor Swift? Nobody I talked to cares about her; neither did anyone give two shits about trying to get on the radio. And I don't think I met anybody who gave much of a hoot about any kind of money, short-term or otherwise. The bands I saw were all about the music, lifers in the game who couldn't do anything else even if they wanted to.

Lefsetz and the other veterans of the old game just had to seek out these mythical creatures beyond the marketing miasma close by the convention center and head out to places like the Austin Typewriter Museum's dusty backyard, the sloping alley behind the Continental Club, or deep within the glades of the Enchanted Forest. — John Nova Lomax

chris.gray@houstonpress.com

john.lomax@houstonpress.com