AUSTIN, Tex. — Mitski, a songwriter based in Brooklyn, clutched her hot-pink bass and surveyed the knots of people standing in the rain to hear her on Saturday afternoon. She was playing her fourth (and last) live set in 24 hours as part of the 29th annual South By Southwest Music Conference and Festival, the five-day blowout that brings an estimated 2,000 acts — bands, solo performers, rappers, D.J.s — to Austin each year.
Mitski was playing visceral, openhearted indie-rock songs with lyrics like “I just need a quiet place where I can scream how I love you.” Partway through the set, she admitted she was tired, as her audience probably was, then added: “I’d rather be tired doing music than tired not doing music. So thank you so much for letting me do this.”
That’s one prevailing spirit during SXSW, a marathon of attention-seeking in countless forms, from social-media mentions on up to actual remuneration. This year’s festival was, as usual, a wild jumble of overlapping and contradictory agendas for musicians, corporations, news media, music fans and full-time partygoers. The promise for musicians is that a stray festival encounter or its ripples across the Internet can bring new opportunities, and many of them spend the festival in a whirlwind of performances, interviews, handshaking and making contacts. For many others, it’s an epicenter for exploiting music in ways both benevolent and predatory, in an era when music often seems to generate value for everyone except the people who make it.
This year SXSW took a small yet welcome step back from the relentless corporate blare and celebrity swanning of recent years. There was no stage set up to look like a vending machine disgracing the Austin skyline, and the sponsors that sustain SXSW’s business were present without being quite so ubiquitous. Yes, Miley Cyrus made an appearance on Thursday evening, but it was a cameo in support of her producer, Mike Will Made-It, not a grand self-promotion. Her costume was made of glitter in a camo pattern: a neat metaphor for wanting both to be seen and to blend in.
SXSW was also facing the aftereffects of the 2014 festival, when a drunken driver crashed through a barricade into a line of people waiting outside a club, killing four and wounding dozens. There were more barricades, more visible police and more closed-off streets — none of which significantly impinged on SXSW as a loud, enthusiastic party, indoors and outdoors.
The big stars at this year’s festival — and the longest lines I saw of people waiting to hear them — came from hip-hop. Rappers unabashedly brand themselves, and the relentless marketing emphasis of SXSW makes them a natural fit. Snoop Dogg gave the festival’s keynote, a conversation with his manager where he explained his tenacious career. “I keep my ear to the street, and I keep my feet to the pavement,” he said. “I always pay attention to what’s going on in the industry that I’m in, whether it’s the new talent or it’s the old talent — what’s hot, what’s not. What’s in, what’s out.”
While many of the hip-hop sets were booming exercises in machismo, there were also more thoughtful performers. Among them were Chance the Rapper, backed by his jazzy live band, the Social Experiment, who set aside self-aggrandizement to call for a sense of community, and Run the Jewels, mixing belligerent boasts with anti-authoritarian politics. Freddie Gibbs revisited and expanded on the thug-life narratives of rappers like Tupac Shakur. The Chicago rapper Tink — who performed outside at the Fader Fort — sped through tricky rhymes about being a forthright, self-sufficient woman. (Her message was diluted by Timbaland, her producer, who stayed onstage throughout her set and spoke between her songs.) Coming at hip-hop from a far different background was Kate Tempest, an English poet, playwright and rapper who vehemently pondered moral dilemmas in a consumerist era.
The dissolving boundaries between hip-hop, dance music, programmers, producers and live performers were obvious through the festival. East India Youth is the solo project of the songwriter William Doyle, whose voice could easily suit troubled pop ballads; instead, he presided over an electronic emplacement, starting out by singing but finishing his set as a frenetic electronic rave-up, piling on drumbeats and keyboard lines. Sophie, a male D.J., smashed abrasive noise against perky sampled pop voices; Odesza, a production duo, and Hudson Mohawke, a D.J., each found different ways to build ominous density under pop tunes.
Still, hand-played indie-rock has hardly disappeared from SXSW. Torres, the band led by Mackenzie Scott, played songs that rose from hazy guitar sounds to moody, turbulent peaks. The songwriter Alex G, who has recorded hundreds of songs and placed them online, chose cannily from his catalog, putting a lackadaisical face on his industriousness. His songs moved at a deliberate pace but quietly exulted in their guitar patterns and pensive attitude: a little Pavement, a little Neil Young. Post-punk was back with Girl Band (noise-centered), Viet Cong (crisply dissonant) and the Pop Group, a pioneering late-1970s post-punk band only now on its first United States tour. Music Band, from Nashville, roared through garage-rock songs that had wryly self-mocking lyrics.
While English-language indie-rock was tinged with nostalgia, innovation came from abroad. SXSW has, with long-term effort, made itself the prime United States showcase for international music — some with commercial goals, some as cultural exchange. Apanhador Só, from Brazil, had sly, tuneful, playfully arranged songs that hinted at Brazilian tropicalía and the brittle constructions of XTC. La Guacha, from Chile, sang and sometimes rapped in lithe, graceful songs about love that kept taking unexpected turns. Centavrvs, a Mexican band, enfolded regional styles, like cumbia and ranchera, in a swirl of electronics.
SXSW helped select a showcase of Pakistani music, sponsored by the State Department, which included what may have been the oldest songs at the festival. Mai Dhai, a female singer and drummer from a rural desert region, has repertoire dating to the era of Alexander the Great: ecstatic, propulsive music that was both devotional and visceral.
Of course, the festival was full of aspiring hitmakers — far too many songwriters relentlessly repeating their hooks over dull march beats. But the hunt for the next Adele — rooted in soul with just enough contemporary production — has helped songwriters like Meg Mac of Australia, who’s fond of minor keys and brooding thoughts, and James Bay of England, with raspy angst in his voice and a foundation in blues and 1960s soul. Leon Bridges, a singer from Fort Worth, played eight shows at SXSW, revealing a voice steeped in Sam Cooke and a kindly stage presence that deserves to connect with a radio-friendly song.
What SXSW reveals, with all of its hopeful musicians trudging from gig to gig, is music as not a fantasy of stardom but as a job. Matthew E. White, a songwriter steeped in the Americana of the Band but with a touch of punk surliness in his lyrics and guitar attack, announced on Thursday that he had played five sets that day, starting with a breakfast-hour radio broadcast, and he took a craftsman’s pride. “We’re a lot better now than we were at 7 a.m.,” he said.
- http://bit.ly/1Oog2Nn
Niciun comentariu:
Trimiteți un comentariu