"Diary from Texas" (SXSW Festival Coverage)

THURSDAY, MARCH 14

My initiation to the 2002 South By Southwest Music Festival—Austin, Texas’ annual feeding and breeding ground for the world’s most diverse and formidable musical talent—came at the hands of an Icelandic hip-hop outfit. It’s a strange world in which we live, to be sure. As I stood in the crowd at La Zona Rosa, unsure of whether I was there in earnest or in irony, I was nonetheless intrigued by Quarashi, a group of young Reykjavikians(??) whose raison d’etre seems to be early-90s era Beastie Boys records. The kids hit the stage, and though the imitation proved impressive, Quarashi’s ponderously derivative sound and lyrical non-content soon left most members of the audience (myself included) pining away for nothing more than a pair headphones and our old cassette copy of “Check Your Head.” A valiant effort, but a needless one.

Quarashi’s fate as a festival casualty was sealed when legendary New York scratch crew the X-Ecutioners took the La Zona Rosa stage at 11. DJs Rob Swift, Rock Raida, and Total Eclipse set the party off with a breathtaking hour on the ones and twos, treating a capacity crowd to a dizzying crash-course in the fine art of turntablism. Effortlessly combining showmanship with virtuosity, the X-men had the crowd in the palm of their hand from the first time needles touched wax, assaulting material as divergent as Missy Elliot’s “Get Ur Freak On” to LL Cool J’s classic “Rock The Bells.” By the time the trio had left the stage, there wasn’t a dry eye in the hip-hop loving house.

Wondering if Rob Swift and the boys had already shot my evening—let alone my weekend—I moseyed (when in Rome…) on over to Antone’s for the 1am performance of Alabama rock quintet Drive-By Truckers. As the Truckers took the stage before a jam-packed house, however, my worries of anti-climax were resoundingly dispelled. Delivering the smartest Southern rock this side of Steve Earle with the intensity of Highway To Hell-era AC/DC, Drive-By Truckers put on as compelling and powerful a live show as today’s music world has to offer. The word on the street is Lynyrd Skynyrd with bad-ass brains, but the river runs far deeper—the Truckers channel Southern musical tradition through an indefatigable conscience and sensibility that manages to embrace, castigate, and ultimately transcend the culture that spawned it. Between the X-Ecutioners and Drive-By Truckers, my knees were so weak I’m surprised I made it back to my hotel at the end of the evening.

FRIDAY, MARCH 15

Friday found me returning to La Zona Rosa for the 8pm performance of the Yeah Yeah Yeahs. Armed with nothing more than a five-song EP and a deafening buzz, the bass-less trio of Brooklyn kids proved that youth can (and should) be a wonderful thing in the realm of rock and roll. Despite a set that clocked in at under a half and hour, the Yeah Yeah Yeahs fulfilled the expectations of the crowd with an ultra-original blend of angular punk and rockstar stage presence. The show’s climax was the perverse power-ballad “Our Time,” as frontwoman Karen O worked the crowd into a frenzy with a shimmering piece of anthemic punk grandeur that has cult-classic written all over it.

An hour or so later I wandered into Austin Music Hall, SXSW’s largest indoor venue, in anticipation of Starsailor, Britain’s latest batch of pop-rock boy wonders. After much fanfare, the band hit the stage and treated their audience to a fantastic hour of sweeping minor-key ballads mixed with, well, sweeping major-key ballads. Frontman James Walsh’s voice is otherworldly, and though no one would accuse Starsailor of being the most versatile or original band in the world today, there is little doubt about the power of their material or their ability to perform it in a way that combines boyish introspection with epic levels of rock grandeur. Arena-rock isn’t dead—it’s just a little shy, and there’s nothing wrong with that. After Starsailor, my night sadly deteriorated into an unfortunate odyssey of barhopping and crummy hardcore bands. Even in Austin, it seems, you can’t win ‘em all, but I realized that I was coming fairly close.

SATURDAY, MARCH 16

By Saturday evening I was gloriously exhausted, but still managed to cart myself to—where else—La Zona Rosa for the Biz3 Publicity Showcase. I arrived just in time to catch Atlanta-based beatsmith Scott Herren, better known to fans as Prefuse 73. The beats were interesting, but the show just wasn’t, as Herren’s obscure ambient hip-hop seemed to confuse and alienate a crowd desperately in search of accessibility.

After Prefuse 73, things were knocked up a notch—but not much further—by the MC tandem of Mr. Lif and Aesop Rock. Lif—a legend of the Boston hip hop scene—showed a knack for firing up the crowd, but too often the blaze was extinguished by the two performers’ lack of compelling or catchy material. To paraphrase the recent musings of a notable MC, it takes an anthem to get our damn hands up, and Lif and Rock came with nothing of the sort. And though the rhymes sounded cool, they only ran the gamut between the pretentious and the downright meaningless, often straying into territory so comically abstract that Kool Keith himself would wince.

All previous disappointments were erased, however, by the arrival of New York-based experimentalists Antipop Consortium. Antipop Consortium played the most daring and ambitious show I saw in my time at SXSW, the sort of performance that leaves an audience dazzlingly disoriented but nonetheless craving more. Trotting out a variety of mixers and bizarre synthesizers, APC proceeded to manufacture their own spacey but hypnotic beats while rapping over them with competence and confidence, with an effect of Stetsasonic-meets-the-Orb-via-KRS-One. Endlessly evocative but still uncategorizable, APC provided a fitting swansong to my three days of beer, barbeque, and rock and roll. There is exciting, innovative, and compelling music being made in the world today, and you don’t even necessarily have to go to Austin to find it. But take it from me, it’s lots more fun that way.

Originally published online at Papermag.com, March 2002