I imagine there is a lot of chatter about SXSW coming unmoored from its origins and capitulating to business interests. Suing NX35 for stealing their name did little to help that image. (Couldn’t Denton have sold the whole thing as an Alfred Hitchcock-themed art festival? Are Hitchcock’s people even more difficult to deal with than fuming Austinites?)
I am reluctant to belabor the point and regurgitate a diatribe about how the moneychangers found yet another way to exploit art and culture. It is an old story and not that interesting. I believe a simple anecdote will do just as well. Yesterday I was walking down Congress and I saw Ted Danson. I had not realized this theretofore, but I believe my entire life has been predicated on the simple habit of being wherever Ted Danson was not. And yet here we are, Ted and I, in the same place, both on purpose. I think that fairly describes the state of SXSW philosophically. Practically, it still offers loads of good music.
Astronautalis played in yet another incarnation called Four Fists, consisting of himself and rapper P.O.S. Their set dovetailed when the DJ couldn’t find the proper samples, leaving Astronautalis standing alone on the stage as P.O.S. and the DJ attended to the problem. Predictably, the crowd demanded a freestyle. Astronautalis closed topic submissions upon someone shouting “Nate Dogg,” who had died just one day earlier. Astronautalis dedicated the entire freestyle to the late rapper, prefacing, “For those of you who don’t know, Nate Dogg is who T-Payne bought a computer to sound like.”
Astronautalis is something like a verbal fount, an Eden of thought. Seeing him live is like watching someone tow etymology, history, and life into a room. There seems to be no bottom to his sack of ideas. Astronautalis is red-faced when he orates, nearly boiling over with mania. He spits novels-worth of material: whole books, amplified, with the footnotes thrown in for good measure. Tomes forwarded, prefaced and epilogued with the desperation of a passing soul. And whenever Astronautalis finally does leave the stage, the room flattens noticeably, like low tide.
Ted Leo played the sunken stage at Swan Dive, making me feel shorter than I already am. His voice floated down from somewhere, bounced around the structural, steel I-beam blocking my view. I would normally have gone to great lengths to avoid anything called Brooklyn Vegan. I like to know something was able to have a good scream before I ate it. But the music blog is sponsoring a wealth of quality talent at SXSW this week, Ted Leo being among them.
Founding member of himself & The Pharmacists, Leo performed solo last night in a setup owing much to Billy Bragg. He raps on his single electric guitar to the pace of a downhill locomotive. In form and theme, Leo evokes images of the worker-musician, singing in the bar to disenfranchised laborers of the steam-presses, the metal stamps and die cutters, fresh off their arduous shifts. The fact that this is done in an Austin club to people with a $139 bit of plastic on their wrists generates too many questions to answer profitably.
I walked into another club just in time to watch Nathaniel Rateliff literally pull the plug on his set, so I wandered over to see Immortal Technique. Upon instantly surmising that watching from a balcony as Immortal Technique and his cohorts tossed t-shirts to an anxious crowd would be pretty boring, I returned to the club Rateliff had played earlier. It was there that I drank a beer as Rateliff told me about his life.
The major catalyst of Rateliff’s songwriting was his father’s passing when he was thirteen. Henceforth, Nathaniel and his mother were co-breadwinners and he never spent another day in school. Nathaniel told me about his various jobs, in the truck yards of Denver and, more recently, gardening. He told me about how he listened to Wolfman Jack DJ doo-wop sets and would mimic the voices pouring out of the speakers when he wasn’t hitching and unhitching commercial truck trailers.
And it was somewhere in that moment, as Nathaniel Rateliff flawlessly mimicked Sam Cooke singing “Bring It on Home to Me” while I stood next to him at a bar, drinking, that I realize this sort of occurrence may personify SXSW. While every corner here on 6th Street offers a new, horrifying exhibit of the music festival’s betrayed principals, it is still the sort of place where someone like Nathaniel Rateliff might end up singing you a Sam Cooke song at a bar. I can only hope Ted Danson is having as vivid an experience.
