The tone of the South by Southwest Music Conference, which opened Tuesday, is somewhat muted compared to the corporate crassness that dominated recent years. There’s no giant snack dispenser masquerading as a stage, and there are fewer mega-pop stars casting giant shadows over the 2,000 bands that have come from around the world, most looking for their first taste of recognition. Kanye West, Mary J. Blige and Iggy Azalea have been booked to play exclusive parties for a cellphone company, but the focus is returning, as it should be, to the up-and-comers.
Some weren’t ready for the big stage. Leather Corduroys, who kicked off a long night of Chicago music at a 6th Street club, lacked focus. MCs Kami de Chukwu and Joey Purp alternated unison lines with tag-team call-and-response, but never developed momentum as they cut tracks short and pleaded with the early after-dinner arrivals to “give us some energy.” Their callowness echoed sets by now-revered Chicago hip-hop artists Chance the Rapper and Vic Mensa at earlier conferences. Promising work in the studio doesn’t necessarily translate to a persuasive live set, but Chance and Mensa have figured it out — they’re headliners this year. In time, Leather Corduroys may join them, but they’ve still got work to do.
Whereas the Corduroys aimed to “show you every side of us,” singer Katie Crutchfield — who records under the name Waxahatchee — offered an unhurried exploration of several of her sturdiest songs. Briefly accompanied on harmony vocals by her sister, Crutchfield commanded the stage with her patient guitar playing and country-tinged vocals. One song consisted of one unanswerable question — or was it plea? “Will you go?” she sang, a mantra to longing. Two songs later her vulnerability gave way to a defiant sneer: “I won’t give you what you want.” The lonesome, lilting melodies unfolded with a deceptive casualness. Just beneath the languid surface, hearts were breaking.
Torres — 23-year-old singer-guitarist Mackenzie Scott — is weeks away from releasing her second album, and she looked and sounded poised for a breakthrough. With a four-piece band, she balanced abrasiveness and fragility: guitar finger-picking bleeding into power chords and floating vocals morphing into full-throated declamations. Songs began as if circling their intentions, then built into stirring crescendos. “What’s mine isn’t really yours / I hope you find what you’re looking for,” she howled, her empathy exploding into the outrage of PJ Harvey in full cry.
These artists were part of a conference devoted to feeding the digital beast, a smart-phone-centric culture that increasingly subsists on streaming of recorded music and concerts, and depends on data and the organization of that data. “Information about information,” as digital executive Bill Wilson said at one panel Wednesday. It’s information that can determine whether an artist gets paid and how often, or can influence how often, when and where that artist’s music gets played. “Meta data is money and meta data is you,” Wilson said, if nothing else proving that just about everything Kraftwerk played around with on its ’70s albums is coming true, for better or worse.
The next frontier of music creation is tying music to emotional experience, catering to a person’s mood and personal experience. Data can help programmers find the right mix for a gym workout, a dinner party, or going on a Sunday drive. It’s enough to make a music lover scream “Orwell!”
This stood in stark contrast to Henry Rollins, the fearsome former Black Flag singer who is the antithesis of the algorithm-dominated world thriving inside the South by Southwest bubble. Rollins said he has been desperately spending the last few decades trying to disguise his inadequacy. Touring alongside bands such as Husker Du and Saccharine Trust in the ’80s, he recognized “I was less talented, so I needed plan B, C, D and E …”
Plan “X” included an hour-long interview Tuesday in front of a full house at the conference. He has dabbled in rock bands, spoken word, acting, deejaying on the radio and writing books, and he even turned this Q&A into something of a performance — a drive that he says came from never, ever wanting to return to the menial jobs he worked as a “directionless, flinching, scared kid” in Washington D.C. He was “an all-together hard to be around person” back then, he said, and even today acknowledges that he talks so much and so fast that he wears out just about anybody in a few hours. His audience “will be done with me before I’m done with them, which sucks,” he said. Hence, the diversity that for him became a survival tactic.
His acting career, which most recently included his first leading-man role in the indie film “He Never Died,” is more a product of audacity than talent, he said: “No one knows I can’t act. … I’ve perpetrated a massive punk-rock fraud.”
“I’m still Henry from the ice-cream stand in my head,” he said, a sense that he was just scraping by in whatever artistic endeavor he tried to pursue. But he said that self-doubt never stopped him from pushing through anyway.
“Never ask for advice,” he advised newbie bands. “James Brown didn’t ask for advice … Iggy Pop didn’t ask for advice. If you have to ask me whether you should be in a band, son, I’d say you should stay in school.” Evoking the shirtless, long-haired, Samson-like Rollins of the Black Flag years, he counseled that being in a band is entirely about attitude. Self-doubt, he said, will kill “the velocity, vengeance and fury” that a newcomer needs “to take the first step out the door.”
“I like employment,” he said. “I believe in it. I evaluate employment by the level of stress induced. The more stressful, the more alive I feel.”