According to the official history on its website, Austin’s South by Southwest music festival launched in 1987 “to reach out to the rest of the world, and bring them here to do business.” For most of the quarter century since, that’s remained the fest’s primary purpose: When I first attended in the late 90s, as an industry hopeful with a wristband I’d bought myself, SXSW was still the place where pretty much every unsigned band worth knowing and every music-biz rep with a contract to offer swarmed together in a bacchanal of deal making. It was the music-industry equivalent of salmons’ spawning grounds, but with more open bars.
Civilian music obsessives have unsurprisingly responded to the presence of free, nonstop live entertainment in quantities that make the lineups of megafests such as Lollapalooza seem dinky: they descend upon SXSW in droves, especially from parts of the country where quality live music isn’t a nightly option. And then there are the college kids.
On that front, a SXSW show by LA producer, multi-instrumentalist, and retro-aesthetic enthusiast Adrian Younge is a cautionary tale. Younge and his band opened for Ghostface Killah with a set that was mostly originals blending vintage soul and exploitation-soundtrack music, full of oddball stylistic choices but vividly funky. It earned a depressingly negative response from a crowd largely made up of drunk college dudes, as did a handful of songs from Ghostface and Younge’s extremely excellent upcoming collaborative album, Twelve Reasons to Die. When Ghostface switched to rapping over studio tracks, one of the best bands I saw all week left the stage to jeers.
