The question I had is one that doesn't get a lot of answers immediately but may in the future. To paraphrase Arthur Miller, whose fest is it anyway? For a while now it has been generally assumed that SXSW, the Pitchfork Music Festival, New York's CMJ fest, and their ilk are about presenting up-and-coming acts to the U.S., presumably as a first-stage rocket to a larger career. But as the years progress, the role of these conclaves as new artist incubators is lessening.
There are plenty of glasses of blame to pass around. The first has to fall on many of the acts themselves who see to be locked into a self-congratulatory spiral of tropes -- a fetishizing of exotic musical sounds and approaches without a clear understanding or appreciation of them; a hundred album covers each year with nothing more interesting to say than, "hey we got a woman to pose topless for our album cover too," a forgetfulness of the fact that should you choose a non-style to be your sound, you still have chosen a style; and that irony only goes so far. Then you just become a disagreeable smart-ass with limited funds for decent shirts and footwear. It is true that if the bands aren't bringing something of value, and they're just cloaking it in what they presume the audience wants, they'll just be swallowed up by the hundred other bands doing the exact same thing.
But that doesn't count for the 20-30% that are "in it for the music" and are dead serious, and would probably turn many a head if only someone would listen to them. Increasingly, the reason why people aren't is because the small fries are being eclipsed by the stars who have decided to make the festivals their stomping ground too. The big news at SXSW this year was that Justin Timberlake was premiering his new music there, and that announcement alone probably meant that half of the indie artists making the trek to Austin probably shouldn't have squandered their day-job vacation hours. Jay Z is expected there too, and one would rightly assume Beyonce would be along as well. So you have two of the biggest names in modern music and another making a sort of comeback arriving in town, in tandem with their fans who come to star gaze and hopefully snag tickets, all to the detriment of these outsiders who thought this would be "their big moment."
Now, why would the stars not only be encouraged to come, but actively welcomed and accommodated for doing so if this is supposed to be a celebration of indie-ness? What is indie-ness anyway? To get a handle of that, we are required to look back to the boom time of the 1990s in film when it appeared that independent films were in full bloom. This was when the company Miramax was still disconnected from the studios and upstarts and start-ups were making their guerilla cinema with little expectation of reward beyond completion of their projects. Seeing that this new wave of creators was not only getting the work done but getting noticed for it, those studios needed to get in the game.
Miramax was bought by Disney. Sony had Sony Classics, Fox had Searchlight, Universal had Gramercy and later Focus Features, and nearly all of these eventually were made as shadows of former selves as the output moved from character-based, more intimate, sometimes more intense work to things more aligned with big blockbusters. Miramax prided itself on being able to release both a shoestring-and-chewing-gum comedy like Clerks and the wide-scale The English Patient roughly around the same time. But as the Clerks knock-offs became more prevalent and predictable, the studios and their indie-boutique labels were straying back to the way they were most comfortable with doing business. Miramax doesn't exist anymore, and neither does Gramercy. Focus and Searchlight is as prone to genre films with big explosions as their parent companies…and that is their right and obligation to their stockholders.
If there is a shame to it, it's that it was being done on the backs of filmmakers who thought they had a level playing field, or at the very least a well-organized minor league parallel. Some of the studios may have felt obligated to go with fare that they felt was going to make money. They are businesses after all. And so is SXSW. If the organizers can't justify the output of funds each year, and there is a waning interest in a crop of bands this year that sound like bands from last year and look like bands from the year before, then to keep the endeavor going, they have to encourage the bigger names to come or otherwise close shop.
I just wish that this form of media gentrification wasn't so absolute that those caught up in its crossfire weren't doomed, and they are doomed. Many bands will call it quits after Austin. Now, if they do so because they are deemed of poor quality and lack of public interest quantifies that lack of skill in a numerical way, that is one thing. It is quite another if a worthy band hangs it up because they feel like failures, but in fact it was because they lost their bid to the big machine and not because of their entertainment value. In that, the system becomes kind of a rig. But if you are an organizer that needs to make money to keep your head above water, you have to abide by the rig.
The audience can be blamed because they should be defenders of the ethos and the overall goals of the festival, but when is the last time you went anywhere to be its defender? Probably never. You went to enjoy yourself. You shouldn't be expected to be the police force for the overall integrity of the endeavor. It's a sticky situation.
I wish I had answers for you, but I don't. I encourage listeners to try new music both through my writing here and on Popdose.com, and I certainly swing close to the indies on Radioshow With Dw. Dunphy. In the year so far, the show has featured artists like Brandon Schott, The Greenberry Woods, Lisa Mychols, The Sonic Executive Sessions, Skeleton Key, and The Duckworth Lewis Method (among others). I support projects through Indiegogo and Kickstarter, and at the moment those seem like the way forward for indie artists.
It also should provoke feelings of déjà vu to know that the Kickstarter campaign to start up the Veronica Mars movie made over two million dollars in the first of its thirty days. An advantage is only exclusive to the lucky few for so long…
