As a first-timer, SXSW seems eerily close to Disneyworld: there’s way too much stuff to possibly do in a week, everyone’s kinda drunken because normal rules of life don’t apply when you’re waiting four hours to huddle in a tiny box-o-entertainment, and it’s entirely possible to have a wildly different experience to the person next to you based on tiny factors like your friend’s love of Ludacris and TV On The Radio (an actual showcase) or that wicked sunburn from yesterday. It’s overwhelming in the strangest way — once you realize you’re going to miss out on something incredible no matter what, it’s easy to experience the whole thing as remarkably consistent throughout. Good music is left and right, so why stress?
I shot myself in the foot before I even got there because, unlike Disneyworld, kids aren’t allowed. By a profound act of oversight from which I’ll never recover, I managed to get a press badge without realizing how many of the official showcases I was interested in were happening at clubs. And funnily enough, club bouncers actually aren’t into 19 year olds trying to convince them how much they need to see Ben Aqua, so here we are. In a perfect world, I might have written about Cascine, Cómeme, #Feelings, and PC Music (though Mike covered that last one brilliantly), but instead I got the weird mixture of DIY and unofficial stuff you have before you, and I wouldn’t have changed a second of it.
Tuesday: Club (Not) Goin’ Up
Hudson Mohawke at the Mohawk? How could I say no? After they announced the full lineup featuring Suicideyear, SOPHIE, and Obey City the day before, this one jumped to the top of my to-do list. After waiting for a couple hours with an (un)surprisingly higb number of 15-year-olds in sadboy garb, my friends and I were treated to a lovely warmup session from LuckyMe resident The Blessings that featured the increasingly standard cocktail of Jersey club and maximalist “beats.”
The event moved inside afterward for Kero Kero Bonito, far and away the best performance I saw. While Augustus (known to some as Kane West) and Jamie provided their sick beats, Sarah commanded that living room like the diva she is. Trotting out silly props like a giant pink phone and a graduation cap/diploma set, she was DIY pop incarnate. There was something about the whole thing that just clicked, as that whole living room went bananas to “Picture This,” nearly collapsing the wooden floor in the process (pop can be very punk). Synchronized dances and all, KKB will certainly be on their way to bigger venues and crowds soon enough, but I’ll be damned if that performance didn’t have the energy of a proper basement blowout.
I spent the rest of the night waiting around at the WorldStarHipHop showcase, hoping that anyone from the announced lineup that included Young Thug, Lil Herb, PeeWee Longway, Lil Durk, Young Chop, and basically every other TMT favorite would interrupt the endless cycle of hypemen. But of the five hours I spent there, I only got PeeWee and Fetty Wap, the latter of whom wasn’t even billed. On the bright side, “Trap Queen” was precisely as good as it should have been, but I left around 11:30, confused but pleased. A bit of a metaphor for the whole festival really. Where else in the musical world can you miss seeing everything you wanted and still walk away feeling like it couldn’t have been otherwise?