Dispel your common notions of a major music festival. Imagine not a campground-turned-hipster-commune but rather, a vibrant and urban downtown area, where bar after bar and club after club is issued a full slate of bands for five days of organized chaos.
That’s the scene at Austin’s South by Southwest (SXSW), an omnibus event that plays host not just to musical acts, but film screenings and interactive technology showcases, too. For a “week” (actually, 10 days), the city is taken over, and this year, for the first time, The Daily is joining in on the action. While we’d love to be there for all of it, finals period has other plans. But, we’ll still get there for the music, and that’s perfectly fine by us.
How does SXSW work? It has headliners — among them this year are Duran Duran, Queens of the Stone Age, Wu Tang Clan, Cee Lo Green, Lupe Fiasco, Wiz Khalifa and The Strokes — but unlike, say, Coachella, the flow of the festival is not based around these performances. The sheer volume of acts prevents it. There are thousands. Seriously. It’s entirely possible — in fact, it’s almost certain — that we will skip the majority of the “main” groups. And that’s okay. There’s plenty to take in, and we have a shortlist, at the top of which is…Killer Mike.
My photographer and I, dear friends since our preteen years, have always had an affinity for southern rap. The third and final member of the group shares said interest. Hence, the following conversation:
“Guys, Killer Mike is playing.”
“What?”
“Yup.”
“Dope.”
“We’re going.”
“Yup.”
“Yup.”
Then there’s Danny Brown and Freddie Gibbs, Roc Marciano and Pill. But we’re not confined to rap. We’ll hit the indie circuit. We’ll get to some country. We’ll take all comers. We’ve spent the past two weeks listening to all the mixtapes and albums we can get our hands on, just to prepare.
How are we going to cover this? We’re going to tweet. We’re going to post pictures. We’re going to review as much of the music and the culture as we can. This is not going to be a standard summation of events. We’re looking at this through an almost anthropological lens. Take Hunter S. Thompson off the campaign trail, reduce his talent by about 95 percent and place him in Austin — voila, you have what we’re going for.
But if you hadn’t gathered, there is a problem: we could deploy our entire reporting staff and still not get to every single performance. There’s only so much that we can see. We’re going to have to discriminate. Our inclination is toward the hip-hop scene, but our tastes are widespread and surely, though we combed through the acts, we may very well have missed a supremely talented act or — gasp! — even “the next big thing.” So: get in touch, give us the scoop, let us know whom you want us to cover. We’ll try and make it happen — if, of course, our prior commitments to Killer Mike don’t get in the way.