This is the sixth year rock nyc has not been involved at all and in the slightest with Austin’s SXSW, except to sneer at it from a great distance, and for a small but somewhat serious music website what does it say about us, that we aren’t there?
1. We have no money to get there.
2. We have no interest in going there.
But, and most importantly,
3. We are writers first and as such we don’t handle social settings very well because if we did we wouldn’t be writing all the time we would be doing that other thing, you know, speaking or something.
But we aren’t, at parties we’re in the kitchen sucking up the backshie booze and reading our Kindles and updating our Facebook status’s desperately: “All tomorrows parties because God knows tonight’s one sucks”
And at Austin SXSW we are fighting with the doorman, getting ignored by hipster girls in tights and denim jackets, gazing listlessly at the hottest new thing since Savages and indeed, aren’t even there at all.
This year, greased with tragedy and murmurings about how the infrastructure can’t sustain the scene, the cool writers of a new generation are feeling the streets of Austin and we in New York merrily freeze, the SXSW finally appears to be a music scene without a reason to exist anymore.
But they don’t feel like me, they feel like they crossover and back while as I remain static as a writer: writing is what I want to do and everything else is secondary. But writing is like a stepping stone for today’s media , it doesn’t feel like what it is: an end in itself for the shy, introverted nerdy music fanatic in all of us. In me. A million miles from Austin SXSW
