Pete Townshend News

As South By Southwest's annual gathering of the indie universe kicked into full swing, rock's biggest mainstream magazine ran an online piece painting it as "a festival struggling for authenticity." If you can identify any one of the half-dozen ways that statement is insanely problematic, you can probably imagine what the experience of being there was like.

Mostly, the Rolling Stone story wondered whether the festival was getting too "mainstream" and "corporate," which seems exceedingly naïve — there's no other event in which bands could be more conscious of themselves as products, critics more conscious of themselves as tastemakers, and fans more conscious of themselves as discriminating consumers. If anything, SXSW is indelible proof that accelerated culture has obliterated any meaningful difference between "underground" music and its "popular" antonyms — the blogosphere has dragged all of that into the same mainstream pool of consciousness.

For one week a year, then, Austin essentially becomes that bustling shopping mall Dave Chappelle imagined in one of his early skits, an actual living, breathing manifestation of Internet Culture: Genres clash and blur; legends like Pete Townshend and Iggy Pop brush shoulders with Myspace bands; labels spam critics with showcases; pubs spam everyone with drink offers; music publications throw parties; and struggling independent labels jostle for space with major-label imprints looking to co-opt their hipster credibility. If it sounds exhausting, it is. Standing in the middle of 6th Street's week-long Mardi Gras, hundreds of bands ultimately bleed into an indiscriminate din of snare hits, warbled vocals and white noise.

Like the Internet, SXSW is a venue for free expression without a filter: The bad is ultimately dredged up with the good (and the queen), and more than often, you're struck by how incredibly arbitrary and homogenous music can get on the forward edge of acceleration. But the process of discrimination is what makes this festival fun, and almost everyone gets what they want: Fans can escape into a chaos of music, critics and hipsters; aesthetes get to show off their "social superiority." And for bands, SXSW offers something much more profound — a genuine shot at success and stardom. A few in particular stood out:

AMY WINEHOUSE

Through a toxic cloud of industry chatter, the most prevalent rumor of the week was that Amy Winehouse had broken up with her boyfriend, gone on a bender and would cancel all her appearances. Judging by the music she makes, this seemed perfectly plausible. It was all sham, of course, but it served its purpose. By the time Winehouse — all 90-something pounds of her, jailhouse tatted, impossibly coifed — hit the stage backed by a super-tight rhythm section, her mythology had provided all the context her music needed.

Not since Cat Power's feral days has so much attention been placed on an indie chanteuse's fragile psyche, and as it happens, Marshall and Winehouse have a lot in common. Both make good use of Motown-like revues, have that quintessential soul-diva ability to sashay around with their self-loathing wrapped around their shoulders like a mink coat, and make Lilly Allen look like a spoiled fraud. Where Marshall opts for a breathier, more opaque, melancholic beauty, Winehouse treads the feisty path of a Billy Holiday or Etta James.

But they're both artists fueled by contradiction: However scattered she appears, Winehouse is an incredibly exacting and controlled musician, and however her lyrics glorify excess, there's almost nothing excessive about her songs. She sings with expressive swagger, rarely wastes a melismatic flourish, and her funky instrumental arrangements pop and strut in all the places that songs about addiction, sex, and love should. "They tried to make me go to rehab, I said, no, no, no," she sang. She's 23. By the time she's been through what Marshall's been through, she may be singing a far different tune.

Check Out: "Rehab," "You Know I'm No Good."

___

NEEDLE IN A HAYSTACK: JAPE

Earlier this year, The Raconteurs spiced up their opening sets for Bob Dylan with "Floating" — a jangly piece of Malkmus-style slacker-rock propelled by a simple, psychedelic melody, a bit of noise and a sitar-like guitar riff. At that point, Richie Egan — the Dublin-based guitarist and songwriter responsible for "Floating" — had only posted the song on his Myspace page. "It was a proud moment in Dublin," he told AP after his set. "It's nice to be able to say, 'Hey, that's Jack White, and I wrote that song.'" He laughed. "I tried to tell as many people about that as possible." He should have: "Floating" shows off some genuine rock savvy, and the event could have conceivably been a nice bit of publicity. Unfortunately, Jape — the blistering electro-rock duo spearheaded by Egan — still doesn't have a publicist, label or distribution in the United States.

On Friday, they appeared at B.D. Reilly's Pub as part of a small Irish music showcase funded by IMFO, Ireland's equivalent of an organization like ASCAP. Less than 50 people attended, and Egan broke his sampler midway through one of their best songs (they just started it again). Somehow, the band still made a rock concert out of their modest surroundings and emerged as the festival's undiscovered gem, striking an infectious balance between churning noise pop and throbbing electronic dance music. While lyrics turned on the odd churlish couplet, their music thrives on tension: Shooting a writhing guitar line through a bed of loops and samples, set-stealer "I Was a Man" opened a cleverly glitchy dance bridge into a martial stomp. Ironically, murmurs after the show suggested that Egan might ink a deal with V2's European operation, the same label which, before its U.S. arm folded a few months ago, boasted The White Stripes and The Raconteurs. Maybe there's room for him on White's Third Man imprint in the States.

Check Out: "Floating", "I Was A Man" (http://www.myspace.com/richiejape)

___

MARNIE MELTS MINDS

There are a handful of artists you could call symbolic of this festival, but only Marnie Stern's music — a tangled orgy of indie-rock idioms, shredded solos, elfin chants and jagged rhythms — could almost capture what it sounded like. That's really something. Considering that her touted debut album, "In Advance of the Broken Arm," can often listen like six disparate indie-acts playing at once, it was amazing to find her taking the stage solo. But the pint-sized Stern looked every bit the part of the 21st century guitar heroine The New York Times recently cast her as: an iPod loaded with power chords and drum samples clipped casually to her waist, her fingers rushing blindingly up and down her fretboard, tapping out solos with both hands like she was attacking a percussion instrument.

Stern's music thrives on energy and disorder, and it cuts an impressively wide swath. Punk, prog, metal, and experimental ideas all figured; at one point she even proffered a John Cage-influenced sound poem. It's every bit as fun to let the chaos of her sound wash over you as it is to try to locate the forms it submerges. But there is order here: Those overdubbed power chords gave her scrambled fret-work shape and color, and her pixieish vocals — vaguely following the melodic movement of the guitar — lend another captivating level of texture and mystery to the music.

There's this avant-garde idea in hipster circles that a real transformative musical experience has to be just a bit difficult — it has to require something of the listener as well as the performer. It's a ridiculously pretentious notion, and most of the time it's just used to maintain a kind of elitist control. But like fellow virtuoso Joanna Newsom, Stern lends a degree of credence to the argument. Though her music isn't "easy" (in fact, it can be jarring), there's a sense of joy and beauty here that far outweighs the inconvenience of actually having to listen. The rewards are deep and lasting.

Check out: "Vibrational March", "Logical Volume" (from "In Advance of the Broken Arm")

___

HYPERBOLE SESSION: KINGS OF LEON

If Caleb Folowill's band is as big in England as he says they are in "Fans" ("those rainy days ain't so bad where you're the kings," he sings in the new tune), that makes sense. The UK loves its Americana, and The Kings of Leon may be the last great genetically purebred American rock 'n' roll band. In fact, they embrace all of rock's tropes and clichés so excitedly — with such brash narcissism, such a fantastic lack of irony — it's amazing they're not British themselves.

But that's kind the point. Three sons and one nephew of a traveling Evangelical minister who dress like models and play music for chair-shattering roadhouse brawls, this band is living a stylized rock fantasy that indie-rock's failed notions of "authenticity" have almost destroyed. They have absolutely no ambitions beyond being the biggest rock band they can be, and that's precisely what makes them great: With all their pretensions worn proudly on the sleeve, there's little left in the music. Fueled by brawny guitar riffs, a cigarette-scorched yelp and some stonesy swagger, their songs are almost always about fighting, sex, cars, Jesus, or women. Most of them are simply conceived, and they're all played with brutal confidence. They even pull off saying ridiculous things like "go guitar!" before their solos, which is truly a lost art. However vulnerable they were to skepticism, on Saturday the Kings wielded their music like a weapon.

The new tunes crammed into their forty-five minute set bore traces of a stadium tour with U2: a new sense of sound and space, Edge-y guitar noise, and even a couple of genuinely ambitious choruses. While set-opener "Black Thumbnail" disguised those new traits within a familiarly brash guitar stomp, "McFearless" employed them all at once. All the debuted material, however, pointed toward a record striving for a new level of anthemic drama, and mostly achieving it. Abandon all pretense here and let yourself love this band. They rock incredibly hard.

Check out: "Four Kicks" (from "Aha Shake Heartbreak"), "Black Thumbnail" (from the forthcoming "Because of the Times"), "Wicker Chair" (from the "Holy Roller Novocaine" EP).

___

OUT-POPPING IGGY: GIRL TALK

By 1:30, Gregg Gillis (aka Girl Talk) is already shirtless onstage at Elysium. He's also sweating profusely, swilling beers, and joyously hugging any number of the audience members who stormed the stage 15 minutes into his set — hipsters who've now formed a writhing circle around him, tousling his hair, dancing psychotically and pumping their fists. Periodically, a few of them will leap off the stage and crowd surf. Basically, the place is freaking out.

It's a weird sight, given that Gillis — a brilliant sampler who will splice at least a dozen disparate elements of hit radio singles into mercilessly paced meta-pop songs-is just jumping in place and tapping keys on his laptop. But this is the quintessential SXSW set: You couldn't find an artist who's more representational of the iPod generation that drives this festival, a better example of postmodern art and how it challenges preconceived notions of what a performer can be, or a more concise tutorial in what makes a pop song work. For that matter, it's difficult to think of a better metaphor for the fragmented way in which people listen to music circa 2007.

Since 2002, Girl Talk has released three mash-up albums through Illegal Art, a defiantly anti-copyright collective with vague ties to sampling pioneers Negativland. Capping a week built on decisions, his set takes consumer anxiety entirely out of the equation: A sped-up version of "The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down" is thrown over a crunked-out hip-hop beat.

Justin Timberlake's "SexyBack" is fed into Nirvana's "Lithium." Carry on My Wayward Son is stitched absurdly into "Whoomp There It Is," while Biggie's "Juicy" finds an unlikely home inside Elton John's "Tiny Dancer." In the meantime, Gillis wove in just about every call and response device in the pop catalogue.

You'd think all this slicing and dicing would make top 40 radio seem irretrievably flimsy and commercial. Instead, the mash-ups tend to unearth pop music's basic innocence. By stripping his sources of their cultural and critical baggage, Girl Talk managed to point out a truth that SXSW reveals on its own terms: In pop music, notions of "high" and "low" don't hold up under close scrutiny.