Texas hasn’t gotten its due as a major piece in the complex puzzle of American art. We’re here to rectify that. Every three weeks, H. Drew Blackburn will conduct a thoroughly scientific analysis of the 254 integral (one for every county) books, movies, tv shows, albums, podcasts, songs, and magazine articles — you name it — that best exemplify the Texas spirit. These texts, products of immense talent, dig into the marrow of our being. When it’s all said and done and we’ve built The Texas Voyager collection, we’ll (figuratively) head to the Johnson Space Center in Houston and shoot it beyond the atmosphere, into the cosmos. A wise person once posed the question: “What if the aliens are hot?” Hold onto that hope — this is our chance to impress ‘em.
“South By Southwest was a music festival!?”
That’s what one of my Gen-Z co-workers said when she heard me and another co-worker reminiscing about all the shows (and cruel hangovers) we caught during the festival back in our 20s. They were everywhere. In downtown Austin, out on the Drag, on the eastside. I’ve even found myself at a show hosted at a mansion on the Colorado River 30 miles northwest of Sixth Street. At 33, my body occasionally tells me it’s in a transitional phase, between young and old. But hearing someone act shocked that the main draw for SXSW was once music makes me feel like I’ve already earned the senior discount at Denny’s.
In Gen-Z’s defense, music is definitely not the focus of SXSW anymore, and hasn’t been for a while. This has led a lot of people to declare the festival dead or over, but this is cyclical. Back in 2011, an article in TechCrunch opined whether calling SXSW passé was itself passé. The festival’s not what it used to be, but it’s a cultural force, and as far as institutions in Texas go, its gravity can’t be ignored.
SXSW was founded by Roland Swenson, Louis Jay Meyers, Louis Black, and Nick Barbaro in 1987 as a music and media conference and had roughly 700 attendees that year. By 1994, the festival added interactive and film and had 4,550 total registrants. In 2018, attendance grew to 308,970.
“South By took off in part because the New Music Seminar up in New York was a headache,” said Alan Berg, founder of the Arts+Labor, a creative video production agency. Berg is president of the board of directors for the Society for the Preservation of Texas Music. “You’re trying to get around this giant city, you can’t park to unload your gear,” Berg told The Barbed Wire “It’s expensive to get there. It’s expensive to stay there, and nobody’s having any fun.”
The main draw for Austin was that in the ‘80s it was small and, during the University of Texas’ spring break, the city would be more empty than usual during one of the few times of the year when the weather is actually perfect. “That’s how they got the clubs to sign on. They said, ‘We’re gonna put people in here when the students are out of town,’” Berg said.
Berg went to the first SXSW in ‘87, and thought it was just a cool event to catch some bands. In ‘94 though, he saw a seismic shift. “That was a watershed year. They brought Johnny Cash in as a keynote speaker and sort of ratcheted it up a level,” he said. “Here’s this major star that everybody knew and there’s sort of a ripple effect from that.”
Those early days were mostly about music discovery and in some ways catered to the music industry’s apparatus. There’s a laundry list of artists who caught a big break at the festival — Odd Future, John Mayer, The White Stripes, Spoon, and Amy Winehouse are a few. Adele played to an empty room.
“What I’ve always liked was this exciting feeling that you’re seeing (what’s) next before anybody else,” Berg said. “You would hear about these buzz bands, so then you’d try to track them down and then a year or two later — they’re famous.” In ‘96, one of the festival programmers gave Berg warning about an act he needed to see at Stubbs, which ended up being The Fugees. “I just remember standing there and I’m like this far from Lauryn Hill,” Berg said. There were those moments where you would “get chills.” Even more chilling — I bet Lauryn Hill was actually on time.
The insatiable desire to catch what’s next has always been a staple of the SXSW experience, but for a different generation, as the festival grew out of the clout built in the ‘90s by Gen X, emerged another draw. With heavy presence by sponsors came a level of extravagance.
For millennials, SXSW was an adventure in finding the best parties with free stuff. Free food. Free booze. Free sneakers. Free music by superstars. In 2011 Kanye West performed at an abandoned power plant. In 2014 Lady Gaga took the stage at Stubbs. However, the one party above them all, the one millennials will tell their grandchildren about while sitting in a rocking chair about if we ever get around to having kids, is The Fader Fort. “That was the best party you needed to be at,” Jose Gutierrez, who formerly operated and co-founded the Dirty Team and When Where What party guide Instagram accounts, told The Barbed Wire. “It was a fucking adult playground.”
There were Levis and Ray Bans activations, endless Budweiser tall boys, Dell’s on site for journalists who need to file their stories (props) and not to mention the performances — Kendrick Lamar, Cardi B, Santigold, T-Pain, The Internet, and many more. It was the party everybody wanted to go to where you could catch what’s next and what’s now. “As you can imagine, as 20-something bros, we all had jobs, but SXSW was our escape from reality,” Gutierrez said.
In 2015, after scoring one of those coveted Fader Fort invites, I caught BadBadNotGood do a set with Ghostface Killah along with a raucous performance that saw Mike Will Made-It bring out Rae Sremmurd, Future, RiFF RAFF and Miley Cyrus. That year I also hurriedly traversed the streets of downtown Austin at midnight so I could witness Courtney Barnett and Kaytranada — two musicians whose music couldn’t be further apart. That was the allure — the diversity of music you could see, acts big and small, who grew up in Australia to Montreal to Atlanta and everywhere in between. I’ll miss the rush of bouncing from bar to bar, venue to venue, but those days, or at least that version of the festival, are long gone.
People have been rendering SXSW dead for years now. Some banged the gavel thanks to the huge corporate presences, like when Doritos built a massive vending machine as a venue (a stage Gaga also took). Obviously, the COVID-19 pandemic threw its status into disarray. You would have every right to be skeptical of the festival for selling a majority stake to Penske Media. And last year, the festival made the biggest loser move in its history when it took a sponsorship from the U.S. Army.
“To me, South By started losing its cool factor when interactive became this giant and sort of subsumed music and film,” Berg says. “I get nervous about South By because I want it to survive. I believe it’s one of the most important things that’s happened in Austin in my lifetime. It coincided with this sleepy little town becoming big.”
There is hope yet. I’ve been noticing a trend here, and Berg, a former award-winning journalist and lecturer at UT, has too.
In a Substack he published last year holding the festival’s feet to the fire for its military sponsorship, cozying up to A.I., and “tech folks drop(ing) in from a parallel planet filled with frothy talk and trendy vests, tolerated because they bring their cheddar,” he ended on a positive note saying, “film in particular felt like a home run. The venues were packed, the stars turned out, the studios staged spectacles.”
There’s probably no better movie-going experience than watching a soon-to-be classic at the Paramount Theater at SXSW, with its stars in their seats among you, the audience whooping and hollering like they’re at the Apollo.
I remember seeing “Bottoms” premiere in 2023 and leaving the venue in a bit of disarray, knowing I just watched the next classic teen sex comedy, the first great one since “Superbad.”
Friday night, as soon as I filed my first draft for this column, I raced over to the Paramount and saw the premiere for Seth Rogen’s “The Studio,” which had such an electric response that some of the dialogue was drowned out by laughter and applause. Right after, I saw “Together,” starring the husband-and-wife duo Allison Brie and Dave Franco. The film is best described as a relationship-horror-comedy about how difficult it is to truly give yourself to another person. Just as I did with “Bottoms” a few years back, I got to watch one of those films that’s going to dominate the summer and stay on our minds for years, maybe even decades, to come.
There’s an energy in the building during the screenings at SXSW that’s tethered to the aura that this festival is a party. That exciting feeling that you’re seeing what’s next before anybody else is still there, just in another form. As Nicole Kidman once said, “we come to this place… for magic.” Just like the city, the festival is changing. It sure ain’t dead yet.
