Bang to Hype

She suggests that musicians forgo big advances for free agency, meaning a band would no longer sign to a label for six albums (OK, maybe two before you're dropped). She reminds that payola is alive and well at your local radio station. She talks eloquently about how the music business has a 97 percent rate of failure. She's passionate, open and able to look like she's out not for herself, but for the kid and comer just about to make it. Problem is, she's a millionaire wanting to re-sign to yet another major label once she gets out of her deal with Vivendi, which renders her a moot point. The real rebel--a Jenny Toomey, say, who heads up the Future of Music Coalition and both performed and spoke at SXSW--would do it all herself, without the funding of the "gangsters" of whom Love so derisively (or facetiously?) spoke.

There was one small nugget of brand-new info to be gleaned from Love's speech: She noted, almost off-handedly, that Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban once offered to purchase Napster, which Cuban confirmed in an e-mail Monday. "I told them if they did the deal they ended up with, it was like doing a deal with the devil and they would never recover, which they haven't and won't," he wrote. "I also told them I would move it off-shore, where there is no DMCA," he added, referring to the controversial Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which makes it a crime to circumvent technologies that protect copyrighted material. Had Cuban been successful in his bid, it likely would have reshaped the entire legal landscape. But the file-sharing system, at the center of so much discussion and litigation, has been rendered moot, buried by a long line of successors and so much paperwork in federal court.

But no one attends South by Southwest's music fest to be lectured to or to learn; that's the province of its kid-sister film festival, held just before the rock-and-roll zombies head to town. (You can tell the film fest's over when the Hugo Boss leather jackets and Prada shoes give way to torn tees and Doc Martens.) They come instead to catch what Robertson called "the music fever"; they drive to Texas to play short showcases, to listen to bands from Japan and Sweden and Germany, to bask in the buzz and perhaps sneak away with a fistful of discs from bands heretofore unknown outside Aliceville, Alabama, or Dayton, Ohio, or Vienna, Austria. They come to discover the secrets and speak the secret language ("They're like Neu crossed with Wilco if they were fronted by Brian Eno or Neil Finn"), to one-up each other ("Dude, I just saw the best Japanese stoner-rock-free-jazz-Kraut-rock-hip-hop band, like, ever!") and make sure they don't miss The Best Band to Ever Play South by Southwest (that would have been Pleasant Grove...or the Eels...or the Gaza Strippers...or...). Like Robertson said, it's about finding that one thing that turns a flirtation into an obsession; on the drive back from Austin, I realized I'd found mine, Dan Bryk.

Unlike Bryk, Norah Jones--Dallas-raised, New York City-based--came to Austin the possessor of the mighty buzz; Rolling Stone and Entertainment Weekly had already proclaimed her one to watch in 2002, and her Blue Note debut, Come Away With Me, has been the top-selling album at Austin's beloved Waterloo Records for the last two weeks. Her trip to Austin wasn't to be wasted: During the span of three days, she performed a handful of times--an exhausting pace, one likely to reduce the buzz to a withering blur. She played a Blue Note party at Stubb's, a Friday-afternoon gig at a Starbucks across the street from the University of Texas campus, a Saturday-afternoon in-store at Waterloo, an in-studio at KGSR-FM and her Thursday-night showcase at The Clay Pit. She even gigged in the Four Seasons bar at 8:30 a.m. on Thursday--where "she knocked my dick in the dirt," said one wary Texas journalist, his face cracked in half by a giant grin. Her Clay Pit gig was a major miscalculation on the part of SXSW organizers: Not only do you not put a hot artist in a small room, thus stranding dozens of irate badge-wearers out in the humid night, but it's also kind of, well, offensive to stick the offspring of Ravi Shankar in an Indian restaurant.