There’s a certain point during a live show-when the bassist drops his instrument on the stage in front of you, falls down in his beer and starts yelling-when you know whether or not you were made for rock music. It is three hours later, when some dick from SPIN magazine with a terrible beard and a vintage blazer is joking over drinks with a label guy about some band “one part Interpol, two parts Neutral Milk Hotel, with the mass appeal of the Stones,” that you wonder if rock music was made for you.
Hunter S. Thompson once called the music business “a cruel and shallow money trench, a long plastic hallway where thieves and pimps run free and good men die like dogs. There’s also a negative side.” Believing this to be not only true, but worthy of reporting, The Voice (and WGTB Georgetown Radio, where I am a music director) sent me to New York City with a pass for the College Music Journalism Music Marathon, a four-day event with 1000 bands, panels for the career-motivated and thousands of music scene hangers-on. It was time to get past the strange haircuts and find out what made indie music, well, independent. Or music, for that matter.
Skipping day one with the firm conviction that nothing ever happens on day one, I boarded the Chinatown bus on Thursday, hoping to reach New York in time to pick up my concert pass. Naturally, we arrived in the city after the deadline. With no shows that night, my cohorts and I went to find our lodgings. When college kids and dirt poor musicians converge on the already crowded island of Manhattan, cheap housing runs out. A last minute Craigslist.org search led us to an informal hostel (read: tenement) run from an underutilized Objectivist theatre. Cheap, clean and based on Ayn Rand, it seemed fine, if small and a bit egotistical.
We spent the concert-less night traipsing about the Lower East Side with a friend and a former Voice staffer, who is now a freelance writer-that is to say, a waitress. She shed some light on the music-centric scenester’s inevitable ritual of post-graduate migration to Brooklyn to drink, attend friends’ shows, and drop names-she told us she knew a guy from Detachment Kit. In a dive bar modeled after a Midwestern rec room, I met people from across the nation uniformly clad in tight jeans and filth, glorying in $2 beer and high-rent poverty. Staying in Iowa would have been cheaper and cleaner, but apparently they had to follow the scene.
The next day I slept through panels like “Aestheticizing Noise” and “From Corner Bar to Concert Hall.” I arrived at Lincoln Center to pick up my credentials and glimpsed the future: college radio nerds, clean cut or otherwise, sporting band t-shirts and buttons, while marveling at their free CMJ gift bags and the bands. These kids will form the next wave of the exodus to Williamsburg, joining the label reps, music journalists/bloggers and most importantly, the upstart musicians.
Bands were playing sets in a sunny, open promenade that afternoon-whither the smoky, cramped stages that are indie music’s habitat? I saw Why?, a rock band founded by the strangely small Yoni Wolf who fronts the underground hip-hip group cLOUDEAD. Their music was fascinating-rocky, eccentric stuff with plaintive lyrics. The mostly white audience ignored much of the set to greet George Clinton, stumbling into the crowd dressed in a powder blue jumpsuit. I stopped Yoni a day later on the street and told him I liked the set; he grabbed my shoulder and stared at me intensely before saying thanks.
Later, I crashed a party hosted by a music promotion agency (the people who send out discs to radio stations and offer concert tickets as modern day payola for spins), complete with a surly band who didn’t make it into the CMJ line-up, sitting in the corner drinking and chain-smoking while college kids got drunk at four in the afternoon. Even college radio, that once-bastion of independent music, had gone corporate. Clear Channel, the corporate scapegoat of all that’s wrong with radio, had a booth in Lincoln Center.
The highlight of the weekend would be the Sub Pop showcase: A seven-band concert put on by Nirvana’s legendary label, culminating in the much-hyped (and very worthy) Wolf Parade. Having missed other big shows by coming too late, we arrived at 5:00, two hours before the first act. During the nine hours we spent at the club, we met the bouncers and the bands. A 50-year-old family friend of Canadian folkster Chad Van Gaalen told me that Chad was “one fucking cool dude, all about the music.” My breaks from the noise led me outside, where I met a drug dealer who was doing brisk business up and down the entry line with a wide variety of narcotics and hallucinogens. He amicably explained that this demographic was good for business. I didn’t take him up on the offered discount for journalists.
Wolf Parade took the stage inebriated and late but delivered a tremendous set, despite their bassist’s frequent pauses to complain of a ghost in the room and the guitar player’s attempts to rename the band mid-performance. The Constantines followed, and despite certain audience members totally ignoring one of the greatest live shows in rock (to see The Constantines play is to be thoroughly beaten by pure machismo), it was great.
I still didn’t have any insight into the music scene afterwards, though, except that it seemed an ever-growing ladder of corruption-or maybe that’s just New York. Many people I met told me South by Southwest, a similar festival held in Austin, Texas, is much nicer. But my hope was restored a little when I saw Scotland Yard Gospel Choir, a little-known band from Chicago. Similar to the Arcade Fire in look and sensibility, but with better vocals and a stronger drummer, they played an incredibly powerful set. “I totally dig your aesthetic,” I told the frontmen afterwards and asked what brought them to CMJ. They were there to get a record contract-and they were still hopeful. Any band that can visit this orgy of corporate independence and keep their hope, well, I wish them luck.
