here are bands that play the South By Southwest Music Conference - skinny, unwashed four-pieces who soullessly schlep gear from showcase to showcase - and then there are bands that play South By Southwest, starry-eyed dreamers who attack any stage with reckless abandon in hope of landing that big record deal that will make them unspeakably rich. Paramore is not one of those bands. Neither are N.E.R.D. or Britney Spears (she’s not even a band, but we digress), although on one glorious night in Austin, two-thirds of them sort of were.
Confused? Welcome to Friday at South By Southwest, a day that featured a pair of big-name headliners, one-supersized rumor and a whole lot of not making sense. (Don’t worry, we’re here to sort everything out.)
First and foremost, pop-punk heroes Paramore, who sat down with MTV News earlier in the day to let fans know they’re not breaking up, headlined one of the most un-SXSW events of the entire week: a multi-band pileup for the MySpace generation, sponsored by spooky-ooky retailer Hot Topic, packed with local kids who wouldn’t know a SXSW badge from a dial-up Internet connection.
Held on the outskirts of town at hangar-esque rock club La Zona Rosa, this was to be the group’s first performance since they canceled a string of European dates to work out some rather pesky (and nefarious sounding) “internal issues,” and clearly, the band were treating it as a rather huge coming-out party.
“I know there’s been a lot of craziness going on, and you’ve probably all heard about it,” frontwoman/firecracker Hayley Williams told the crowd, pausing to allow appropriate time for the squeals to pass. “We all just wanted you to know that music is the one thing we love, and no matter what you’ve heard, we won’t stop doing it.”
And then they got down to doing just that, ripping through a set full of their hits (”Misery Business,” “Crushcrushcrush”) and older (at least for them) songs, like “Woah” and “Emergency,” from their 2005 debut, All We Know Is Falling. Through it all, Williams - who, according to label reps, has been battling vocal strain for awhile now - belted out as best as she could, and when her voice faltered, she simply thrust the microphone into the crowd, who were more than willing to do the work for her. Guitarist Josh Farro and bassist Jeremy Davis flanked her, busting out chords and pulling out some truly Trohman/Wentz-worthy onstage acrobatics. Oh, and drummer Zac Farro totally barfed up some Mexican food he had eaten for dinner.
Truly, Paramore were giving it their all - and then some more. And at the end of the set, the band joined hands and bowed in unison as their fans held up a countless array of hand-held devices. Paramore left the stage amid a blizzard of cell-phone camera flashes, and their message was clear: We’re a band, we’re united, we’re not going anywhere. It was the kind of context you rarely get from a SXSW show, and though Paramore aren’t your typical SXSW band (they’ve sold more records than 14 Vampire Weekends, 100 Times New Vikings and 2,000 Lightspeed Champions combined) - it’s something we could get used to seeing more often ’round these parts.
Meanwhile, as Paramore were exiting the stage, something potentially huge was bubbling up across town: namely, rumors that Britney Spears would be making an SXSW appearance, performing with Pharrell Williams and N.E.R.D. during their late-night set at Stubb’s. It seemed improbable, but hey, stranger things have happened (though not many) and within hours, it had been texted from handheld to handheld with such veracity that it had seemingly become fact.
Of course, it never happened (Britney at SXSW? Come on!) and, to be quite honest, Pharrell didn’t need her anyway. The line to get into Stubb’s stretched for miles up Red River Street, and when Skateboard P and his N.E.R.D. cohorts finally took the stage, all the struggle was worth it. With a pair of funky drummers, a guitarist, bassist, keyboardist and sampler, N.E.R.D. played a rock-star set that mixed nearly punk thrash with funk keyboards, outer space effects, acid-rock guitar and hip-hop swagger.
Williams commanded the stage, bounding back and forth during hard funk jams on “Brain” and “Rock Star,” which found the stage filled with nearly two dozen posse members, waving red flags, parading their Mohawks and snapping photos of the thousands of fans in the crowd bouncing up and down in unison. Williams has clearly spent time in a mosh pit - as evidenced by his scissor-kicking, arm-swinging dance moves - but as loose as he got at the start of “Lapdance,” the man is a meticulous professional and when the instrumentation got a bit sloppy, he made the band start over.
By the time the set ended with a punk-funk take on “She Wants to Move” (which slipped into Queen’s “Another One Bites the Dust” for a few bars), Williams had proven to the crowd that while his genius might be in the studio, his heart is on the stage, where he breathes new life into his creations. And you thought Britney had a Jeckyl and Hyde complex …
Tags: , beat street, hip hop, mosh, Music, music news, nerd, news, pharrell, Pharrell Moshes It Up With N.E.R.D., r and b, techno
