Frightening the hipsters ... Pusher T and Malice of Clipse
Anyone who has ever been unfortunate enough to attend Mardi Gras in New Orleans will have an idea of what the centre of Austin has been reduced to as SXSW hits its climactic weekend.
The epicentre of the chaos is 6th Street, the main drag for music venues, which has been cordoned off both to stop cars from passing through and to create the impression that the town is an inebriate's playpen where whooping, staggering, and the dropping of sauerkraut (an accompaniment to the popular local bratwurst) is encouraged all day and night. Throw in the hottest March weather ever, the prospect St Patrick's Day celebrations, and you've got a recipe for a street scene Hogarth would have trouble getting down on paper.
Fortunately for everyone concerned, the quality - and sheer variety - of music on offer has grown in tandem with the blood alcohol level. On Friday I saw 10 different acts, from the frazzled psychedelia of Yeasayer to the stripped-down punk of No Age to the bizarre, yet compelling, arthouse bashment of Telepathe, and still the abiding feeling was regret at having missed too much. I managed not to see MGMT (again), Lykke Li (who's been getting great reviews), the Dodos (ditto, though I did hear a bit of them through an open doorway) and the Cool Kids.
I finished the night watching Clipse, the crack-rapping Thornton brothers from Virginia, part of a large roster of hip-hop acts playing SXSW, perhaps the highlight of which is a show from Ice Cube on Saturday (or, if you're so inclined, a set by Pete Rock at the remote Lady Bird Lake stage).
While there's a lot of hip-hop music in Austin, there's not that big a hip-hop crowd and by the time Clipse came on stage at 1.15am they were playing to a smaller audience than the one which had previously lolloped along to the cheery hip-pop of Kid Sister (think MIA without any edge whatsoever). With most of the remaining spectators to be bracketed under the label "hipster", it put the hardcore observations of Pusher T and Malice into an odd context, making the brothers more of a gangster circus exhibit than they might have wished.
By way of an example, Malice likes to pull an expression, which he presumably rehearses in the mirror, probably best described as the "stare of a cold-blooded killer caught in the act and contemplating doing it all again". This might be intended to convey the stark, ruthless nature of life on the streets of Virginia Beach but in Emo's, Austin, at 20 minutes to kicking-out time, his snarl simply occasions a rash of camera flashes.
• Click here for the rest of our music coverage at South by Southwest
