creatively exploiting the Austin scene: a review of "Echotone" (pt. 2)

[This is the second part of my review of the documentary "Echotone" (2010, dir. Nathan Christ).  For the first part, go here.]

Technically, no one in Echotone ever says the phrase “creative class.”  However, the filmmaker’s marketing materials invoke it regularly, starting with the DVD’s back-cover description: “Echotone is a cultural portrait of the modern American city examined through the lyrics and lens of its creative class.”

Of course, the creative class doesn’t just refers to the workforce of artists, musicians and other cultural/knowledge producers.  It’s also the title of the economic development paradigm advanced by Richard Florida that counsels cities, states, and other growth-promoting entities to build the physical, organizational and amenity infrastructures needed by this ascendant post-industrial class.  Florida gave a lecture as part of the city’s South By Southwest Arts & Music Festival back in 2003; more generally, he has long cited SXSW as the kind of synergistic, value-creating development that can arise when cities embrace and promote their creative advantages.

I have no idea how familiar the filmmakers are with Florida’s ideas, but certainly their attitude toward SXSW indicates they would take issue with his celebration of what by now is literally a block-busting event in Austin.  Echotone presents SXSW as a massive headache for most Austin bands, who regularly find themselves excluded from the official events and have to scramble together unofficial, off-site events in order to catch the attention from the thousands of attendees.  If the distaste expressed by local musicians and promoters isn’t clear enough, the film includes a surreal on-the-street segment at a recent SXSW that gives the impression of a garish college spring break event set up by music merchandisers.  Here then is another unanticipated hazard of Austin’s prosperity — the mega-event equivalent to the high-rise condominium construction on Congress Avenue. 

Echotone thus emphasizes the conflict of interests between local bands and SXSW, as at least an implicit rebuke to the coincidence of interests that Richard Florida or other economic development planners would expect.  Surprisingly, no one offers the third view: that Austin musicians aren’t either (or only) the beneficiaries or victims of creative-city development, but actually (or also) comprise the very aesthetic landscape sought out by creative-economy employers, real estate investors, gentrifiers, Starbucks, Urban Outfitters, and so on.  To be fair to Florida, his writings signal he’d anticipate anticipate this kind of ecological dynamic of creative-city development.  However, his work is generally so instrumental and growth-minded in mindset, he’d likely describe this pattern as a good thing, a virtuous circle.

Elsewhere, Echotone shows the political efforts by local musician Troy Dillinger and other music-scene advocates to push back against the noise and nuisance complaints made by a growing number residents.  These advocates find it strategic to embrace Florida’s kind of rhetoric: “Music is economic development and growth,” Dillinger says.  It’s uncertain whether these efforts, which in the film are made by folks in their middle or later age (possibly once their own music careers have slowed down), are shared by the 20-something musicians featured in the documentary.  What is certain, however, is that Echotone’s filmmakers seek to secure the connection between indie rockers and political advocates as a result of their film’s message and (in case the course of action isn’t clear to viewers) the “get involved” agenda presented as the last title of the end credits. 

 

The number of new-economy buzzwords in this statement (at the moment, I couldn’t tell you what “aggregate your audience” means) suggests the differences between the creative-class agendas of Echotone and Richard Florida maybe aren’t that great.  Both seek to arm local musicians with a shot of careerism and a rhetoric of economic productivity to counter residents’ NIMBYism and other threats to the scene.  They also give political urgency to statistics such as the one Echotone reports: 70% of Austin musicians make less than $15,000 a year.

Look, no question it sucks when profit is extracted from musicians by corporate record labels, big festivals, or real estate developers.  (Not that any of those larger entities should be considered secure in the creative economy; what once was a smart investment five years ago is often an inevitable financial morass from today’s perspective.)  But for once, let’s ask ourselves: does urging musicians to treat their art like a business really help a music scene?  In almost the same breath that musicians’ advocates express alarm at the precarious balance that the Austin music maintains, they acknowledge that an economically vibrant scene will attract more musicians to the city — of both the touring and full-time migrant side.  How likely is ratcheting up this creative-economy agglomeration going to benefit any one struggling local band?  Musicians might think about that separately from the question, how likely will ratcheting up this creative-economy agglomeration benefit the scene’s professional services — the city’s music venues, promoters, graphic designers, lawyers, landlords, etc.  (Just because many musicians have a foot in both camps doesn’t make it any less of a contradictory position to be in.)  If we consider the latter question a little more carefully, then maybe the imperialism that SXSW exerts over the scene will start to appear a little overstated.

Here’s a timely thought.  Want to help the 70% of musicians who make less than $15,000 a year, in Austin and no doubt many other places?  Then go occupy Wall Street and join the fight against broader socioeconomic inequality and the weakening of the social safety net. 

The point is that Austin musicians’ vulnerability isn’t fundamentally a consequence of their occupation; to believe so only naturalizes the neoliberal ethos that people are essentially defined by their contributions to the labor market.  (This is why the so-called dilemma between a day job and full-time devotion to one’s art, as depicted in Echotone and so many other creative-class manifestos, has always struck me as problematic.)  However, musicians’ vulnerability is, among other things, a consequence of their locality — specifically, of living and making music in an urban economy heated by creative activity, population growth, and urban development.  A city like Austin should make evident that local music is a force for “competitive” urban advantage and broader uneven geographic development.  These are political economic games that the creative class didn’t create, and that they can’t mitigate if they choose to play them.

It might seem a strange argument for a blog about musical urbanism to make, but the problems represented in and by Echotone suggest maybe we should rethink the “natural” relationship between musical activity and places.  Particularly if (as I discussed in pt. 1 of this review) the relationship is an aesthetic one filtered through indie-rock solipsism, with no genuine participation in the collective practice of a local style — maybe the musician’s creative relationship to place is primarily one for the extraction of inspirational inputs, analogous to a sampled found sound, the profits of which can follow the musician should they ever leave for another creative hotspot.  Treating music like a business doesn’t necessarily soften or mitigate this symbolic exploitation of place; it doesn’t necessarily make the city more livable for musicians either.  

losing Austin's weirdness: a review of "Echotone" (pt. 1)

 

A 2010 documentary that just graduated from the film festival circuit to DVD, Echotone captures the Austin music scene at a moment of transition.  The film is a pleasure to watch and listen to, with great photography, fantastic sound (plus great sound editing, not something I usually notice), and an effective yet easy-going narrative style mercifully free of expert talking-head interviews and other clunky conventions of the rockumentary.

Analytically, however, the film is a bit of a muddle.  From a distance, its three themes are unassailable.  First, Austin has a lot of good bands currently.  Second, Austin is, as the city advertises, the “live music capital of the world.”  (Well, I suppose someone could assail that, but why bother? Austin has more good live music in a week than you or I could see in a year.) Third, Austin’s music scene needs protection from the rising costs of living, incompatible zoning, and residential complaints associated with the city’s prosperity over the last couple of decades. 

Echotone aims to document the overlap of these three themes: i.e., Austin’s good new bands are part of the live music scene that deserves protection.  But is that really the case?  The problem comes with the two concepts that the film uses, both on screen and in its marketing materials, to make its argument: indie rock and the creative class.  I'll address the latter in my next post; here, I focus on the Echotone's depiction of Austin's indie-rock bands.

An opening montage of Janis Joplin, Willie Nelson and Stevie Ray Vaughan suggests the direct line of descent from these Austin legends to the current groups featured in Echotone.  But Joe Lewis, frontman of soul revivalists Black Joe Lewis & the Honeybears, makes a crucial observation: “There’s not even that many roots bands around anymore, though. Indie rock took over, man — college kids.”  In fact, Lewis’s band provides the only exception to the film’s predominant focus on Austin’s current crop of indie rock bands.  Viewers looking for the latest blues guitar hero or honky tonk sensation will likely come away disappointed.

Furthermore, the ways Lewis is shown making his music — operating out of an established pop-music genre, bandleading a large number of musicians, working toward a record deal, submitting to professional direction in a promotional photoshoot — is held up as obsolete in contrast to the methods used by indie rock groups, like making recording studios out of bedrooms and vacant buildings, incorporating untraditional sound media, and handpainting their CD covers.

(The racial correlate here is awkward, since Lewis seems to be the only person of color in the film’s primary cast.)

Not to put too fine a distinction on this, but Lewis’s soul revivalism can be thought to fit into Austin’s famed roots music tradition, at least insofar as both sustain live music scenes characterized by established genres and repertoires of classic songs that musicians seek to master in order to play with each other.  Stylistic innovation is respected but not a primary concern; virtuosity generally comes from individual mastery, not rejection, of musical conventions.  As Howard Becker (writing about jazz musicians), David Grazian (writing about Chicago blues clubs) and Richard Lloyd (writing about Nashville songwriters) have shown, scenes like Austin’s roots tradition involve the collective, sociable interaction of musicians — in rehearsal, on stage, having a drink or sharing a joint afterwards, exchanging songs, and via the revolving door of membership (often just play-for-hire) in multiple bands.  Through such quintessentially social activities, local styles and idioms develop, circulate among a scene, and are learned by new generations of musicians.

Possibly, with its emphasis on individual expression and continual innovation, rock music stands apart from this social practice of creativity.  And possibly indie rock (in the broadest sense, including electronic music, folk-rock, etc.) most embodies these modernist aesthetics of rock.  But Austin’s indie rock bands are a notable exception, at least until recently.  I’m thinking of the Reivers covering Willie Nelson’s “Blue Eyes Crying in the Rain” on their 1985 debut album, or Kathy McCarty recording an album of songs local iconoclast Daniel Johnston.  Historically, Austin’s independent rock groups embraced the city’s roots heritage, since it’s the musical source of the city’s cherished ethos, Keep Austin Weird, as a glance at any picture of Willie Nelson will attest.

Echotone has lots of on-stage footage by the new crop of indie rock groups, but more symbolic are its images of these bands’ private settings and mental spaces.  A memorable scene features the group Belaire playing keyboards in their van, jamming out a secret improv for themselves, the cameraman, and the film’s audience (is it me, or is the level of self-consciousness in the van very high?), but not a paying Austin audience.   

A recurring visual motif (the film’s favorite metaphor for indie rock’s connection to its local environment) shows the duo Machine hiking through condominium construction sites, hunting for the perfect found sound to sample and mix later into their indie electronic music.  Not that sampling field recordings is an entirely novel technique, but it remains a highly individual, idiosyncratic form of musical practice.  The contrast with roots music is clear: you can’t easily show a fellow musician how to incorporate your signature sampling style into the local style, can you?

It’s not clear whether the problem belongs to these Austin bands or to the film, which is visually indebted to the dreamy, solipsistic aesthetic of indie rock.  Maybe Belaire actually moonlights as a shit-kickin’ honky tonk group with a rousing version of “Jolene” that the filmmakers couldn’t license.  Something like that would shoot down the preceding hypothesis.  But it’s worth remembering that in the sense I described above, indie rock groups in Austin are really no different than their counterparts elsewhere.  And that may be the point: Austin’s indie rock groups are no longer weird in the sense of that uniquely local, collective tradition.  If that’s the case, then what does Austin really give them?  A place to build a career in; a cool brand (or “moniker,” as a local promoter calls it) to distinguish themselves from other bands; but relatively little of the stylistic influences, performative exchange and “weird” way-of-being that comes from participating in the city’s venerable musical practice.

[For pt. 2 of this review, go here.]

photodump of O+ Festival

O+ Festival, Kingston, NY, a set on Flickr.

I caught a bit of the scene over the weekend at Kingston, NY's second annual O+ Festival, a "festival of art, music and wellness... wherein artists barter their contributions directly for medical, dental, and other wellness services from art-loving health care providers."

Admittedly, I missed almost all of the performances (except for a great opening-night show by Nicole Atkins and Willy Mason) even though it was located only 30 minutes away from where I live. However, I made some contacts and have been intrigued enough by the festival and its mission to want to write about it further. In a nutshell, the event seems familiar enough as an initiative in arts-based urban revitalization, with all its familiar promises and shortcomings.  But while it's unclear whether the event is a significant step toward revitalizing an old rustbelt city, it seems very interesting as an alternative to the increasingly predictable and commoditized urban music festival.
 
More on these questions later; until then, here are the photos I took. You can find many, many more pictures and media at the O+ Festival Facebook page.  And do take a look at its website for more of their story.

punk-rock dads in suburbia: reflections on "The Other F Word"

I'm still thinking about "The Other F Word," Andrea Nevins' new documentary about punk rock musicians who became fathers, since I saw it a week and a half ago at the Woodstock Film Festival.  Featuring the dads who play in Pennywise, NOFX, Blink 182, Rancid, Bad Religion, Black Flag, Rise Against, U.S. Bombs, and Fear (represented by Flea from the Red Hot Chili Peppers), the film is entertaining, glossy and (this isn't insignificant) generic enough as a rockumentary to go straight to VH1 Classics, as it develops the absurdity and unexpected nuances of its premise: "Isn't it funny how guys who played music to rebel against the system have now become part of the system?"  

Narratively, "The Other F Word" alternates between interviews of punk-rock dads in their domestic settings, usually with kids in tow, and an extended focus on Pennywise lead singer Jim Lindberg over (what we discover by film's end is) his last tour with the band, a narrative device that develops common conflict of emotions and principles that almost all the musicians feel between punk rock and their families.  Maybe the film follows the threads of Lindberg's story too much.  We really don't need to spend so much time on the music industry's decline as fans stop purchasing recorded music, for instance, to give context to the grueling 200+ date tour that Lindberg finds himself on.  (The priority that punk rock gives to live performance over selling recordings has long preceded the music industry's current predicament.)  But Lindberg, who has written about his life as a punk rock dad before, is candid and articulate; with his rather 'suburban' appearance, he makes an appealing figure for mass audiences to identify with.

If Pennywise isn't exactly the kind of band that comes to mind when you think of punk rock, then you might be disappointed by Nevins' choice of informants.  For the most part, the dads' bands featured in "The Other F Word" hail from Los Angeles' South Bay and neighboring Orange County, with a few exceptions (Rancid, Rise Against).  And for the most part, these are the "punk rock" groups you hear on the Warped Tour — a well-produced derivation of Southern California hardcore, characterized by a fat guitar sound and an aggressive masculine bellow, that can be slipped into a KROQ playlist — or the original hardcore groups that inspire those bands.  (A mellow, wise Chavo from Black Flag, a.k.a. Ron Reyes, gives one of the film's most welcome appearances).  Nevins fails to provide a representative picture of contemporary punk rock: among other absences, there's none of the DIY stuff played in youth centers and basements, no metalcore, and obviously no queercore or riot grrrl (if those 1990s sub-genres have any contemporary manifestations).  But what the film sacrifices in terms of representativeness, it gains in terms of empirical coherence.  By inadvertently focusing on a regionally identified sub-genre, "The Other F Word" sheds light on a very tangible set of class dynamics that illuminate tensions and contradictions in the lifeworlds that punk rock and its offshoots provide many young and not-so-young adults.

I confess: I've never been a major fan of this stripe of punk rock.  Back in the mid-1980s, it was easy enough to have your world changed by Black Flag (whose achievements across North American post-punk and alternative music are documented in Michael Azzerad's Our Band Could Be Your Life: Scenes from the American Indie Underground, 1981-1991).  It was only when I was a college student in Los Angeles that I got up to speed on groups like the Descendants, the Adolescents, the Vandals, and Social Distortion.  This means I missed being a high school student in Southern California, which I discerned was the place where the real local punk rock diehards came from.  At that time, Hollywood punk rock was either a memory (the Germs, the Weirdos, the Screamers) or a group trying to eke an existence in the uncharted waters between major labels and college radio (X, the Go-Gos, the Red Hot Chili Peppers).  The punk rock that has always thrived in Southern California, drawing legions of young guys looking to let off some aggression by picking fights and slam dancing (I never heard the term "mosh" until east coast thrash metallers Anthrax recorded "Caught in a Mosh"), hailed from the suburbs.  

The fact that American hardcore punk originated in Southern California's suburban environs is fairly well established.  In We Got the Neutron Bomb: The Untold Story of L.A. Punk (Three Rivers Press, 2001), Marc Spitz and Brendan Mullen record two contemporary recollections from hardcore's ground zero:

Jeff McDonald: I know exactly how and where hardcore started.  I remember the day!  I was a teen with a couple of friends around my age who were all into punk rock.  Somebody told me about this school in Huntington Beach where there was supposed to be over a hundred punk rockers.  That was unbelievable to us, completely unheard of.  One afternoon we went by that school, Edison High, looking forward to meeting all these cool new hip people.  We were shocked and bummed instead when it turned out it was the same kids who previously been hassling us for liking punk and now they're all red-hot punkers emulating how the media portrayed punk rock, as really violent and fucked up.  The Edison High punks all seemed to worship Sid Vicious and Johnny Rotten.  All their bands sang with English accents, whatever was coming over from England, stuff that had nothing to do with their lifestyle in southern California.  The entire New York punk scene just wasn't a factor.

Mugger: Edison High is just this one school.  There were a lot of schools in the Huntington Beach and Costa Mesa area that attracted the sorts of kids whose families didn't care about them or whatever, and they just got crazy.  Huntington Beach was the term people used, but it was all over Orange County... it was basically a full-on white suburbanite rebellion.  People were saying "fuck you" not only to these people that were trying to tell us what to do but to the establishment in general... the kids did their thing and now the punkers were doing their things (pg. 193).

Of course, hardcore never stayed confined to Southern California.  Indeed, aside from legends like Black Flag and Circle Jerks, it's arguable whether the best stuff even came from Southern California.  (Ultimately, I don't think the Minutemen can be considered a hardcore group.)  But as hardcore took on more political overtones and/or expressed more inner-city perspectives in Washington DC, NYC, San Francisco, North Carolina, and elsewhere, punk rock in Southern California mutated into a more tuneful and self-consciously 'juvenile' form.  Ryan Moore argues for its cultural influence in Sells Like Teen Spirit: Music, Youth Culture and Social Crisis (NYU Press, 2010):

In the L.A. suburbs, nihilism begat a new sub-subculture of punk bands described as "brat-core" or "snot-core."  The names of some of the seminal bands — the Dickies, the Circle Jerks, and the Adolescents — seem to say it all.  These were groups of young men who flaunted their immaturity and idiocy while making high-speed but very melodic music, which might be described as the sonic equivalent of being teased by an annoying child.  This was "punk" in the juvenile sense of the word, and their songs were full-blown but fleeting temper tantrums against authority.  The Adolescents personified this state of retardation in "No Way": "No class / No job / I'm just a victim of society / A slob / No ass, no head / I gotta go home and jack off instead."  This sense of boredom and anomie had originally been expressed by the Ramones and the Buzzcocks, but it seemed especially relevant to punks growing up in the Southern California suburbs.  The Adolescents were part of a circle of punk groups in the Orange County cities of Fullerton and Placentia that included Social Distortion and Agent Orange.  Although nestled in the suburbs, the City of Fullerton in particular was beginning to experience downward mobility, and Social Distortion developed a uniquely working-class aesthetic in that social milieu.  Further toward the coast, an even more violent punk scene developed among much more affluent youth in Huntington Beach who followed the bands T.S.O.L. (True Sounds of Liberty), the Vandals, and China White (pg. 56).

In fact, brat-core or snot-core punk seemed to anticipate a larger trend in dumb and dumber American popular culture, where billions of dollars are now made from men who regress to adolescence on screen, over the airwaves, or in cartoon form...  The man in the gray flannel suit, we might say, has been replaced by the boy in the backward baseball cap (pg. 57).

This legacy of "suburban punk" leaves us more or less at the point in which Andrea Nevins documents the punk rock dads in "The Other F Word".  Have they given up the backward baseball cap for the gray flannel suit? 

Of course not.  "The Other F Word" shows us dads bonding with their preteen kids over video games, dressing their tots in precociously cool outfits (the daughter of NOFX's Fat Mike is a scene-stealer), escorting them to father-daughter dances at middle school, and chauffering kids of all ages around in mini-vans.  The dissonance in these scenes is only superficial; consumer materialism is the lingua franca between these punks and the 'suburban people' among whom they raise their families.  (Interestingly, scenes of fathers and children playing musical instruments together offer some of the film's only non-consumerist interactions.)  And as the cultural codes and status symbols of today's consumerism shift ever younger and younger, it turns out these punk rock dads are able to identify with and "provide for" their kids quite well.

Quite likely, at least some of the materialism that these punk-rock dads shower on their kids is a reaction to the ways they themselves were raised.  In fact, the most emotionally stirring section of "The Other F Word" examines the relationships these dads had when they were young to their own fathers, which Nevins portrays as generally negative.  Many of these punk-rock dads grew up in single-mother households, and several reminiscences involve occasions when their own fathers abandoned the family.  Others who came from two-parent households confess the lingering pain of moments when their own fathers didn't think to show up for little league baseball games, never really showed much concern for their kids' doings, or simply failed to live lives of integrity (Jim Lindberg recalls his father was a traveling salesman) that their sons could respect and emulate.  

As the interview with Flea illustrates, even when the punk-rock dads refer to their own family situations in the vaguest of terms, it's quite clear how deep the wounds of their childhood remain in their present lives.  These wounds are cited as both the reasons why they took up punk rock in the first place, and why they're powerfully committed to their own children.  In the film's most optimistic assertion, such family commitment is held up as the ultimate punk-rock principle.  It's a cheery note to end the documentary on, although it's a problematic one insofar as it casts aside any of the political contexts of punk rock's history and neglects the consumeristic settings in which (as "The Other F Word" would have us believe) musicians pursue punk-rock fatherhood today.  

Maybe this contradiction isn't (simply) a failing of Nevin's analysis; maybe it's generalizable to the whole of the American punk rock scene.  It's been said that whereas British punk originated as political protest, American punk was more cultural in its basis, expressing in extreme form the familiar American impulses of individualism and the youthful quest for autonomy.  Perhaps that's one way to explain the contradiction that "The Other F Word" ends with, but I can't help but think about this more in terms of economic class.  

For instance, does the sub-genre of commercially successful (relatively speaking), male-identified punk rock found on the Warped tour represent a particular class?  It's tempting to ascertain one, as Ryan Moore does in Sells Like Teen Spirit, in the downwardly mobile generation who grew up children to educated yet not exactly "free thinking" parents working in white-collar technical or administrative occupations of Southern California's once-booming aerospace/defense economy.  Certainly many of the fans of Southern California hardcore came from such circumstances, but, curiously, few of the punk-rock dads in "The Other F Word" seem to identify such a background.  The more important commonality Nevins highlights is the household/parental situation: abandonment, neglect, disrespect.  This raises an important issue: does the family situation also constitute a class situation?

I'm not yet ready to abandon the economic perspectives that Karl Marx and Max Weber offer in regards to class.  Furthermore, it's reasonable to be suspicious of family-based theories of social class, which smack of conservative ideologies that hold "personal values," not economic relations, to be determinative of life chances. But what "The Other F Word" does rather well, if somewhat inadvertently, is reveal some of the micro situations of gender, education, materialism, and family history in which individuals manifest and work through the macro contexts of economic relations and geographic setting.