Steve Earle's Keynote Address: Austin Convention Center, Thursday, Mar 16

Steve Earle's Keynote Address

Austin Convention Center, Thursday, Mar 16

Welcome to the South by Southwest 2000 dot-commie branding soiree and its opening address. These things are always curious affairs, if for no other reason than musicians are asked to write something besides three minutes of verse-chorus-bridge, and typically they respond by just winging it. A few years ago, Bob Mould walked through the bleary-eyed industry audience shoving the microphone in people's faces and demanding to know, "Why are you here?" When they do write something, it's typically not too memorable; anybody recall what Krist Novoselic's prepared remarks were about? The resulting good news for Steve Earle is that the bar has never been set too high, and expectations for his keynote address were appropriately low. Earle, who looked slimmer than last time he was onstage in Austin, took the podium and for the first third of his "speech" issued various comments on the state of the industry: everything from revisionism run rampant ("Kiss was never cool. Kiss is not cool now. Kiss is never going to be cool."); to consolidation ("It makes it easier to figure out where all of those motherfuckers are -- I like all my snakes in one basket."); or the self-effacing ("I've made an embarrassing amount of money in this business for a borderline Marxist"); to the serious ("We need artists, not product."). After that, Earle took the opportunity to thank literally everyone he's been involved with before getting to the political portion of the show; has Earle ever taken a stage in Texas and not made some remarks about the death penalty? The state-funded killing of criminals is the reason he refuses to ever move back to his home, so it came as no surprise to many in the room when Earle made similar comments as the keynote. He did pick up a couple of new causes, however: welfare rights and land mines. Okay, who, besides the U.S. government, is not against land mines? C'mon, if you're going to be political, at least try to be a little controversial or even thought-provoking. Land mines. It's like being against crime or in favor of jobs. If Earle wants to use the forum for those comments, fine, but seeing how this is a music conference and seeing how he does run a label that's jumped from Warner Bros. to Danny Goldberg's new Artemis label at a time when over half of all media in the U.S. has fallen into the hands of six multinational corporations, he had a wonderful opportunity to give a roomful of people from literally all over the world some insight they wouldn't be able to get themselves. Hell, he could have just told prison stories and that would have been better. Earle was fine, but the best SXSW keynote moment still remains Carl Perkins telling the story of how he wrote "Blue Suede Shoes." Proof that a real-life war story beats a land-mine plea any day.