// For the past fifteen years, a certain strain of indie rock (and rock in general) has been gripped by the “motorik” beat, picked up from ‘70s krautrock forbears like Neu! and Faust. It doesn’t matter the indie subgenre—punk, dance/disco/electro, psychedelic, post-punk—that beat is ubiquitous. I heard it a dozen times at SXSW this year; I’ve heard it a thousand times at shows for almost two decades. This must be unprecedented, right? For one, specific rhythm to be so dominant for such a long time?
New sounds are always born from new beats. Jazz and blues swung the rhythm; rock and roll picked up that swing and swallowed tributaries from Bo Diddley’s “shave and a haircut, two bits” and Chuck Berry’s forward-facing stomp. Country, zydeco, salsa, hip-hop, disco, house, trap, drum ‘n’ bass…the genre signifiers owe as much to their rhythms as they do to the instrumentation or melodic organization.
The roll is gone from rock and roll. It’s all front-footed, frenzied, feverish. Punk is the new classic rock canon, but those texts can cheat us of sex, of groove. “Hardcore [punk] dissipated as soon as everyone got laid,” Thurston Moore quipped on Marc Maron’s podcast recently. And yet, bodies and rhythms today still move tight, like a dance in a straitjacket.
So where is the new beat? Is this why culture feels like it’s stagnated in an algorithmic tide pool? Is there a new rhythm tapping its way out with an ice pick, ready to gobble up the competition like an apex predator set loose on the dinosaurs?
// Kassa Overall maybe provided a glimpse of that new heartbeat. A jazz-trained drummer, a former member of the house band for The Late Show With Stephen Colbert, a beatmaker, a producer, a rapper, a fashion model—the 21st century artist experience, with hands tapping out lots of different rhythms. His records are dense, fractured kaleidoscopes about Blackness and American-ness, the daily mindfuck and spiritual salvation of living. On stage, he’s cool. A warm, inviting kind of cool, comfortable in co-creating with the audience.
And his band—my god, his band. Piano, congas, Tomoki Sanders—the child of that Pharoah Sanders—on soprano sax, samples, percussion, even the kit when Kassa was just rapping. Tomoki burst around and off the stage, running out the venue and across the street and back, traded Coltrane-quoting blasts with a second sax player, screamed into the mic when the sax couldn’t say enough. Kassa Overall and his band combine all of this—jazz, hip-hop, electronic beatmaking—with the steady determinism of pioneers. In this same fifteen year, motorik-heavy time frame, artists like Kendrick Lamar, Flying Lotus, Makaya McRaven, and Kamasi Washington have explored this new territory too. We don’t have a name yet for what they’re creating—is it jazz with hip-hop influences, or vice versa? But one day, we might look back and see: ah, this is where our future came from.
// But not all of us can be jazz-trained rhythmic geniuses. So if you’re going to take up the motorik pulse, you need to inject newness. I saw two bands taking the post-punk thing in different directions. Corridor, from Montreal, with everything set against them: playing to a crowd of seated, graying industry reps in a convention center ballroom at noon on a Friday. The band gave us physicality as a counterbalance. And Corridor’s songs are airy too, three part harmonies floating above jagged edges.
Font, an Austin five-piece, went subterranean. Two drummers, more samples than guitars, a bassist leaving lots of room like a dub musician. This was post-punk in the true sense of the word: punk-informed, but original, frightening, exciting. They only have two songs out. They have so much more space to cover.
// I’m waiting for a listening party to start for Wild God, the new album from Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds. I’m soaking in the quiet of the Central Presbyterian Church, a marvelous space from 1875 in a town that tends to bulldoze its history. The sound guy arrives, checks levels for about ten seconds, and the listening party starts. It is obscenely loud, blasting incomprehensibly out of rented mains instead of the church’s own sound system. The space’s acoustic energy is violently obliterated. I put in earplugs and move to the back of the sanctuary. It feels sacrilegious to me—not in a religious or Christian way, but in a sonic way. There’s no attention paid to the sound’s physical, emotional, and spiritual dimensions, the way it can inhabit the space. Is it the sound guy’s fault? Why aren’t we equipping sound engineers with emotional/artistic techniques as much as scientific? Why do mains still sound as dogshitty and muddy as they did when I was playing crappy clubs as a teenager in Dallas, twenty years ago?
It’s a lost opportunity. Wild God is supremely moving, even with ear plugs jammed down my ear canals. It’s perhaps more suited for churches and spiritual spaces than rock clubs. The Bad Seeds groove and undulate, putting that roll back in. Rock and religion have abandoned sex and danger, and the Bad Seeds are claiming it. Cave is in fine form, a joyous preacher calling for mercy, spirit, peace, good tidings, loaded terms that have fallen on hard times in this world. The phrase that soars out of one of the songs: “love costs everything.” He would know. The album ends, there’s a moment of silence, the twenty or so industry reps politely applaud. As we’re filing out, they talk only about what’s next on their festival schedules.
// A hundred bands dropped out of official events because SXSW is sponsored by the U.S. Army and several defense contractors this year. Thousands of miles away, their tech and weapons are used to indiscriminately kill Hamas militants and thousands of Palestinian civilians. In the convention center, the Army and defense complex canvass tech companies, offering money and support and partnership. All across Austin, we use technology that was only possible because of the U.S. military’s public budgets and slow technical tinkering. We went to the moon on Nazi ingenuity. This world is hopelessly, relentlessly interlinked, a web of meaning we can’t make much meaning from. My last show is Austin’s Good Looks, who were one of the bands that dropped out of official SXSW events. Frontman Tyler Jordan laments this impossibly small gesture. Maybe small gestures are all we have.
Outside the convention center, a blustery spring day, my wife and I are eating overpriced falafel and gyros, sharing a table with a woman from San Francisco. She talks quickly, incessantly. She’s a “creative” for Delta Dental, which last I checked was an insurance company. She’s in town to learn about AI, how it can help her “create content” at extreme speeds and low prices. I’m not following what it is she actually does or how it applies to Delta Dental. She asks about Austin, compares it to downtown San Francisco, where “you have to step over the homeless to get to the store.” I’m repulsed by the conversation. It feels like a caricature of a coastal elite. She reveals that she has two daughters, and her and her husband’s plan: “we need to make a fuck-ton of money over the next five to ten years” to pay for their kids’ college educations. All of a sudden, her anxiety feels tragic. She’s upper-middle class and barely treading water. How much of AI, of all amoral, shortsighted tech decisions are driven by workers who are desperate to stay afloat?
Outside Cheer Up Charlie’s, which has its own shady and shaky financial future, my wife and I are trying to get in. The door person says, you have to RSVP first online. So we scan the QR code plastered outside, RSVP, and report back, but no entry yet: you have to download the free ticket from Eventbrite. Eventbrite requires a login, which requires an account, which requires an emailed password. A crowd of people milling outside Cheer Up’s, heads bowed, furiously tapping at their phones. Finally, the tickets are downloaded, scanned, and we’re in. This is SXSW, this is so much of our contemporary culture: maddening, arbitrary, confusing, cold, unhuman. A “free” event isn’t truly free; your email and data and frustration are taken hostage.
But inside, Kassa Overall is breaking free. Tomoki Sanders is again running around and jumping offstage, through the audience, out the gates, across the street and back, banging a cowbell to a new beat.