Fun Fun Fun? Thirty Years of Chronicling Austin Music
Austin Convention Center, Friday, March 18Five panelists representing the past, present, and future of Austin’s music journalism (plus a few more in the audience, including the venerable Ed Ward and Bill Bentley) reflected on the past three decades of The Austin Chronicle‘s distinctive music coverage. After dusting off the closet skeletons and engaging in a bit of laughing nostalgia for past exploits, Music Editor Raoul Hernandez, music-scene provocateur Michael Corcoran, and music-scene historian Margaret Moser surveyed the current landscape and their positions in it. For Hernandez, today’s Austin musicians represent two or three generations of locals who’ve grown up going to Waterloo with their parents; music is part of their geography, their terroir. Corcoran jumped on that as his next story in the Austin American-Statesman, while Moser said it was her mandate to foster those kids’ development as artists. “They are the children of the musicians, of the industry workers, of the fans, and I feel a strong sense of obligation to them.” Looking forward, the cosmopolitan Ward warned about Austin’s insulating tendencies, saying, “Every now and again, Austin needs to be reminded that there are Japanese bands singing about serial killers; otherwise it’ll just be a bunch of boring blues bands and indie bands.”
This article appears in March 18 • 2011.