Austin – Unexpectedly, my first concert of South By Southwest came on the first night I was there…for SXSW Interactive. For those of you who have never been to South By Southwest Interactive, here’s a quick rundown – There are panels that run from 9:30 to 5:00 pm, but most people go from 11:00 to 3:00, where most of the meaty panels take place At 3:00, open bar starts. By open bar, I mean, once it hits 3:00 in the afternoon, depending on which parties you go to (all sponsored by companies like Google, Microsoft, Mashable, Can I has Cheezburger, etc) you can pretty much drink and eat for free the rest of the night. It just happens that one of the parties I went to was a Ustream party hosted by Pete Wentz and it featured a band called Gym Class Heroes.

I’ll be honest and admit I had absolutely no clue who Gym Class Heroes is. I had a sneaking suspicion that they were some emo band since the night was hosted by Pete Wentz (who is about 4 feet tall and wears sunglasses in a dark room). Not wanting to go in blind, I asked facebook people who they were, and replies were:

V: Bad emo/”punk” band. like fall out boy.
P: Actually, they’re even worse than that … it’s like fall out boy with rappin

You would think this would help, but i’ve never heard Fall Out Boy either. So I was expecting some sort of shitty emo rap band. All instincts told me to leave, but hey, this is South By Southwest. If there was ever a time to be open minded about music, now would be it. Also, there was a lot of free alcohol. So I stayed.

The overall show was kinda meh. I mean, I didn’t love it and I didn’t get offended. It wasn’t super good but also wasn’t super crappy. If anything, they played a lot more chilled set then I had imagined, given I had heard they were of the emo-rap variety. The chilled out rock-rap set they played could almost be on VH1, and maybe some older people will listen to it and then hear the rap and think they have some edge to it or something. The lead singer was pretty energetic and worked hard to get the crowd going, doing a lot of call and responses. I guess its not hard to get a crowd going when it’s an open bar party and people have been drinking for 8 hours already. At one point, he got everyone to stick their hands in the air and then turned it into a middle finger, in an act of defiance or something. I wonder if he knew that most people attending this party were white collar workers all working for giant corporations that sent them to a conference to have fun on their dime. Can’t really hate the establishment when you think about it. Points for effort though.

All in all, it was okay, nothing good, nothing bad. I guess that’s what passes for #4 on Billboard these days.

Oh yah, the picture is of Jamie Lynn Sigler/Meadow Soprano who was also at the party. Had a really hard time resisting asking her where turtle was.