SXSW Interactive's Unofficial Anthem: "South By Girls"
With an ambling beat, Auto-Tuned vocals, and lyrics that celebrate parties over platforms, Eston Bond just created the best song ever written about South by Southwest Interactive.
Double D's "South By Girls", a nerdcore rap about skipping out on panels to get with the relatively few females who attend, caught the attention of tech gossip site Valleywag yesterday, along with Wired editor Chris Anderson, who gets name-checked: "F* the panels, there ain't one girl ta talk to / I didn't fly here to see some Wired dude / You want The Long Tail? Well that's the wrong tail / Imma take these geek girls back to ma hotel."
In an email interview Thursday, Bond said he stayed up to 4 am one night writing the lyrics, then spent a weekend recording the vocals.
"The thing is that I wanted to make a club banger, and I couldn't think of any time when geeks actually went to the club. I struggled to figure out when the last time I went to the club with a bunch of tech people was, and the only time that came to mind were the Facebook parties at Pangaea at SXSW last year, thus I decided to write a song about South By." said Bond, who used to work as a designer at Facebook. "The more I thought about SXSW last year, the more I remembered that really no one cared about the panels or the conference. It was all about the parties. That's where you made all your connections, professional or otherwise. SXSWi really is geek spring break. For most people I know, it's a bunch of drunken sex, really."
Don't worry if you don't know your Django from your JavaScript. Bond has provided a clever set of annotated lyrics so you don't miss a single tech or hip-hop reference. A particularly sweet section? How about a jab at the SXSW Film and Music crowd: "Look at us now, where be film and music? / "Oh that computer stuff? That be too confusing" "
You can also win an iPhone by coming up with the best video for the song. Good for you, sure, but your good fortune actually came out of Bond's bad luck. He spent a month planning the video and lined up some "serious tech rockstars" to appear.
"The day came to film and it just poured. There were sporadic power outages in the city, and there was no way we were going to get everything to come together and we had to cancel the shoot," said Bond, who lives in Palo Alto. "I was pretty bummed, but I came up with the iPhone contest idea last week and thought well, at least I can get the song out by South By."
The video fiasco drained Bond's expenses and his money he had earmarked for his trip to Austin.
"I'm going to try to at least make it for the weekend assuming I can get a cheap(ish) flight," he said. "Then I'll just hit up a party or two. I mean, that's all you do at South By anyway."
