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By Root 828 0

considering that since the mid- 1980s, which whelped that first litter of them, the portion of Americans saying they had read a book of fiction in the previous six months has fallen by a fifth, from 57 percent to 47 percent. And yet the more plausible causation runs the other way. Literature has become such a niche obsession that the only way to publish stories about it is through niche sensationalism; a new writer who can speak to some lost demographic (usually the young) is the only thing in the little world of American letters that can be called big news. Moreover, in the career of a journalist, it-children play an especially important role, because they allow the reporter—who is usually older—to trump up a subject’s youth appeal and thereby sponge off it, even as doing so begins to diminish that appeal. To explain a novel by reference to its “buzz,” not to mention its author’s invariably attractive and black-clad peers (always at KGB!), is both to bask in that imputed coolness oneself and to bootstrap oneself above it, to cast it as a perishable taste that the reporter can be seen sampling just before it dies. This follows the fundamental action of the media mind: to find the thing with momentum and latch on to it, redefining it, drawing some of its power onto you even as you weaken it. The media mind is about parasitism. And the paradigmatic act of media parasitism, one should always remember, is to sup vampirically at the neck of young, doomed fame. With that in mind, let us return to the story of Annuals.

A WEEK INSTEAD OF SIX MONTHS

The South by Southwest festival (aka SXSW), held each March in Austin, Texas, is the closest thing indie rock has to a national convention, a four-day caucus at which all the ambitious indie acts are expected to mount the dais. The number of acts at the festival has swelled to more than 1,500, performing on some sixty separate official stages, and this tally does not include the countless unofficial bands, on unofficial stages, hoping to be seen by the thousands of indie-industry functionaries who roam the streets with their all-access badges. Every alleyway or back patio of every club or store seemed to have a tent with a band blaring away underneath. The first, sleepy day of the festival, before most of the attendees had arrived, I found myself on Sixth Street, the main club drag, at dusk, where I floated almost alone down the cordoned-off thoroughfare; the strains of the bands in all the empty clubs all sluiced together into the street, a multitonal wash of noise around me, a Charles Ives score for a little ghost town.

KEXP had set up shop on the UT-Austin campus, broadcasting its in-studio appearances from the set of Austin City Limits, the venerable public-TV music show. I caught up with John Richards the following afternoon, a Thursday, shortly after he signed off his shift, and we sat down in a spare, lofty office just off the set. It had been only half a year since Richards and I first met, but I found him obsessed with an entirely new slate of bands. “It almost worries me that the burnout is going to happen in a week instead of six months,” he said, only half joking. There was a wave of new British acts: pop-punk bands the Holloways and the Fratellis (the latter of which had just had their song “Flathead” turned into an iPod ad); the retro-soul songstress Amy Winehouse (who had not yet become the mainstream misfit); and Fujiya & Miyagi, a hypnotic and danceable electronic group. There were the other domestic bands of the moment, including Deerhunter, the Ponys, and Menomena, all smart, admirably difficult acts that had each released a couple of albums before but for some reason were just getting big now. Annuals did not come up.

The very first band Richards mentioned in his list, the band “at the top of their game,” as Richards put it, was Peter Bjorn and John, a Swedish act best known for their song “Young Folks,” a laid-back and likable dance number built on a dispiritingly addictive whistle riff:

FIG. 2-3—THE PETER BJORN AND JOHN WHISTLE RIFF

Peter Bjorn and