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By Root 790 0

John had built this simple figure into a cacophony of attention, by way of the typical channels. Pitchfork bestowed an 8.5 on the full album, Writer’s Block, and then chose them to headline the website’s own South by Southwest party—a spot that one could imagine almost any of the 1,500 bands would have accepted. KEXP put them on their live bill too; in fact, Peter Bjorn and John was the band I had come to see perform that day. They were scheduled for quarter to two in the afternoon, and I sat in the near-empty bleachers and watched them set up.

The stage set of Austin City Limits seemed, at first glance, like an incongruous backdrop for indie rock. A kitschily stylized Austin skyline in the evening, it managed to render a too-sleepy city even sleepierseeming in miniature. For that matter, Peter, Bjorn, and John (their actual names) seemed an incongruous indie-rock trio, at least visually speaking: The first two, who have played together for a decade, were mop-topped, fashionably unkempt fellows in tight black jeans, whereas the third, the drummer, wore a suit jacket over a crisp, white dress shirt, his black hair impeccably styled to one side, his overall look resembling that of a villainous investment-banker in an ’80s movie.2 But stage and band seemed to come together fine when it all started up; the stands, which for the other bands that day had been half-empty or worse, were very much full.

Before I arrived in Austin, I realized that Annuals’ season in the fickle sun had ended, and I found that my marvel at it all, at the ever-flowering garden of good-enough bands, had given way, I must confess, to a species of anger. Peter Bjorn and John, too, were good, yes, and so were these other bands, but what about the bands from six months ago—Annuals, but also White Whale, Bound Stems, Tokyo Police Club, bands whose names even you, unfaithful reader, perhaps have already forgotten from just a few pages prior? I had begun to forget them too. We falter like the others, don’t we—enjoying the stories put in front of us today and forgetting the rest? How can we resist the new band, the new track, the one that everyone else is listening to, linking to, cueing up at parties? “Young Folks” was exactly that track, and as Peter Bjorn and John started in on it, I couldn’t help but get a certain thrill despite myself, and the rest of the crowd clearly did too. Some teenagers, who earlier on had improbably bounded out from the wings to sit Indian-style before the stage, now rose to their feet and began to dance, as unselfconsciously as only teenagers are able to, and in the heartbreakingly loose-limbed style they seem to prefer. Peter, it must be said, could whistle with astonishing skill, performing the difficult riff over and over again without falter. But wait—halfway through, there is a malfunction; his lips unpurse and yet the riff goes on—he has been lip-synching the whistle. And now, acknowledging his mistake, Peter begins to laugh as he sings, and Bjorn begins to laugh too, and now John, as well, all cracking up at their mighty hit, cut off at the knees. I hurry to write it down in my notebook, because Peter Bjorn and John is my enemy, and their slipup will become an item on my blog.

EXPERIMENT: STOP PETER BJORN AND JOHN

Here I should be clear. I did not, and do not, have any particular dislike for Peter Bjorn and John or their music. But seeing that they clearly were poised to become the so-called buzz band of SXSW, that welling anger of mine—that desperate desire to stop Internet time, or at least to let the cycles last longer, let the spikes stretch wider—had focused, for the moment, on these affable Swedes. I began to chart out an experiment in viral culture that, unlike the flash mob, would explore nanostories purely in the negative; in this case, addressing the question of whether “buzz” could be self-consciously neutralized or reversed. On Wednesday, March 7, precisely one week before the festival began, I had created an anonymous blog, called Stop Peter Bjorn and John, which described itself as “an emergency blog