The Sound Strike's Spin on Their SXSW Panel, Old 97's and More from SXSW

​A day ago, I told you what happened at the panel discussion The Sound Strike hosted at South By Southwest. The group, which is organizing a boycott of Arizona because the state's legislature passed a draconian anti-immigrant law called SB 1070, which was blocked by courts and will likely never go into effect, is now telling its side.

To hear their version of the story you'd hardly think they were at the same event where a crowd that was mostly made up of upset but polite Arizonans confronted the group about its heavy-handed tactics after politely listening to lengthly lectures about U.S. history.

"Those in attendance agreed it was one of the best and most informative panels they had ever seen at SXSW. With some of the most unique and creative perspectives on this issue, the Sound Strike panel gave an initial overview of the issue and the recent uptrend in the belligerently harsh approaches being taken up by far right wing extremists."

Ummmm, not so much. One woman who posed for pictures with the panelists afterward like a schoolgirl meeting Justin Bieber seemed to really dig it, but other than that everyone who spoke was either angry, sad, or both.

Organizers hinted at the real story on The Sound Strike's official twitter account, where the group posted: "Despite what phx nt spews haters got schooled @Sxsw"

This of course begs the question: What haters? I thought, "Those in attendance agreed it was one of the best and most informative panels they had ever seen at SXSW."

Also, it's pretty funny to hear the group bragging about "schooling" people when they wouldn't give them a space on the stage to make their case and tried to encourage the few randoms in the room to take up the few minutes of question time.

That's not the only bitter hypocrisy here: As you can hear in a recording of the speech given by organizer Javier Gonzalez, he began by stating that, "We don't want to have a conversation about tactics or strategies -- I know I, for example, represent The Sound Strike, the artist boycott of Arizona -- that we look at that as a tactic. This isn't a debate about boycotts or no boycotts, playing or not playing. It's a debate about what we can all be doing."

How the hell a boycott doesn't fall under "what we can all be doing" since it's what they're doing and how organizers planned to promote their boycott but not answer questions about it, I cannot say.

Then again, it's pretty hard to imagine why this panel was allowed -- especially without giving a voice to the opposition.

Southby is a apolitical music festival and conference that's supposed to promote business. Yet someone in the management structure decided to give a slot to a group that's promoting a boycott of Arizona's music industry over the state's stupid-but-never-gonna-take-effect-anyway immigration law SB 1070. They were allowed to stack the deck, too -- no boycott opponents were permitted on the panel, which meant the "discussion" was mostly centered around the group's controversial historical narrative.