Keepin’ It Real at Pop Montreal

Still collecting thoughts Post Pop. It was indeed a whirlwind of a festival that took the city by storm, almost on par with the Jazz Fest’s cyclonic power. The Gazette featured buildup for days. Young folk were abuzz with show-goin’ and program checkin’. This here blog got some serious bloggin’ love over the weekend. It was an important weekend for Montreal.

As a Fringe Fest baby myself, this is all very new to me. When I think “independent artists festival,” I picture little corner-side city parks being filled with local summer slackers. I picture outdoor stages crammed with Festival coordinators in drag. I picture dozens of cheerful volunteers pouring out dozens of pints of donated St. Ambroise. I picture artists and and patrons alike knockin’ back a few, the lines between them as blurry as their afternoon inebriation.

So when I showed up at Pop and Policy on Friday last, I felt like a bit of a poser. An indie music poser. Or maybe just a festival poser. I got my little pass that said “media” on it, a glorious word that seems to justify all kinds of ignorant voyeurism. People at the conference owned record labels, were recording engineers, or had a band that actually toured. They knew what words like “distribution” meant. They had myspaces that actually said something important.

I’ve always been pretty intimidated by the Indie music scene. Maybe cuz I grew up singing in classical choirs in this city, I feel a little defensive of my musicianship against the coolness of the indie scene. Maybe the whole, well, coolness of indie rockers kinda terrifies me. So showing up to this festival - behind the safe veil of Media - I just tossed all that aside. Knowing, and owning the fact that this was not at all my world, I slipped into the panel discussions bringing my own intelligence and my own curiosity.

Midway through one of the panel discussions, when someone in the audience asked for the thousandth’s time “how to make it,” and I heard for the trillionth time “there is no one way,” I felt a little bit of peace settle in. Man, thought I, we’re all just figuring it out along the way, aren’t we? If there is no one way to Make It, then all you can do is trust your gut. And trusting your gut means making good art. It means keeping your artistic process real.

Okay, thought I. I can do that. Or at least I can try.

So Pop Montreal was fun. It wasn’t my scene, but who’s to say it was anybody’s scene? Big thing I learned, there’s no one way to fit into any arts scene except to just Be Yerself.