Image Credit: Wild1/PR PhotosWith SXSW finished until next year, thousands of music fans are now scattering back home to annoy and/or delight their friends by bragging about all the life-changingly brilliant new artists they discovered in Austin. Most also have a horror story or two about buzz bands that turned out to be more like bust bands in a live setting. Perez Hilton was eager to share the latter type of SXSW tale when I met him backstage before his warehouse party last night. “I saw jj earlier this week,” he said, referring to the woozy Swedish act whose full-length debut inspired countless critical raves last year. “I love their album, and they were awful live…They were embarrassingly bad. It was insulting as an audience member, actually, how little they cared. This girl just sat there, not having any interaction with the crowd, being lethargic. It was disgusting.” Ouch. Sorry, jj.

Surely, not everything Perez saw in Austin this year made him feel such revulsion? “I went to parties, I saw some shows, but everyone that I really wanted to see is performing here tonight [at my party],” the savvy self-promoter said. Oh, okay. I asked Perez to explain why he’d picked some of the artists he did for his third annual SXSW bash. He answered as follows. READ FULL STORY »