D Nuts || July 21, 2009

Seems like as good a day as any to update Dd, since this year's Dallas Observer Music Awards take place tonight. Since Dd wasn't nominated for our hard work this past year--GEEZ--I will celebrate in Seattle by seeing DOMA nominees The Theater Fire and Robert Gomez in concert tonight. West Coast tour, whoop!

The DOMAs have a good-looking list of nominees, a fact that will sadly be eroded when everyone's least-fave acts win out over the voting melee (the Nader effect is brutal at any local media award show). But that good list doesn't make up for the latest screed by Observer music ed Pete Freedman, lambasting We Shot JR while trying to defend the award show's "house party" theme.

[Before I begin, I want to heartily thank Pete for getting the ball rolling on the DC9 video series. It's the modern equivalent to the Observer's old Scene Heard compilations, and even if it follows on the heels of video features by Quick, its consistency and quality is the kind of thing a major organization can do to outdo the blogging competition. I have bad things to say about Pete's writing, but not about his video series.]

[Okay. Back to it.]

There's a he-said-he-said between the two sides, but it's not worth analyzing; Pete's article does nothing to address some obvious issues and direct quotes laid apparent by We Shot JR. Not that I get wound up with either side on the basic theme of house parties--they're a subset of concerts that come standard in any town where a bunch of kids are starting bands and getting their musical feet wet. They're nothing new; at my time at the Observer, an editor greenlit a story on house parties, and the writer couldn't come up with anything compelling. Been there, done that. Deleted.

My bigger issue here is that Pete defends his appropriation of a DIY ethos by name-dropping bands, not by talking about his experiences at DIY events.

"[Fergus & Geronimo] are getting love from beyond North Texas' boundaries, getting name-dropped adoringly."

This sentence, out of context, comes off as particularly empty, and perhaps in context, it's not so bad. But it should be isolated to highlight the detachment that Freedman has trafficked in for months since arriving in Dallas. I already wrote about this in the linked We Shot JR post:

Just because Pete fronts a corporate entity--sponsored by liquor, smokes, official venues and so on--doesn't mean covering "fringe" scenes (tejano, hip-hop, DJ/mix, DIY) should be neutered or scared away by the "sponsored by" tag. So why are they? Pete had a real shot with suburb-rock, a long-overdue niche article angle that [former editor] Jonanna Widner lazily ignored before him. But his June feature on the trend came off like something in a business magazine, because it's obvious he dislikes the music in question and wouldn't put his cajones on the table to be an honest writer about it. Guess what? Zac Crain hated Pantera and wrote about them during his tenure--with teeth, conviction and respect all at once. Is the corporate culture of VVM so brutal these days that Pete is stuck in a box, awaiting the day he can finally loose his frenzied feelings? Or is Pete unwilling to get himself caught up in uncomfortable spaces, other than the controlled anxiety of reloading a WeShotJR comments thread again and again between blog posts at work? The typical complaint is that a mainstream outlet covers "the same five bands" over and over, but a far worse fate is to force people to read about all 5,000 of them with no personal conviction attached. -SM

And in this latest column, this detachment is blatant in his descriptions of the Dallas punk scene:

[Dallas punk bands] are being forced to fake their way to a scene through infrequent gigs at July Alley, Reno's Chop Shop Saloon and, when it'll have them, The Lounge on Elm Street.

And that's all he has to offer. Therefore, Pete, I don't believe you. Put us in that scene. Take us to a shitty night at Reno's and put your balls on the table to out yourself as either a fan or a disdainful outsider.

I don't count on that happening, based on how unwilling Pete was to respond to his licks from We Shot JR. The soulless everyman who posts vapid scene commentary--and the same guy who reposts shitty bands' links with smarmy, personality-less commentary on DC9 on a daily basis--is, at this point, throwing up band names on a corkboard in the college cafeteria. Of course he seems like a champion of the scene! Lists are awesome!

But you can do better, man. Unless the boss isn't letting you. -SM