Full report from Clock­clean­er & Drag­on City shows tomorrow.

This week­end Philly’s best nomadic book­ing part­ner­ship, Plain Parade, signs off after four sol­id years of crit­i­cal­ly acclaimed book­ing. Their final two shows will be host­ed at Tri­tone and the M‑Room, their two most sta­ble venues since leav­ing Doc Wat­son’s, and both nights will fea­ture bands they’ve cham­pi­oned since Plain Parade came on the scene unabashed­ly in sup­port of local music.

It was an amaz­ing, if at times heart­break­ing under­tak­ing: Maria and Sara shoe­horned more local acts onto bills that would’ve oth­er­wise nev­er mate­ri­al­ized any­where oth­er than a week­night slot open­ing at the Khy­ber, or maybe on a Sun­day night if no one else was around. Not only were they under­dogs in the scene, they were lit­er­al­ly beneath the under­dog; how often do you hear about DIY, queer-friend­ly, cryp­to-fem­i­nist women pro­mot­ers mak­ing it — much less suc­ceed­ing — in a city as big and tough as Philadel­phia, in an indus­try dom­i­nat­ed by swills and philistines?

So while Sean Agnew got acco­lades for tak­ing it to the man, and the Man took every­thing else, Plain Parade sub­sist­ed on a steady diet of care and affec­tion for inde­pen­dent music and art, empha­siz­ing local acts over well-fund­ed nation­al [and inter­na­tion­al] tour­ing pack­ages, though they scored their fare share of those too. When they once took a prover­bial bath one fate­ful Decem­ber, it was on such a fly­er, demon­strat­ing that the name brand focus that dri­ves so much of the music indus­try is only so much hype. That they per­se­vered despite such frus­tra­tions in a mar­ket known for its sec­tar­i­an squab­bles was their own prayer for the city.

In oth­er words, you’ll be missed.

So if you’re in the area be sure to get out tonight to Tri­tone to see the Notekillers, a Thurston Moore favorite as well as local noiseniks Clock­clean­er, and/or tomor­row night at the M‑Room for Drag­on City, Philadel­phi­a’s most dev­as­tat­ing shoegaze onslaught.

[Inci­den­tal­ly, those Doc Wat­son’s days were crazy. And by crazy I’m refer­ring to the ratio of med stu­dents gone week­end war­rior who want­ed to hear Dave Matthew’s “Crazy” on the upstairs juke­box while play­ing pool and drink­ing over­priced beers while indie rock­ers and assort­ed hip­sters shuf­fled polite­ly into the per­for­mance space to hear the likes of Alan Sparhawk and his Chair­kick­ers crew, French Toast, This Radi­ant Boy and, most unlike­ly, Cher­ry Coke. And who could for­get the Hal­loween show, com­plete with bob­bing for apples? A favorite!]

What if Elliott Smith front­ed Slow­dive, or if Sys­tem of a Down used their prog instincts for the forces of good, instead of boredom?

[Full dis­clo­sure: Jeg er meget glad for Danskerne og deres nye musik­gruppe. Det er nem­lig meget bedre end Melanie’s Breast o.s.v.]

It’s an intro course in lan­guage arts, but here’s Rup­ture suss­ing texts and con­text re Da Capo and oth­er col­lect­ed works with canon­i­cal pretensions:

How is it that the notion of a CD con­tain­ing “The Best Music of 2006” would be pre­pos­ter­ous while the idea of book col­lect­ing “The Best Music Writ­ing of 2006” is read­i­ly accepted?

Is it due to qual­i­ta­tive dif­fer­ences between music and writ­ing? Does author­i­ty swoop down in the gap sep­a­rat­ing (source) art and (sec­ondary) reportage? Is writ­ing about music eas­i­er to rate than music itself? What rhetor­i­cal tech­niques does music jour­nal­ism employ to gain under­stand­ing — or at least the appear­ance of semi­otic con­trol — over sound?

Every anthol­o­gy a ghetto.

New York Times music crit­ic Kele­fa San­neh writes:

Lots of the folks in “Before the Music Dies” might think the huge­ly pop­u­lar Cana­di­an neogrunge band Nick­el­back is a sign of all that’s wrong with the world. But when the most recent Nick­el­back album hit 3.7 mil­lion copies sold in Amer­i­ca, Mr. Lef­setz could scarce­ly con­tain his glee, writ­ing: “Could it be that Nick­el­back is now the leader because they’re the only one with any val­ues? And the rest of the acts are sold-out whores pur­vey­ing music that has the fad­ing taste and longevi­ty of bub­ble gum?” Hmm. Don’t answer that ques­tion. Or rather, don’t try to answer it with­out address­ing the sim­ple but slip­pery issue of taste. We can argue all day about bub­ble gum and CD sales and micro­for­mat­ted radio and major-label artist devel­op­ment. But none of that makes much sense unless we’re also will­ing to dis­cuss what music we like, and why. (For the record Nickelback’s cur­rent hit, “Far Away,” is a first-rate pow­er ballad.)

Taste. Since Robert Christ­gau was fired by Vil­lage Voice man­age­ment “for taste” ear­li­er this year, it’s some­thing that’s cropped up qui­et­ly here and there among crit­ics both wary and weary of engag­ing in anoth­er friv­o­lous debate over rock­ism. Yet unlike that debate, it’s not a meme cours­ing through the inter­net like dysen­tery. Instead, there’s a mea­sured, yet pas­sion­ate dis­course enfold­ing both taste and com­merce. Fur­ther­more, it’s not lim­it­ed to a clois­tered cir­cle of crit­ics whose aim is to impress one anoth­er with pseu­do-intel­lec­tu­al jar­gon, but rather to engage the pub­lic at-large on the ques­tion of their curios­i­ty, at least when it comes to music, and how it man­i­fests itself in the marketplace.

In some cas­es, like the one men­tioned in Mr. San­neh’s arti­cle, it’s a lede buried deep in the text In oth­ers, it’s more open­ly dis­cussed, such as this Coolfer piece that address­es hiphop sales over the past year. Coolfer writes:

For proof of the gen­re’s cur­rent lack of stay­ing pow­er, one can look at the length of time a hip hop album stays in the Top 40. In 2006, there are no long-last­ing hits at the top of the chart. Each album is a fla­vor of the less-than-a-month. How many hip hop albums are in the Top 40? Five. How many have been there for more than three weeks? One (Ludacris). A hip hop album makes a big splash in its first week, drops around 60% in the sec­ond week, and fades out of the main­stream’s attention.

In this case, taste affects not only the genre, but the media itself; it’s not just what we’re lis­ten­ing to, but how we’re lis­ten­ing to it, when and for how long.

Mixed into the much talked about demise of phys­i­cal media is a com­men­tary on how more ephemer­al forms of media give rise to more ephemer­al uses of it. Like oth­er aspects of Amer­i­can con­sumer cul­ture, planned obso­les­cence is sacro­sanct. To me, this is val­ue neu­tral, not a val­ue judg­ment. Any­one look­ing for durable artists/art is mis­tak­en — and it’s not as sim­ple as noth­ing gold can stay. [More on this lat­er.]

Since the specter of rock­ism start­ing haunt­ing a new gen­er­a­tion of crit­ics, two things have hap­pened: viewed pos­i­tive­ly, there’s been an effort to bet­ter under­stand cul­tur­al prod­ucts on their own terms, rather than resort­ing to some vari­a­tion of the high/low cul­ture debate and dis­miss albums or artists out of hand. Giv­en the cease­less tide of new releas­es, the effort to sift through is no mean feat, and it empha­sizes the point that the bet­ter part of crit­i­cism is left to an edi­tor’s agnos­ti­cism or curios­i­ty. Con­verse­ly, the rapa­cious hunger with which cul­ture is con­sumed has led to a sort of cul­tur­al amne­sia about taste itself.

A corol­lary to this point is that there’s such a taboo about get­ting it wrong that it leads to either bad judg­ment [see Matos’ one-lin­er here], or an unwill­ing­ness to con­demn any­thing at all. But char­ac­ter assas­si­na­tion should­n’t be con­fused for crit­i­cism. To me, it’s just as unfair to dis­miss ephemera as friv­o­lous as it is to wan­ton­ly lead the sacred herd into the abattoir.