Genetics & Politics

Dear San Francisco Weekly,

Recently, you ran a piece in the “Critic’s Notebook” section of your local music website All Shook Down, entitled “When Pork Belly Replaces the Punk Club.” The general thrust of the article was that, due to an influx of tech-boom money, San Francisco’s music scene is gradually becoming less and less vital. The argument was made that this stagnation and decline into the world of $50 “musical events” instead of cheap underground shows was a direct result of young people getting their yuppie training wheels and “practicing their conspicuous consumption.”

I can agree with that, to a point. I live close enough to Zynga that I have to deal with their weird predator-van shuttles double-parking all over my neighborhood; i fight the urge to engage in vandalism each time I pass their building with the huge fucking dog-logo banner on the side. I live close enough to Plow to witness the massive lines of twenty-somethings who line up at seven a.m. on a Tuesday to eat a plate of seventeen dollar bacon. I’ve been to plenty of bars in the Mission where a good time was spoiled by a huge group of amateur hour brogrammers elbowing everyone in site, doing expensive shots, and screaming about their jobs at the top of their lungs. This dynamic exists. We all know it. There are a lot of very wealthy immature pricks here spending way too much money on everything, most of them are wearing North Face jackets, and all of them don’t know how to act. That’s a given.

But I think trying to present the commodification of the San Francisco music scene as a direct result of this one dynamic is misguided at best — and at its worst, grossly disingenuous. It feels especially so when that criticism is coming from a publication which demonstrates, again and again, a reluctance to give any attention to the underground which this article purports to lament the loss of.

All Shook Down is a property of the San Francisco Weekly, and is a publication which purports to provide “San Francisco News and Reviews at Full Volume.” However, if one were to stop by their website today and scan down the articles on the front page, this is what they’d see: Shirley Manson, Tupac Shakur, three articles about a music festival in Las Vegas, and a review of a Ray Wylie Hubbard show. Tupac is very dead. Ray Wylie Hubbard is from Texas, and was born in the 1940’s. Shirley Manson is Shirley Manson. The list continues farther than I can screencap, but rest assured that nobody else on this page is contributing to our ‘local music scene’ in the year 2012.

j. lesley feezberg: An Open Letter to the SF Weekly and All Shook Down

To be fair, it’s the best $17 bacon that you will ever consume.
h/t: Mr.Destructo