  The Dismemberment Plan are a bunch of fucking liars. "College Rock" is not rock and roll. College Rock is the heresy of the rock idea that says that resistance, while futile, is easy, mellow, and only for the privileged.
At the core of the College Rock ideology is the notion that you get to have four uninterrupted years of beersoaked Good Times away from Mom 'n' Dad before you have to start at the Company, after which you'll always have your Memories of them Good Times. This notion is endemic to towns like Bloomington, Boston MA, and the entire state of Vermont, which have as their brief the total isolation of young bastards from reality before they are spit back out into a suburb very much like the one they came from. Many of us hoped that after urlLink 1991 , this kind of smug, self-satisfied garbage would go the way of urlLink the Free Design before it. Unfortunately it was not to be. Rather, it would metastatize into the Jam Bands, touring the country non-stop on a quest to depoliticize and commercialize the last remnants of a politically bankrupt and washed-up echo of the counterculture, letting kids pretend to be their parents. In Bloomington, the only refuge against College Rock is urlLink John Wilkes Booze , at least until Ian Svenonius shows up and takes his schtick back.
John Wilkes Booze rock, and they rock hard. They instantiate the very desperation and intensity that every other act in this town lacks. So why are their fans such a bunch of assholes? All I want to do is meet someone in this town. I'm not an unfriendly person. Shy, maybe, but not unfriendly or mean. I make an effort. But the degree of cliquishness here is absolutely astounding. Finding shows is an absolute impossibility. Once found, any attempt to break into a conversation is met with shock and horror. Frankly, I'm confounded. I suspect that here, Indie Rock is a frat. A super-secret fraternity with its own handshakes and initiation rituals, and I'm just some wannabe who's blundered into the party.
You know what it urlLink reminds me of ? Let me tell you, friends, people complain about places like Madison or Milwaukee or Chicago being cliquish. Well, in those places, if you see someone at a show you don't recognize, you can assume they're just someone you'd never seen at a show before. Here, if they don't recognize you, it's like you're some kind of narc. Last year I accidentally crashed a birthday party - I signed up to a sporadically worthwhile mass e-mail list to try to find out about shows, and the one show I could make it to turned out to be 90% birthday and 10% rock.
The party turned out to be pretty big, with a totally indiscriminate door policy. After the bands played I was hanging out in the kitchen trying to blend in, and I found myself standing near a conversation about some band or another that I happened to know something or other about. I casually attempted to put in my two cents and found myself confronted with a lot of snooty, fuck-off attitude and eyerolling.
Like I was a mere peasant trying to ingratiate myself with royalty. Later I discovered that urlLink one of my interlocutors was the lead singer of urlLink the Panoply Academy Trenchcoat Mafia ; apparently I had committed the cardinal Bloomington sin of trying to hang out with a rockstar without the proper vetting. "The Panoply Whoozis? " you may ask. Ek-fucking-zactly. This is how I came to realize that in Bloomington, you're not even invited to the punk rock show. 
