Mob Rule

It's time for another one of those crazy music industry festivals, so it's time again for me to be hypercritical. MOBfest is perhaps even more problematic than MECA, because I got the notion that MECA was trying hard to be inclusive. MOBfest is pretty famously insular, so if you aren't tight with the organizers, you can pretty much forget about participating. Which makes it both a bad example and a perfect example of the Chicago music scene at the same time.

Bad because it is in no way a good representation of the Chicago music scene. Perfect because there are so many deep fissures in the local scene, so many people that won't deign to talk to each other, that it's not surprising that the festival ends up being so tightly focused on potentially commercial modern rock.

I'm coming around on the oft-leveled criticism that these festival weekends don't look any different from any other weekend in Chicago, and writing this column once a week for two years has really rammed that home. I've seen some of these bills, almost band-for-band, before. And then there are bands that play this thing every single year. I know the guys in Blank Theory. They're good guys, and I like them. But here they are again playing Metro for MOBfest for about the fifth straight year. What, exactly, is the point?

And the discount for anyone with a MECA badges just strikes me as mean-spirited.