Someone Got Lost on the Way to the Carrie Underwood Show

Fucking Dan Bejar.

I was all prepared for this week's post to be a bilious rant about how much his show sucked, what a giant turd farmer he is and how sandwich-eating Cannucks are a blight on the music industry.

I was pretty excited about it. I've been carrying around a lot of hate following his shameful performance with the New Pornographers the last time through town and I was very keen on a little character assassination. So what does that unshaven, curly haired fuckstick do on Friday night? He takes the stage at the Black Cat and puts on a tremendous show, during which he appears to actually care about every song.

Vexing.

I like slagging douchebags more than anyone, but I find it real, real hard when they're talented. And Dan Bejar is one talented douchebag.

So in lieu of bashing Bejar, I guess I'll just have to comment on one of the odder phenomena facing the indie hipster concert goer. If there was a dark stain on last night's show, aside from an air conditioner that could have frozen mercury, it was a phalanx of sorority girls and their thick-necked, date-raping fraternity counterparts clustered directly in front of us.

The guys were distinctly uninterested, mercifully leaving to go take Jaeger shots and share uncomfortable homo-erotic silences after just a few songs, but the sorority girls persisted for the bulk of the show, throwing the devil horns, shouting woo, and taking an unending supply of Myspace photos -- not of the band mind you -- but of each other ... pretending to listen to the band. One of their number, a willowy blond, dressed in a short skirt and hooker boots, didn't look at the stage once.

This whole display was more curious than it was annoying. Other than their relentless commitment to flash photography, they weren't actually disruptive, but I couldn't stop thinking of how they managed to stumble into the Black Cat to see a famously persnickety Canadian art rocker sing about literature.

You will never convince me that any of them owned a Destroyer record, or, in fact that they could properly describe what a "record" was.  And its not like the week before the Black Cat hosted Toby Keith or whoever the milquetoast kids are listening to these days. The Black Cat is an unstintingly snooty hipster venue, far from the part of town where they trade in $4 mojitos and rohypnol. So what the hell were they doing there? I spent much of the show writing mental scripts for how they managed to show up there (dare? pledge initiation?) but none of the explanations satisfied.

And the truth is, this happens all the time at indie/punky/off-the-beaten-path kind of shows. One of the realities of listening to non-mainstream music is that, depending on the band, you can usually predict the concert demographic with stunning accuracy. And then the sorority shows up and throws off all your calculations. Perplexing.