Yesterday morning, I waded into the slap fight between Pitchfork and Urb magazine with this post on the TOC blog. In dissing Pitchfork, Urb placed them within the Chicago indie rock scene, which it finds to be “the most pretentious smarter-than-thou scene in the entire country.”

Nevermind that ALL indie rock scenes are at least a little pretentious, but I don’t think you can really call much of anything in Chicago pretentious (although in a response, LA Weekly drops a reference to Tortoise and if all most of the rest of the world knows about Chicago is either its post-rock and free jazz scenes, then I guess I can understand where they’re getting that from). Moreover, I don’t think Pitchfork is a vibrant part of the city’s scene. It’s not a knock against them, they’re just more nationally-focused.

In any case, the post got picked up by LAist and The Daily Swarm as well as a couple other places. I’m getting called out for not knowing my ass from page 8 in the dictionary because Film School are originally (?) from San Francisco and not L.A. OK, my bad even though they’re billing themselves as an L.A. band. And yeah, they’ve been around a couple years, but that’s exactly my point: I don’t see them as anything more than a band of noodling wankers who keep trying to convince people to buy what they’re selling.

Skeet On Mischa also points out that No Age is obviously L.A.’s most talked-about indie musical export right now. And he’s got a point. It slipped my mind that the noise-rock duo hails from there.

So to sum up, in the 1st Annual Talking Out Of Your Ass Tourney, TOC, Pitchfork and Urb finish in a three-way tie.