Sometimes an inside joke is the funniest joke of all. Last month, the ethically challenged music rag SF Sounds ran a story about local bluegrass band the Brothers Comatose headlined ‘The Backstreet Boys of Bluegrass,’ which wasn’t critical insight about the group resembling a boy band — as one might think! — so much as a strangely bitter, caustic collection of accusations, up to weirdly specific details about some festival in the Sierra Nevadas and how the band drew too many people and then barfed on stage, or something.
The thing was a wreck, complete with “quotes” attributed to a person who doesn’t exist about the venue’s permit troubles, and a byline which ran in the print version but was removed from the online version, because it was pretty clearly a public opportunity for SF Sounds publisher Jason Perkins to grind yet another axe in his tabloid-size paper that gets dropped off around the city to advertise shows at his clubs and disguise various issues surrounding them as objective editorial in a newspaper. (Bob Patterson at SF Critic explains the whole fiasco here.)
Anyway! In response, the Brothers Comatose have pulled a “when they go low, we go high” move and just recorded a damn Backstreet Boys song already, and of course, it’s good, because “I Want It That Way” is a good song and the Brothers Comatose are a good band and SF Sounds is, well, whatever it is. It’s almost the weekend. Enjoy!
