Like two nerds arguing over who’s got the better protractor, Chicago-based Pitchfork and Beverly Hills-based Urb magazine are in a tiff over Steve Aoki’s new mix Pillowface and His Airplane Chronicles. Pitchfork hated it, and said so in a review Urb describes as a "tirade so spiteful and unsubstantiated that it pretty much decimates any credibility the indie rock monolith had left, especially when it comes to the world of  "indie-dance" music."

I don’t have a dog in this fight, since we’re talking about a frigging Steve Aoki album here. But then Urb had to go and say this:

"[Pitchfork would] rather be giving Arcade Fire the obligatory handjob while posted up in their Chicago digs (Chicago indie rock, btw, is the most pretentious smarter-than-thou scene in the entire country)."

Hey, hey, hey! Why are you bringing us into this? What did we do?

Sure, we’ve got our share of math and orch-pop rockers, and okay, I’ll spot you a night here or there at the Empty Bottle as having air so thick with pretension that you expect the assembled crowd to to start making out with itself. But show me a local music scene that doesn’t have the same exceptions to a rule. Overall, Chicago has as much pretension as a beer fart.

And not for nothing, but as influential as Pitchfork is in the world of music criticism, I’ve never felt that they were particularly intrinsic to Chicago’s local music scene, aside from the obvious exception of its annual music festival in Union Park though even that has a national aim, and reach.

But Urb’s got to be a little touchy. If I lived in the metro area of Los Angeles/Beverly Hills and the most buzzworthy band my city had right now was Film School, I might start tossing around insults, too.

(h/t The Daily Swarm)