Okay in the second graf she talks about how "international hype" (such as the forced whine of a thousand fake Klostermans writing limp, identical columns for the bovine mass of North American free weeklies, perhaps?) is engendering an undesirable situation where "access to popular gigs is contingent on how many doorpeople you know". The average fan is getting squeezed out from an "anti-establishment" festival initiated to "challenge corporate monopolies," and it's only great Tribunes of the People like Liss that can see the cracks in its "laissez-faire ethos".

Then in the fourth graf she works in a little name-dropping and makes casual reference to how down and hooked-up she is, when confronted with a crowded gig where "we wouldn't've made it in without the help of a friendly Ninja Tune honcho." Later on, forced to wait among the hoi polloi outside Lambi, only "divine intervention snuck us in". How blessed. Your newspaper sent you to cover a festival, you didn't get the gold-plated media treatment (getting in to whatever show you wanted whenever you felt like showing up) you expected, and then you talk about the end of some "grassroots-to-the-max" "honeymoon"? Motherfucker please. She'd never pull the same thing with SXSW, lest they exile her from the media kissassery she seems to think she deserves.

Also she can't fucking write:

-A "kaleidoscopic grab bag"?

-A "buzzy act that turned out to be a downer"?

-Cadence Weapon's "unrehearsed rambles added tons to the experience"? She writes for a living, is paid to tell us something interesting, and she deems the appropriate intensifier to be "tons".

-There's "something exhilarating [what, exactly? isn't that the thing which you're paid to specify?] about watching a crowd of franco-freaks [here we just call them "concertgoers", or alternately "people"] wave their hands in the air while listening to rhymes [wow, there's rap in French -- cra-zee!] delivered in their mother tongue [guess there weren't any allophones in the spot that night, huh Sarah?]". Ah, the Torontonian descends to examine what the Ethnics are up to, out there in the dark beyond the radius of her own self-importance, and deems them worthily amusing as they engage in what can only be explained as a ritualistic reaffirmation of their identity.

I was amused to see Timber on the "bad" list -- that's all you can give us, "bon" or "bad"? are you presuming, perhaps correctly, that your readers can't comprehend information delivered outside of a sidebar? -- as I was under the impression that they *didn't fucking play*. Maybe she mistook one Ships at Night band for another one that included a roughly identical configuration of members, which even I do sometimes if I've been drinking. Still, it's hard to know what impressions to take away from a magazine that appears to be heading straight for the post-literate age. If this trend continues, within five years NOW will be distributed as a brief text message containing a "hot or not" list written in Chewbaccaspeak.

She gets paid to do this?