by JOHNSON CUMMINS

If you're an indie-rock geek who visited www.20hz.ca last week to post about how much Pony Up! or Pitchfork sucks/rules, you probably got a bit of a shock - banner ads for Hummers alongside those for "the loudest fucking band in Canada," Cursed.

Here's the skinny: 20hz.ca, headed up by Ryan Mills, became the host for montrealshows.com, as well as a bunch of similar music bulletin boards catering to other Canadian cities. Montrealshows.com could arguably be described as indier than thou (they're not big fans of Rubberman and Pacer, apparently), and even with its ongoing beefs and gripes (par for the course for an Internet chat room), it really did help foster and galvanize a sense of community in the Montreal independent music scene.

Mills, in a questionable move, recently sold 20hz.ca for an undisclosed sum (cough, $10,000, cough) to the current owners of Toronto's El Mocambo and, in keeping with Toronto tradition, it seems that corporate ads started creeping up faster than you can say Sebadoh. It's obnoxious that Mills took the money without compensating all the people who volunteered their time for 20hz.ca, but at least the new owners should soon be fit for shit toupees.

The El Mocambo investors figured that these indie nerds wouldn't even notice a couple of new banner ads, and that they could continue to exploit these poor, myopic knapsack types and their blind brand loyalty. Hell, what' s a few body-spray ads when you're discussing the importance of laptop DJs, right? Immediately after the sale of 20hz.ca, regular posters were seeing their posts wiped out and even banned if they questioned the new banner ads or the new administration's future plans for the bulletin board (apparently, venomous posts about Pacer were left unscathed).

Montrealshows.com moderator and avid fan of a capella band the Nylons Shawny Petsche smelled the Hummer fumes in the air and quickly hauled Montrealshows.com to its current location www.stillepost.ca. The current location now has six times the bandwidth and can handle any amount of traffic, and with over 750 people signing up to the Montreal board on the first day, it looks like they'll need it. On the other hand, the current montrealshows.com board owned by 20hz is littered with invitations to the new stillepost.ca site, while other indie-rock guerrillas use up bandwidth with nonsensical multiple posts. With the exception of a few chumps trying to sell their old futons (probably ex-Rubberman members), the site has been rendered a virtual wasteland. Compared to the 1,000-plus posts 20hz.ca would get each day before the sale, they now garner less than 100, with that number dropping every day. If they were hoping to trap some Internet traffic to soak up ads, the El Mocambo owners soon found themselves chomping into an oven-baked shit sandwich. Ahhhh, life is sweet sometimes.

GIMME INDIE ROCK! Don't forget to catch the last show of the Royal Mountain Band's current formation at the Main Hall on Friday, April 29.

DEATH TO FALSE METAL! jonathan.cummins@gmail.com

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