You buy the music section front-row tickets for unrepentant pop troll Avril Lavigne's upcoming tour, and we reward you with a Payback Time T-shirt, two CDs off the Straight 's Top 50, and two tickets to a Live Nation club show in Vancouver within the next four weeks. Here's this week's winning whinge.

Dear Payback Time: I can't help but feel punished by the sorry state of opening acts these days. I've been to over a dozen concerts in the last 10 months (including Silverchair, Athlete, and Keane), only to suffer the ruthless onslaught of musicians with no concept of song structure, melody, or creativity. Who do I blame? It's bad enough that Ticketmaster charges $10 "convenience fees". What is convenient about having to sit through a painful 40-minute set by so-called band the Mohawk Lodge? A word to all the indie-pop bands: three guitars is unnecessary; three guitars playing the same thing is cruel, ear-bleeding punishment, whose only upside is not having to pretend you're ignoring your boss the next day, because you can't fucking hear anything anyway.

> Josh Fraser

John Lucas replies: Dearest Josh–I can see why I got stuck with the task of replying to your letter. After all, as a member of several local indie bands, I have played opening sets for relatively high-profile touring acts. I'm also a well-documented fan of the Mohawk Lodge, having written two Local Motion stories on the group. However, since I'm unlikely to do even a pubesworth of damage to your set-in-stone opinion, I won't launch into some eloquent essay about the importance of supporting local up-and-comers, without whom Vancouver wouldn't even have a music scene worth writing about. Nor will I offer a lengthy explanation of how opening bands usually don't get a proper sound check and are often stuck with a mix done by someone who doesn't give a flying fart, which is why they end up sounding like a wall of undifferentiated shit. Instead, I'll take this opportunity to plug a pet project: the Georgia Straight Music Blog. As the primary contributor to the blog, it pains me deeply when a post I spent an hour of my life composing generates zero comments. Why, it's almost as heartbreaking as playing your songs for a roomful of yammering ingrates who just want you to get off the fucking stage so they can cheer on some out-of-town headliner.

For taking the time to abuse us, Josh Fraser takes home Blue Rodeo's Small Miracles and Eddie Vedder's Into the Wild. You can voice your impotent rage by snail mail or by e-mailing payback@straight.com .