You invite Justin Bieber to the music section’s laser-tag game, and we reward you with a Payback Time T-shirt and two tickets to a Live Nation club show of your choice taking place in Vancouver within the next four weeks. Here’s this week’s winning whinge.

Dear Payback Time: Imagine my disappointment when I read the music section’s entries in the recent Best of Vancouver issue. Was it just me experiencing a strange sense of déjí  vu, or didn’t we see the exact same thing last year? Sure, asking the stars of Vancouver’s music scene about the best of Vancouver was an interesting enough concept—the first time around. But couldn’t you have come up with something different, dare I ask, original, this year? If the food section can come up with such gems as “Most Erotic and Web-Savvy Name for a Weenie”, I would expect a bit more creativity from the music section.

Instead, in the music section we were given a lame set of six questions for each person/band interviewed, which may have been interesting for the first few interviews, but 12 sets of the same questions became repetitive and boring. Ke$ha, Michael Bublé, and Lotto Max can only be so interesting. With such a talented team of writers, couldn’t each interviewer have come up with their own unique set of questions for each band, each giving the reader fresh insights into the “people, places, and albums that make the city great”? In a paper that prides itself on being “hipper than thou”, at best it was disappointing, at worst lazy and uninspired.

> Kevin Lee

Mike Usinger responds: Dearest Kevin—You have no idea how difficult it was to put down the Pringles canister, peel myself off the couch, and drag my ass over to the computer to answer your little missive. I am, you see, feeling lazy. Much like we all were when we dreamed up the questions for the Best of Bands feature. You see, our thinking—what little thinking we had the energy for—was that we would come up with some questions designed to see how clever the people we were interviewing were.

I see now that that was stupid. Screw making them be entertaining with their responses; next year, we’re going to go with the most awesome questions ever fired at anyone in this city. Like “Who would you rather do—the farting corpse of Jack Webster or Sarah Palin with a whopping yeast infection and a searing case of ’roids?” And “Do you agree that the Group of Seven doesn’t hold a Hornby Island beeswax candle to the absinthe-addled surrealists of 1920s Montmartre?” And “Is foie gras wrong if the ducks are fed a steady diet of vanilla-bean-infused Grey Goose vodka by a clown dressed like John Wayne Gacy in his Pogo the Clown costume?”

All these queries, which will be tailor-crafted for each musical act we talk to, will require a simple yes or no answer. Because, as you note, we’ve been going about this annual feature all wrong. Thanks for opening our eyes to the fact that it’s not about the answers at all, but how fantastical the questions.

You can voice your impotent rage by snail mail or by sending an e-mail to payback@straight.com