The Decemberists played what may be their last show in the area for a while last night. Here's what I learned about frontman and songwriter Colin Meloy.

Colin Meloy will not be pigeonholed on the matter of beverages: There were some pretty banal observations made, on the Merriweather Post’s Twitter vanity board and by some people standing near me, about the preponderance of “hipsters” at the show. True, Meloy and his cohort do fit some parts of a certain stereotype: They are from Portland, they have facial hair, they play a lot of funny-looking string instruments, they dress with a sort of anachronistic formality considered purposefully eccentric by contemporary standards, and they drop a lot of obscure literary refs. So it may have surprised some of these smarmy people-sorters that Meloy, early in the show, declared the mojito—a tropical, syrupy, anti-flannel Island cocktail—to be “the official drink of summer 2011.” I’m sure the haters chalked it up to irony.

Colin Meloy is a Twihard: Midway through the set, the Decemberists frontman played “Dracula’s Daughter,” a song he has described as the worst he’s ever written. It goes something like this:

Dracula’s daughter
Has got it bad
You think you’ve got it bad?
Try having Dracula for your dad

Meloy prefaced the diddy by explaining that he had “desperately” submitted it for the soundtrack to each of the Twilight films — alas, in vain. Fair to say that he was being ironic that time.

Colin Meloy has memorized Martin Scorcese’s 1978 concert film The Last Waltz: Or at least the part during “It Makes No Difference” when Band guitarist Robbie Robertson shows some panache by quivering his pick hand in the air after a particularly sexy solo note (see 3:30). Meloy simulated the gesture during an intentionally haphazard solo on during “The Perfect Crime #2”—then copped to it in an aside, to the immense pleasure of pseudo-esotericists such as yours truly.

Colin Meloy’s guitar is a more graceful crowd-surfer than he is: After descending into the crowd and moshing with the floor section during the first encore set, Meloy sent his guitar back to the stage on a bed of hands. He then followed somewhat awkwardly in suit, pitching and rolling a bit, a member of the security heaving him over the gap separating the front row barrier and the stage.

Colin Meloy hates Michelle Bachmann more than Rick Santorum: As the Decemberists took the stage in Maryland, a gaggle of Republican presidential hopefuls were doing the dozens in New Hampshire—including Bachmann, the Minnesota congresswoman, and Santorum, the former Pennsylvania senator/sodomy-related neologism. Both earned unflattering dedications: to Santorum, Meloy dedicated “The Chimbley Sweep,” a song about vengeful urchin whom not even a mother could love; to Bachmann, Meloy offered licensing rights for “Calamity Song,” an apocalyptic vision of the collapse of civilization, suggesting that it might make a good anthem for Bachmann’s presidential campaign. Meloy is obviously not a fan of either candidate, but the implication seems to be that Santorum is wrathful but ultimately impotent, while a Bachmann presidency could portend the End Times.

Modern folk rarely includes storytelling. Todd Snider is, therefore, an anachronism: a true bard who spends at least as much time contextualizing songs as he does playing them.

Originally from Oregon, Snider has accumulated barrels of yarns over 15-plus years on the road — such as becoming the unlikely frontman of a Memphis country band after the lead singer was knocked unconscious by a drunk patron falling off a ceiling swing (to take one example from Snider’s most recent live album, which came out in February).

In keeping with the form, championed in America by activists like Guthrie, Seeger, Dylan, Ochs, et al., there’s political fare too: notably the song “Conservative Christian, Right-Wing Republican, Straight White American Male.” But while Snider may be old school, he is no revolutionary. “I might share some of my opinions with you over the course of the evening,” he is wont to disclaim at the outset of shows, “not because I think they’re smart, or because I think you need to know them, but because they rhyme. I didn’t come down here to change any of y’alls minds about anything, I come down here to ease my own mind about everything.”

Apropos, much of Snider’s work celebrates people and places that, like him, “don’t wanna throw [their] fishing line in the old mainstream.” On “Sideshow Blues” (a near clone of Dylan’s “Tombstone Blues”), Snider sings: “It’s a circus out here, Mama, I got them sideshow blues.” One reading: I may be a freak, but the rest of the world is an absurd pageant too, just with a bigger budget and more pyrotechnics.

The sideshow is the main event at The Birchmere tonight. Tickets still available.

TODD SNIDER w/ MARSHALL CHAPMAN, THE BIRCHMERE (Map), TONIGHT, 7:30 P.M., $25

Middle Brother, a supergroup of rising Gen-Y roots rockers, may just deserve the attention that so often eludes the mid-sequence siblings for whom the band is named.

Jon McCauley, of Deer Tick; Taylor Goldsmith, of Dawes; and Matthew Vasquez, of Delta Spirit might not yet wield the indie capital of another recent (and aesthetically similar) supergroup, the Monsters of Folk (M. Ward, Conor Oberst, and Jim James), but Middle Brother’s self-titled album makes a pretty good case for this J.V. squad of easy-riding neo-folkies.

The band’s tiny oeuvre includes the album’s two thematic centerpieces: “Me, Me, Me” and “Middle Brother,” both of which (but especially the first) evoke ca. 1963 Beatle-pop. Elsewhere, MaCauley sneers mischievous little folk songs while the rangier Goldsmith and Vasquez wail with the sort of soulful desperation that a firstborn son (nor any of the Monsters of Folk, for that matter) could hardly hope to conjure.

The gig is being billed as “Middle Brother w/ Deer Tick and Dawes,” meaning those who attend will likely be treated to songs out of those bands’ repertories as well. Tickets are still available.

MIDDLE BROTHER w/ DAWES and DEER TICK, TONIGHT, 9:30 CLUB, 7 P.M. DOORS, $25

I think we can all agree that the best part of the Oscars was Luke Matheny winning Best Short Film (Live Action) for his grad-school thesis, “God of Love.” For all of James Franco and Anne Hathaway’s self-aware demographic-baiting, it was Matheny’s acceptance speech when youth had its moment at the Oscars.

City Paper arts monarch J.L. Fischer has been throwing up posts from a cruise ship this weekend, where several hundred bruisers, led by D.C. rock mayor Ian Svenonius, have been rocking in the free world — that is, international waters.

Lady Gaga made like the Romans and issued some dubious maxims from the bully pulpit during her visit to D.C. last week. TBD compiles a few gems.

The Spiderman broadway show is so doomed. On the other hand, there is a market for morbid curiosity, so we’ll see.

Have a good one!

-So a Foxx, a Seal, and a Crowe walk into the White House... Chris Richards and WaPo have the 1,148-word punchline. (Sub-question: Will Obama pardon Jamie Foxx for futzing with Motown lyrics for a cheesy laugh?) (Sub-sub-question: If Peter Sarsgaard and Kiefer Sutherland had a baby, would it not look exactly like Chris Richards?)

-Fred Armisen is performing at the Black Cat tonight. For those of you who don’t fit the mold of the self-loathing hipster, Armisen has been killing it on "Portlandia," his new show with Carrie Brownstein on IFC. (Did you read?) The man is so much better than his dime-store Obama impersonation.

-TBD plumbs the meta-subversion of wearing L.L. Bean to a Lady Gaga concert.

-Prince of Petworth smiles at how silly old-timey folks albums used to be.

-Kanye West gives everyone a seizure.

-Free Chocolate!

I should go.

Alas, 'twas a heartbreaking Grammy night for most D.C. nominees. Local legend Chuck Brown couldn’t beat Sade for best non-solo R&B performance; Raheem Devaughn failed to upset John Legend and the Roots for best R&B album; and Cee-Lo, dressed as some sort of Dr. Suess-jacking peafowl, proved too formidable for upwardly mobile newcomer Carolyn Malachi. See Click Track for the play-by-play.

Most satisfying win of the night? Esperanza Spalding. Dig it.

Jealous of the winners? YOU TOO can be a Grammy winner! A helpful how-to, courtesy of J.L. Fischer.

The Grammy performances were nothing if not a picture of (literal and figurative) racial harmony. But as the film industry's own climactic awards show bears down, A.O. Scott points out that “it was perhaps the whitest year for Hollywood since the post-Richard Pryor, pre-Spike Lee 1980s,” a fact that should reflect glaringly on Oscar night.

In Friday's WaPo: National Endowment for the Arts chairman Rocco Landesman says this country needs fewer theaters. "Look, you can either increase demand or decrease supply," he said at Arena Stage last month. "Demand is not going to increase. So it is time to think about decreasing supply." Refreshingly candid or needlessly fatalistic? In either case: YIKES.

The Atlantic picks some love-themed cultural artifacts on the occasion of the holiday. Props to features editor James Gibney for repping Gram Parsons.

What does it mean when your mom and your girlfriend get you the same Valentine’s Day gift? Guesses are welcomed in the comments, I’m desperate to know.

Bye!

How will the outcome of last night’s Super Bowl affect the continuing viability of “Black and Yellow” as a club anthem? Guess it depends on how the Pirates do this year.

But enough of sport! There are important Art Things afoot!

To wit: In The Future, will art students take field trips to Google? The Google Art Project might not supplant galleries, but I certainly wouldn’t call this one based on glitches in the project’s beta version. WaPo has the lowdown.

Meanwhile, TBD pitches Hollywood on some D.C.-based T.V. shows that might actually capture the city without kowtowing to the seat-of-government trope and all its attendant cliches.

Here on Arts Desk, Andrew Noz breaks down the pros and cons of Wale’s decision to sign with Rick Ross’s new label. Among the suspected cons: “Wale's music will likely move even further away from anything resembling a DMV aesthetic.” (Perhaps TBD could pitch Wale on album concepts that would capture that aesthetic?)

ReadySetDC reps the pop-up Museum of Censored Art, which happily does not yet include this gem.

CRITICAL THEORY BONUS! University of Virginia professor Mark Edmundson has this to say about the absence of sweetness and light atop the best-seller charts:

Media no longer seek to shape taste… It pisses off the readers. They feel insulted, condescended to; they feel dumb. And no one will pay you for making him feel dumb. Public entertainment generally works in just the opposite way—by making the consumer feel like a genius. Even the most august publications and broadcasts no longer attempt to shape taste. They merely seek to reflect it. They hold the cultural mirror up to the reader—what the reader likes, the writer and the editor like. They hold the mirror up and the reader and—what else can he do?—the reader falls in love. The common reader today is someone who has fallen in love, with himself.

Admittedly, we suck. But take heart, Dr. Edmundson: The Decemberists have the No. 1 album in the land!

Have a good day!

Today, D.C. anti-censorship picketers seek Wayne Clough’s head. Clough, the Smithsonian secretary, is on the hot seat after ceding the National Gallery’s standards of artistic decency to the Catholic League. The advocacy group ART+ is organizing protest today at 1 p.m. at the Smithsonian aimed specifically at convincing the museum’s board of regents to fire Clough.

There’s a new book out about Alan Lomax, the legendary audiophile/historian who discovered Huddie “Lead Belly” Ledbetter and dozens of other folkies, foreign and domestic, on his travels.

In light of the current debacle at the Smithsonian, it may be worth noting that in the early ‘40s, the FBI used some thin evidence to peg Lomax as a communist and tried to get him canned from another state-funded cultural preserve, the Library of Congress. But the LoC refused to bow to right-wing paranoia and kept Lomax. Several weeks later, the library dispatched Lomax to Mississippi, where he made field recordings of Muddy Waters and Son House that changed music history. In 1967, the Smithsonian asked Lomax to help organize the inaugural iteration of the now-famous Folklife Festival. In 1986, Ronald Reagan gave Lomax the National Medal of the Arts.

OK, other stuff:

-Protesting, for all its theatricality, can be a bit stylistically prosaic. Perhaps the ART+ advocates would find have more fun critiquing Clough via, a “Docu-opera,” as is the style of the time?

-WaPo examines some lower-stakes examples of artist-venue antipathy.

-Filmmaker Andrew Rossi and kindreds at the New York Times protest the market-driven funding model for public-service journalism in a good documentary with a bad title.

In an upset, this weekend’s episode of Saturday Night Live had significantly more hits than misses! Worth a gander; Jessie Eisenberg killed it. Have a good Monday!

Morning, folks! And happy MLK Day!

The Golden Globes were last night, and hoo boy were they chippy! Much to the chagrin of WaPo TV critic Hank Steuver, who apparently would have preferred that host Ricky Gervais act the ass-kissing buffoon, Gervais ventured to roast such sacred cows as The Tourist, Tim Allen, and the Hollywood Foreign Press Association, which puts on the awards. “You kept hoping the crowd would rise up and pummel Gervais,” Steuver writes.

Really, did I? Writing in the New York Times, Alessandra Stanley points out that when they were not being zinged by the host, several celebrities also piled on jokes at the expense of the journalistic corps that was honoring them. But who would ever accuse prickly artiste Christian Bale or Good Ol’ Bobby De Niro of fostering hostility? Writes Stanley:

The ceremony itself is almost always a fast-paced orgy of fashion, frivolity and self-congratulation, and often more fun to watch than the Oscars, partly because viewers can expect the unexpected.

So there you go. If you’re a celebrity who can’t stand a few jibes from a funnyman, surround yourself with sycophants elsewhere and have the HFPA mail your trophy. If you’re a press association who wants merely to bathe those you cover in blandishments and champagne backwash, don’t hire a famously irreverent comedian to host your show, particularly a comedian whose oeuvre includes poignant, semi-autobiographical discourse on the folly of kowtowing (See Extras, season 2). As last night's broadcast ended, Gervais delivered his final and perhaps best joke of the night: “Lastly, I’d like to thank God for making me an atheist.” The British entertainer has made it plain in his work that he does not believe in God. Last night, he made it plain that he does not believe in treating celebrities like gods, either.

Whew, OK.

-In TBD, D.C.-based rapper Whitefolkz explains the difference between a “pimp” and a “mack.”

-Here on Arts Desk, Ryan Little holds forth on a new single by Hume.

-Congrats to Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross, whose score for The Social Network netted them a Golden Globe last night. I watched the film yesterday for the third time, and while Aaron Sorkin and David Fincher certainly deserved the awards they won, I can’t imagine the film being being nearly as good without Reznor and Ross’s alternatingly pensive and sinister, electro-infused compositions.