Philadelphia, Meet Your Future

JOEY SWEENEY BECAME well-known around the city during a seven-year stint as a writer, columnist and editor with the Philadelphia Weekly. His work earned him several awards, including top honors for music criticism from the Association of Alternative Newsweeklies. But it wasn't just his strong, perceptive and sometimes seriously acerbic prose that made people read his stuff and talk about him. His tendency to refer to himself — and his personal story — self-indulgently in his writing made him something of an alt-guy lightning rod around Philly.

Particularly decadent, for instance, was a Weekly piece he wrote about his music playlist at his 2002 wedding, held at NoLibs' trendy 700 Club — "usual home of DJ Abby Klein and Mr. 10 Fingers," he informed his readers in his lead. On the rationale behind the choice of the Beach Boys' plebeian "God Only Knows" as his and wife Reyna's wedding song, he wrote: "Mr. & Mrs. Sweeney chose this song, though, for a host of reasons: The sentiment of the song points to exactly how lost the both of us would be without the other's guiding hand; the peerless production values and arrangement; and, it must be said, how invoking a kook like Brian Wilson at our wedding would at least for a second take the attention off us and if nothing else, make us appear vaguely normal by comparison. There was not a dry eye in the house." The marriage lasted two years.

Joey's self-obsession invited attacks. They would eventually include personal insults, such as those peddled by a tiny 'zine called Cherry Coke, which mocked Sweeney as having "the face of a 15-year-old boy and the ass of a 40-year-old woman." In the 1990s, an obscure private e-mail chain called Dummytown, created by a group of fellow scenesters, some of whom Sweeney had apparently burned ("He has a tendency to cast aside friends and associates when he no longer feels that they're serving his purposes," says Jonathan Valania, a former friend, Weekly staff writer, and especially former contributor to Philebrity. "There is a bit of a body count") took issue with everything from the facts in Sweeney's stories to his style to his ability as a writer. Sweeney claims today that the posts didn't bother him all that much, but a Dummytown participant who knew Joey at the time remembers otherwise. "Because this town is so small, the list became comprised of a lot of people who had problems with Joey," says the former participant. "And he took it pretty badly."

Which is ironic — or at least paradoxical — given the niche that Sweeney would carve out for himself. In 2004, after a falling-out with Weekly editors and a year of freelancing for other publications, including Time Out New York and Salon.com, Sweeney and partner Adam Farrell launched Philebrity.com.