Dealing With Negative Criticism

Only laugh it off if it is funny.

One of the jobs I've done recently as contract work is compiling a list of every music journo in the UK for a well known PR office. So I actually HAVE the most recent address, home and work numbers, and email address of almost every critic in the country. So the nose-punching option is more seriously doable that you would think. I joked that I should start a service for disgruntled musicians: either A) provide home address and phone to disgruntled musicians, or even better B) provide a nose-punch-o-gram service whereby for a fee, disgruntled musicians could have a gorilla despatched to the critic's house, and administer an anonymous nose-punch.

(BTW, I *AM* joking about this service, before anyone takes me seriously. I know too many journos who really have been threatned/actually assaulted in the persuit of their duty.)

The thing that got me in a state to come back into the office was thinking that they are far much more TOSSERS than I cd ever be - it may be a lie but it managed to get me back on my feet. That and caffiene. Yes it's a short-term fix until I can go home and collapse on my bed and cry.

Actually, fill out YET MORE application forms and then cry, more likely.

My face feels like the little dutch boys finger, trying to hold back the amount of tears I feel behind my eyes every second.

CHIZ.

More coffee.

THE HYPOTHETICALS' main selling point would appear to be that they're not
very good. Musically, they sound like an exceptionally inebriated punk band
falling headlong into a coal cellar while still clutching their instruments.
It doesn't help that their lead vocalist would appear to be in possession
of the single most appalling voice in rock history: an uncommonly nasal
whine from the same elocution class as Eastenders' Patsy Palmer that would
effortlessly peel paint at fifty paces.
If the Hypotheticals continue to produce records of this quality they could
rapidly become as big as, well, Anal Beard.

Rating : One K

yeah, motherfuckers.

Is that a real review, Kitten?

1) Remind yourself of WHAT exactly you are trying to accomplish
2) Examine how well you feel you have accomplished your goal
3) Remind yourself of WHY you are trying to accomplish what you are accomplishing.

But then again, I'm my own harshest critic, and I'm NEVER happy with anything that I've accomplished. Negative criticism hits harder because deep down, I truly believe that it is right. Of course I've been misunderstood, because the thing I created was flawed, and of course it was going to be, because of my own inadequacies and inabilities. What I would give for just a tiny portion of real rock star arrogance and self belief... but I suppose that's what cocaine is for.

I should get offline when I'm depressed like this.

"Claiming on the press release to be a cross between
Sugababes and The Magnetic Fields, this is in fact so 
schmindie it makes Belle And Sebastian sound like
Jay-Z.  Namby pampy xylophones, cymbals that sound
like drizzle, synth burbles and some tosh about 
"a boy who ler-herves you", you'd only like this
if rusty hairslides had terminally affected your brain.
As Chemsitry Experiments go, it's about as interesting 
as boiling water.  Let's just feed 'em to Andrew WK and 
have done with it."

The fact that I think it sounds precicely NOTHING like this helps shrug it off to some degree, but how do you deal with this sort of stuff? I don't know, give it time I guess. In the end I think any negative criticism I've got has made me stronger if anything, but that comes after the initial period of feeling really quite shitty. I honestly can't see any sure-fire way to deal with it, other than to accept it WILL happen.

I dunno, I guess all that "have faith in yourself" crap helps. Not that I'm the person to be talking here, Momus is that man who surely knows about this (that NME review of Hippopotamomus was amazing).

Actually despite the fact I can't leave the office til 6 I shd probably stop reading this thread as well as I want to start crying again. Kate, at least you've accomplished something you're happy with. I still feel like I'm stuck underneath something and .. I am going now!!

it's a nice dream to dream, but given that the latest band to get this kind of treatment in the UK were Starsailor, it's probably not anything to value aesthetically any more, tho' obviously it would be good for record sales. To put it more clearly I mean that good reviews in the UK press don't necessarily entail a special meeting of minds between audience, performer and writer anymore, if indeed they ever did before Oasis and money ruined guitar music for a generation, maybe forever. The ONLY reason for you to want good reviews is for the £3 in your pocket for every LP they sell.

Also, music and its associations being something outwith/bigger than language, the writer should see their job as as much of an artistic challenge as making an Lp to begin with, and it's just as likely that they'll botch their review as you'll botch your LP.

Reading your own reviews, good or bad, seems in some mysterious way to be poison to the creative process.

(the above is my rationale when i get dissed. But also when i get praised. Please don't mock my obsessive-compulsive misreading of the situation, it's brought me peace and contentment)

Kate the one thing you have to learn is to NOT CARE. Even if 99% thought your band was great there will be a 1% that hates it. If you can't learn to not care you will go crazy!

When I get negative criticism and I do take it seriously, the first thing I think is, "OK, might they be right?". I go back and work out why they're not, or why they are and how I can take the criticisms on board. Sometimes the criticisms are of stuff that I really can't do much about - "the meanderings of the terminally over-privileged" said one e-mail and I thought, yeah, fair point, but I'm not going to go live in a garret for you, chum. On the other hand I think I've learned a lot more about my strengths and weaknesses from some quite harsh criticisms than from a lot of praise. Praise is obviously loads nicer and more appreciated though, so the best thing is praise with a couple of jabs slipped in.

If you are really really sure about your artistic ability, vision and execution - or if you take the pragmatic view that fuck it, the record's out and you can't change it now - then ignoring it is the best policy. But saying "ignore it" is as useful as yr mum saying "oh don't scratch it" when you have a spot.

Our principal responsibility is to tell the reader whether a record is worth spending £15 on or not (and for some readers, that's almost a third of their weekly income). Should I tell the reader to waste their money on substandard product just because I might feel sorry for the person(s) who made it, because they are sensitive souls who will cry or throw a hissy fit (or worse) if I give them a bad review? No I should not. We are not paid to make musicians' lives easier; we are paid to say what we think, hopefully in an informed and interesting way, given the limitations of monthly magazine formats.

And if any musicians have a problem with this, then they shouldn't submit their records to magazines for review. Simple as that.

The best way to deal with negative criticism is probably to have a good support system of family/friends/significant others to tell you "oh, it's all rubbish anyway, ignore it."

But what about us losers who started making art because they needed the approval of press/fans/general public/random strangers because they LACKED family/friends/SO's? And *need* approval/validation from others the way some people require sex?

Sarah McL is OTM. The best way to handle it is to invalidate the critic's opinion in some way. Easy to do when it's some twunt who admits their favourite bands are "Coldplay, Muse and RHCP" (fuck off, I don't WANT you to like it) but harder when they hide behind their facade of sneering, never-giving-anything-away-about-themselves anonymity. Good music criticism says as much about the person writing it as it does about the music. It should put THEMSELVES on the line, and say "my tastes are as much up for criticism/discussion as the music I am discussing."

What I am going to do is post the worst offenders and rip them to pieces. Yes.

It is difficult. Nicolas Slominsky's Dictionary of Musical Invective is a good read (though mostly classical-orientated) because it anthologises lots of now acknowledged masterpieces being brutally and ignorantly slagged off. It's a delicate balancing act.

But I think there's a definite distinction between hearing a bog-standard indie/hip hop/metal/whatever record where it's clear that there's nothing remarkable about it, and hearing something that you're not quite sure about, that you might hate (at least initially) but then recognise that something is going on there.

Give you an example: I got sent a record this week from a Norwegian fellow whom Q described as "the Norwegian Badly Drawn Boy" and whose press release exalted as a cross between Burt Bacharach, Beck and the High Llamas. On listening it sounded like bad Divine Comedy (no gags please about "was there ever a good Divine Comedy?"). And you end up bitterly disappointed because you had been promised a masterpiece, whereas you've just wasted an hour of your life immersed in someone else's averageness.

and when ppl were cross w.me that they'd bought it and it had been rub, i basically felt "more fool you for not reading my review properly"

the most common crit i get = "i'm sorry mark s i haven't the slightest idea what yr talking abt" => s&s once published a letter where the complainant said i had made his head hurt; my initial inner response wz "good"

If you are making music as a therapeutic replacement for family/friends/sex then perhaps if you don't want it tainted by others' sneering then you should similarly keep it out of that arena. Distribute/circulate it yourselves, rely on word of mouth/gigs/etc. - and if your music is any good at all, it will eventually find its natural audience.

I admit that stylistic pigeonholing is a major problem now - every magazine, from Wire to Kerrang!, is entrenched in its own, fiercely protected territory, and is not really equipped to take on the wholeness of current music; so I'd question the value of sending things to any of them if it doesn't squarely fit into what they can deal with. It's a sad situation, yes, but that's what market forces seem to demand, and there's not a lot anyone, even Naomi Klein or Michael Moore, can do about that.

i dunno, i guess Abs will go get himself a real name.

This is not supposed to be a discussion of what we like or don't like in music criticism, there are multiple threads about that currently on ILM.

To those who say "if you can't take the heat, get out of the kitchen" well, whatever. I'm not saying "I can't take the heat" I'm saying "Ok, does anyone have any tips for handling hot plates with oven mitts to avoid being burned?" I *DO* think that what we're doing is special and/or neccessary in some way, or I wouldn't be doing it.

I'm well aware of the importance of the press in the music biz, hence why, as I've repeated here a thousand times, we had a PR year before we ever even had a label.

I guess it's more the thing of "if a review REALLY bothers you, you should examine WHY it bothers you, decide if it has a valid point, and ifso, use it as a tool to make your art better."

That wasn't my worst. The worst was Barbara Ellen in the NME saying, totally ad hominem, 'Ugly men get their misogyny with their milk teeth, and Momus makes Nosferatu look like a Chippendale.'

But you know, I've never really complained. For instance, I had a very friendly meeting with Betty Page after the NME review of Hippopotamomus.

I actually enjoy bad reviews and feel bored in countries (like Japan) where everybody's too polite to say anything remotely negative. I think the point is that reviews are all correct from their own perspective. It's then up to you to work out whether the critic lives in Alpha Centauri or next door. Then you're free to decide whether to train your telescope on a new galaxy or move house.

And no, I wasn't strapped up in her dungeon going 'Spank me! Spank me!' I know how your minds work, you dirty sods!

Kate, I like you.

1) Lazy reviews. The utter worst. Why bother writing one? Fit neither for reader nor artist. Obviously ignorant comparisons, formulaeic descriptions and often guilty of...

2) The innacurate review. Often provokes a "WTF? Were you even listening to the same record as me?" response. Can range from the boring Facts Not Checked review to the endlessly entertaining "what galaxy did THIS come from?"

3) The Misses-The-Point review. Like the Nu Metaler reviewing a bubblegum album. They're not SUPPOSED to get it. Though these are the easiest shrugged off, these annoy me the most.

4) The "Gets The Point But Disses The Point" Yeah, they know what you're on about, but they don't like it. These frustrate me to no end. These are the ones that hit the hardest, because they seem most personal. When I assert that X and Y are the reasons I make music in the first place, and a person listens to the album and goes "God, this album is full of X and Y. Gah, X and Y are crap!"

5) The Invective - the critic uses the review to rail against their own personal bugbear. In the right hands, this is devastatingly funny, and sometimes even better than a GOOD review (I have a Swells vs. The Lollies review that I clipped out of the NME and saved, because I swear, the way he used our record to diss the entirety of Indie probably sold more records to "long-haired vegan indie boys who read french poetry and think football is vile" than a good review could ever have hoped to.) But it takes an incredibly GOOD writer to pull it off. And sadly, there are even more mediocre hacks than N. claims there are mediocre records.

I'm going out to buy a Lollies record tomorrow!

I remember this. A bunch of us had been watching the documentary about Nick screened by its student director at his college, and Helen (my old NME editor) got BP to come down. The doc. was chiefly notable for 'moody' tableaux and it placed Nick in profile with an actively twitchy nose, so for 30 minutes H & I were laughing our faces off.

After seeing that, how could BP resist the Man With The Wibbling Nose?

http://www.thelollies.co.uk/images/nmesingle.gif

(though he loses points for mispelling my name, and mysteriously confusing the name of our record label with our PR...)

i sent them gwyneth paltrow's head in a box.

Page and her ilk are fine on their own, but in King's Reach Tower they cower before the Party Whip, who usually has some agenda like 'attack French poetry, it's NME house style'. And they do it, grinding out new slanders on the insult mills. For 2/4d a week.

are you really this lazy and cynical?

'This album is a sexless, emotionless, witless, cripplingly self-indulgent, pompously self-satisfied, intellectually hollow, achingly pretentious, stultifyingly bland, spiritually bereft, ideologically bankrupt, aesthetically repugnant, culturally pointless, musically sterile heap of shit'.

Once you know the NME's values for what they are, it's so easy to read between the lines. In fact, you don't even have to change the words. The NME writes 'art school' (meaning TOSSERS) and you read 'art school' (thinking COOL and COCEPTUAL). The NME writes 'sounds like Bond villainess Rosa Klebb singing washing powder instructions into a karaoke machine after having her coffee drugged with Mogadon' (meaning DIRE) and you read 'sounds like Bond villainess Rosa Klebb singing washing powder instructions into a karaoke machine after having her coffee drugged with Mogadon' (thinking CAN IT REALLY BE THAT GREAT)!

Oh fuck that, if you can't get on a ringtone, I'm not interested.

Personal criticism about myself is what gets me because a good amount of the time I agree with it (and try to improve as a result -- a slow but sure process, or so I hope). And I very much am my own worst critic there, I'd be willing to guess. But about what I create and/or write, hm...maybe I need to see who is annoyed on that front more?

MAN HATER!

Tending to say 'x' was at the conception of this movement or was a pioneer of something is much more accurate.

I wish there were a similar word or meaning of "ovulatory" cause I'd use that as well.

I agree though that seminal is a horrible and overused word.

I like it because of all those associations with semen, and the fact that no one person can conceive of something by themselves.

It was like those times when, during a conversation, someone introduces a slightly unusual word, and the other person then uses the same word in their retorts gratuitously, by way of keeping score.

Great reviews don't appeard to have helped that much. Two reviews called our record "album of the year" and we've still sold less than 400 copies of the little fucker.

If not A&R, see them as R&D. A reviewer has no personal stake in your future (as both you and your label do have), so s/he may be the one to look at what you've come up with, run a few bench tests on it, and tell you to go away and 'fail better'. The inevitability of failure, and the importance of the right to fail, means that bad reviews are perhaps more important than good ones.

'It is failure that guides evolution; perfection offers no incentive for improvement.' Colson Whitehead (1999)

How can we get our hands on the fucker?

Hrrrrm. I like the idea of reviewers "listening to loads of shit so you don't have to." I guess I should take the fact that so many of them are calling us unique and necessary as a good thing. And the bad ones that say "This is not going to save indie because it's not BLAND enough..." well, fuck off. I have no interest in saving indie.

though, kate, if offered i would review your band just to wind you up on ilxor.com!!!! what scene would hte lollies be part of??????

ps - the hang out with mark s and marcello (both charming men...hahahaha.....(morrissey was playing brixton that night) was very coo'....we shall have to do it again sometime.

would the kate look-a-like mumble and waahaaing about her mission to save independant music, in the corner of the academy count?

don't worry, kate, it's part'n'parcel, bad reviews. chin up, etc.