Here is the thread where we bitch about rock critics we don't like

JR Taylor's an ass.

(this is not to take away from nate's righteous indignation. it just makes him [taylor] exhausting. everything is up grabs and nothing is sacred! lookit the way i poke fun at everything, not the least of all my own "culture"! if rock crit is parasitic [and i'm not saying it's not necessarily], then people like taylor as so doubly filled with it's own blood that hopefully someday their fat, tick-like bodies will explode messily in the hot sun.)

This is going to be another Vice thread, I just know it

geeta, once again, someone stumbling into an occasional hoary truism that makes them look intelligent doesn't refute their uh less positive qualities. like being a boil on the asshole of popular criticism.

I don't really buy the idea that Taylor has read that much old-skool rockcrit, or intentionally aims to ape them in his prose. His writing isn't good enough to even merit accusations of imitation. But I think he's responding to things that he sees among other current critics that he quite rightly doesn't like -- about rock crit today. He's aiming to be contrary. The problem with that is that readers care more about his opinion of the music at hand than they do about his opinion of the latest issue of 'Rolling Stone', and in that sense he is doing his readers a disservice.

Although I want to throttle Xgau for letting that piece even run. It was juvenile and poorly written. It's great to be a contrarian and all, but that piece was shit. Surely there were more capable people to address Sonic Youth's relevance, Bob.

I also despise the jackass, who, in SPIN about ten years ago, claimed, in a published Pussy Galore review (or maybe it was JSBX), that the first time she ever heard the Rolling Stones was when she heard Pussy Galore's "Exile On Mainstreet." In my maturity I have since forgotten her name but she was atrocious.

The worst writers out there today, and I put the blame on their editors for running this crap, are the ones who try at every opportunity to make themselves the story. Diarist writing is booooooooooooring and needs to be left to the blogosphere where losers like me can think they matter.

NIRVANA NIRVANA (DGC/UNIVERSAL) NN (that's two of out five, btw)

Considering the distasteful way Universal has begun its Nirvana back catalogue exploitation, the company must be relieved that it doesn't have Kurt Cobain to deal with. You just know he would never have allowed a single unreleased track -- the chilling kiss-off You Know You're Right -- to be used as buyer bait for a lame 14-song holiday-season cash-in collection with a cheesy romance-novel-type silver embossed sleeve and foolish liner notes written by Rolling Stone hack-for-hire David Fricke. Where's all the other unreleased music? Poor-value-for-money product like this is what keeps the CD-Rs burning.

TIM PERLICH

that's pure comedy!

Also Don, I'm guessing Xgau had very little to do with publishing Amy P.'s piece on SY. He's a "senior editor", but I think a certain Chuck E. actually puts together the music section and was probably the one who decided to run her piece.

Chuck Eddy
Martin Popoff

And yes...I too hate the "culture of rock critics" that guys like Bangs have created. OTM there.

expect semi-frequent updates.

-
Alan

No way did it just glide by the editor...SPIN wasn't on autopilot in those days.

Actually, as my memory revives itself to something more reliable, it was a record review on the Rolling Stones' Steel Wheels album. It was in 1991 (or was that 1990 when that piece of shit hit the rack. Pardon my digression.) The copy went more like, "The first time I ever heard the Rolling Stones was through Pussy Galore. Yes, it's true. My first experience with Exile On Main Street came from Jon Spencer and not Mick Jagger." Or something closer to that.

If that's funny to you, great. I found it totally inane and worthless. The tone of the review did not strike me as funny or even faux ironic. It was a predictable snipe against dinosaur rock, and not convincing.

I didn't realize I was getting huffy about it, but thanks for letting me know. I thought this thread was all about bitching about critics we didn't like.

Oh, and if Eddy signed off on the SY piece, great. My apologies to The Dean if that's the case.

P.S. Since I'm getting huffy, I might as well let it be known that I generally don't care for Rob Sheffield's work.

Speaking of Voice writers, I don't really like Jane Dark; cheers Alex in NYC, something we can agree on!

Speaking of Voice pieces, I think the recent piece on Cobain's diaries was a travesty!

The expose in my newspaper the other day about how Britney and Holly Valance (wait for it) use their scantilly-clad bodies to attract the attention of girls and men in order to sell songs written by middle-aged men (OH MY GOD!) was much more annoying (those "middle-aged men" = Nelly Hooper and Max Martin ==> GENIUSES!)

same here, can we have an explanation as to why those paragraphs were so damn awful.

I hate music critics that don't agree with me. They are just wrong, end of story.

If it was in 1997, I find it even more dubious that someone had only heard the Rolling Stones was off a very rare PG tape that came out in 1986. It was a hard tape to find back then, as it is now. If that was indeed her leaping point, fine. It strikes me as an overstatement or some attempt to register some urban, Gen X credibility.

It just seemed all too conveniently hip to me at the time, and until I read it again I'll continue to think it wasn't a good review. I don't think you're necessarily being unfair Matos, but your evaluation of people who hated that review is rather dismissive--it implies that those of us who didn't like it didn't take the time to "get it." All I can say for myself is that I read it over and over, surprised that something like that ran in SPIN.

I see that review on the exact same terms as I do the Murray Street review in VV this year. Unoriginal. And not funny.

how Britney and Holly Valance (wait for it) use their scantilly-clad bodies to attract the attention of girls

Lezzing up is the new Chartpop! The video for "Down Boy" implied as much, anyway...

Btw, Dom, that's a press release, right? NO WAY could that have appeared under the pretense of music criticism...

Daniel - most UK writing about indie is exactly like that nowadays, pick up a copy of X-Ray if you want further misery.

(I don't know Hopper or Grose's stuff well enough. Amy P seems to get her detractors saying "oh she only gets work cos she's a young girl" and her supporters saying "oh she gets detraction cos she's a young girl" - I don't think her record collection and/or taste really feature in any of the disputes about her writing)

i'm talking abt unspoken assumptions on the part of my deluded opponents, the assumptions behind the kneejerk belief that girls make poor critics, not the facts in the given case => i am on perfectly safe ground here, since unspoken assumptions are unspoken!!

however i *do* think there was an element, in the murray street thread, of "she opts for mere girly blog-style biography bcz her approved and attested knowledge is obv deficient" (ie accurate knowledge of one's own responses and the reasons for them can only be of value to a reader when accurate knowledge of discographies and canons and stuff has been demonstrated) (and i wd argue that accurate knowledge of the latter is very often used in music writing as a mask for uncertainty and even fear in respect of the former...)

as it happens, the name of this condition of possibility is currently chuck eddy — who is as we speak (disclaimer disclaimer disclaimer) working on a piece of mine, for possible inclusion in the VV

(a review, curiously enough, of a record sent to me by a label whose current PR person = jessica hopper!!) (but i only just realised this...)

"the problem with [x] as an editor is that they only run pieces by ppl whose writing they like"

Most music writing is now a dreary recitation of facts written by dot-brains with no real understanding of the world. That’s how we ended up with the All Music Guide.

Hey, that's mean!

(Frank Kogan is an ilxor so no apology needed!)

- "this style of rockwrite is inappropriate therefore AP is rubbish"

and

- "this style of rockwrite is great but AP is rubbish at it"

in other words the specifics were important.

I think its a good road to go into every once in a while. when the reviewer got into music via x and now, many years later, that person is reviewing x. Just saying what the music/band means to you with some general descriptions to give the reader an idea of what the rec sounds like (i thought those were OK in her piece).

Back to a point Ned made, which I have to agree with: there seems to be little to no place for all-out enthusiasm for music in rockcrit. Sometimes there are writers who do use it and go a bit overboard and mushy (like the currently-on-hiatus Pioneer Press columnist Jim Walsh) but it beats the editorial "lots of media outlets are saying good things about this band so let's try and find the writer on our staff who is the least likely to enjoy them so we can flaunt our veiny 'bucking conventional wisdom' jimbrowski" approach.

I kind of mean who marries the other good things about rock criticism to a sense of enthusiasm.

I might be retreading a few points here, but...

i do think it's a boring descriptor insofar as that EVERY record on the market is - to varying degrees - a cash-in, and certainly ALL greatest hits album are, even by the strictest standards.

All records are released to make a buck, true, but there's a difference between "if we make a lovingly rendered compilation of Nirvana's singles plus some fan-favourite album tracks and some unreleased shit, and get someone who is widely acknowedleged as being a good writer on the topic of Nirvana, lots of people will buy it!" and "If we just throw around Nirvana's most well known hits, people will buy it cuz they're too cheap to spring for all the albums, and fans will have to buy it too because we'll tack on 'You Know You're Right'!" I think that what the reviewer is arguing for here is that the compilers of the Nirvana best-of went for the second approach, which if it is true, I find regrettable (and foolish, in these days of p2p sharing and all...)

and "lack of unreleased material" (which is like going to a disney film and complaining about the lack of subtitles)

Ah, I don't know...sure, bonus tracks are usually garbage, but I didn't mind at all having "The Sweetest Thing" on the U2 best of, or those extra tracks on the Jesus & Mary Chain compo... just tag 'em on at the end so that most listeners don't have to suffer through them.

I certainly understand the point of the collection, but it seems to me that given the shifts in the Beatles' career -- and the fact that most people have a marked preference for one or another phase -- any of the LPs would actually be sort of more consistent than just the #1s.

The Red Album/Blue Album approach was right-on, I think.

It reminds me of Bruce Springsteen's Greatest Hits

What did they miss out on there? "I'm On Fire", certainly, "Jungleland" (maybe too long, tho), "Growin' Up"?

Final Casual Fan Personal Point Of View: Nirvana best-of is a dumb idea, 'cos all the good stuff is on Nevermind and MTV Unplugged and everything else is crap, anyway.

I don't own any Nirvana so I couldn't honestly compare. I think a fan would want all the original albums, yeah.

After reading Scott Seward's El-P review I wondered how such an absolute farce of an attempt to communicate anything, other than a masturbatory fascination with words and the self speaking them, got printed in the Voice. One would expect a reviewer to offer something more tangible than useless literary name-dropping and meaningless pop-culture references like "El-P's sound tries to come across like some William Burroughs cutup of the B-boy's Bhagavad Gita but turns out more like Nabokov's Lolita holding down a slab of Velveeta so it can get fucked by Chester Cheetah." The point of a review is to express cogent thoughts about a piece of work, not rhyme one's way through a gleefully nonsensical diatribe against music one clearly has not taken the time to listen to closely.

Dan Thomas-Glass
Berkeley, California
--------------------------------------

UP IN THE ATMOSPHERE

Re Scott Seward's review of El-P's Fantastic Damage: Wow. Did El-P sleep with someone's girlfriend? To whoever is responsible for handing out records to the writers who review them: Thank you for not letting Seward come near anything my band Atmosphere released. I don't know if my mind is complex enough to understand what he's talking about, much less emotionally stable enough to endure the way he attacks the albums that he doesn't like.

Sean ("Slug") Daley
Minneapolis, Minnesota

Roman Holliday once had a Smash Hits cover - looking, as I remember, camper than I think was legal in those days. Wasn't this around the same time as the Style Council were making videos with loadsa nudge-nudge wink-wink homo-erotic overtones? Aaaaaahhh...

I think the last sentence of that review is pretty telling myself. I am starting to think that Scott makes for good reading if you're mostly apathetic about how the album he is reviewing actually sounds and just want to read some guy completely go off his nut and throw out batshit free-association stuff -- which is only bad if he's talking shit.

Besides, it's fuckin' indie-rap-hater Mad Libs. Excise all El-P-centric references and insert Aesop Rock or Kool Keith or any MC who doesn't sound like yet another Bad Boy reject and dares to oh my god no not that, anything but USING LOTS OF WORDS IN A LINE, and you could write that review about any motormouth MC with weirdo beats you could think of. Shit, even Eminem (though you'd have to double the references to how lame the production is).

But he needs some kind of justification.

SFA are better than MBV.

Happy now? :)

Don't make me send Toby Keith out for you.

That doesn't even work as a threat! I'd just laugh at the guy.

Fuck buying American. Dylan vs. Bowie in my mind means dear god in heaven, Bowie any day of the week...

Argh!

Nate, I will forever be lost as to why you care that someone is ribbing one of your "fav albums of the year". You take it all so personally! Why does someone making fun of El-P provoke such a rage in you? Why do you take it so seriously?

Also, El-P's music does have a sense of humor (though usually dark, maybe Vonnegut-esque if you will). He riffs on Phil Hartman's "Unfrozen Caveman Lawyer" SNL bit on "Deep Space 9mm", the whole "McFly!" bit between "DeLorean" and "Truancy" makes me laugh like a spaz, and "Dr. Hellno vs. the Praying Mantis" has such preposterous dirtay-sexx imagery ("I dreamt of little bouncing cherubs with clit rings and sexy wood nymphs in crotchless lederhosen begging to get bent") that the term "deadly serious" is hardly apropos. I mean, he ain't Ludacris or anything, but he's got his nutty moments.

but he spends a large portion of that el-p review talking about how much he likes blackalicious!

Plus if Seward is such a 'typical' chart-rap lover, why is he giving props to DALEK and BLACKALICIOUS of all things?

(PS, Don't get into this "ILM anti-undie contingent" either. Most of the people on this board who are into "chart-rap" are a damn sight more open-minded than most undie/indie types I've run into. What's really tired is this "oh I am so put upon on ILM" card which certain undie/indie fans seem to love to play at every conceivable opportunity as if to say look at how tough they have it.)

de-revive! de-revive!