the only thing punk rock ever did was to create articles like THIS

ahahahahahahaha ha ahha ahah ah aha.

Sum 41 are all angst and Blink are too, sort of but with stadium rockisms and anthems and etc thrown in, and both are well in the Ramones tradition and I mean... the Dead Boys!!!?

Okay also the problem isn't the author arguing WH or MJ or etc. is punk, but just making a very poor case for it.

Tom Sinclair is a senior writer for EW and has been called "the handsomest man in rock criticism'' (by his wife)

Even funnier is David Browne's anti-grammy rant - click on the letf, the "hot topic" of "what were grammy voters thinking"?

Choiciest Avril bits:

Maybe the voters are so sure who will win that they figured, what the hell -- let's nominate Lavigne's ''Complicated'' for Song of the Year to get a few more ratings points. How ELSE can one explain anyone thinking of that Alanis-lite mewl as worthy of a writing award?

Go David!! Go David!! MEWL!

P.S. to Lavigne: In case you ever have to announce nominees again, the ''Bow'' in David Bowie's last name rhymes with ''beau,'' not ''cow.'' To bolster your integrity, you may want to remind your handlers to make sure you don't make such gaffes (rhymes with ''laughs'') in the future.

Ahhahahaha - I like this comment the best:

Joel- Thu, Jan 9, 2003 at 7:27 PM EST

I pronouce it Bowie as in "cow", and everybody I know does too. But teach us more! Is "INXS" pronouced "inks"? I need to know more than anything in the whole wide world!

Now i SERIOUSLY wish i knew Avril in real life

i agree with everyone in some aspect or another but your all still off. punk is all about heart. you and only you can follow your own heart. you do whatever you wanna do with your life without letting anything stand in your way. its not about fashion, being edgy and dangerous, a drug addict, or a rebellios teenager. its about being yourself. theres only one you, seperating you from everyone else. but you have to be honest. only do things you want do just do weird or spontaneous things cause they're cool. be honest all the time, otherwise your just a fake - a poser.

punk is awsome...but michael jackson and whitney houston arent punk!!! Good Charlotte is(but they sing pop/punk)...sum41 is....and a bunch of other bandz i like r..

Transgression maybe, but deviance has been part and parcel with Rock since the sixties.

People keep saying this like it's a good thing.

• too incompetent for even Rolling Stone's bullpen of yoyos...and
  
• not creative enough to write for the Weekly World News.
  

Will Hermes is always Spin's boy whenever there's a faceoff with Rob Sheffield on NPR. I always think 'can't anybody figure out how to bomb radio boothes anymore?'

Amen to that.

You're making them sound like an Earache band...and clearly they're not. Except maybe Lawnmover Deth, who I think are funnier. ;-)

I've yet to see a rock critic doing the talking head routine on VH1 - and this applies especially to Sheffield and Joe Levy - and not thought 'what a buffoon'. They're always so goddamn happy to be on camera.

I once - and only once - saw David Fricke on there, and he was so decked out in hippy attire - complete with tie-dyed posters behind him, long hair, the works. And can anyone still wonder whether there's the Boomer-romanticizing going on in RS has ever ceased?

oh yeah ... ditto to what Kate and Kim said upthread.

Sheffield, meanwhile, looks as if he's contracted some slow spreading form of leprosy (though it hasn't lessened his insufferable gee-whillikerishness).

Despite his tonsorial insistance on mimicing Johnny Ramone, I have nothing but respect for David Fricke, as he is that rare beast: a rock critic/historian that really *KNOWS* about his subject matter and can actually string a coherent paragraph together without resorting to smarmy zeitgeist baiting and/or oblique allusion.

I almost mentioned Legs McNeil as an exception, but I think part of that is due to me growing up reading him (in Spin of yore)and still loving the guy (looking forward to his porn book). The problem with putting rock critics on tv is that most of them have faces for radio. Jancee Dunn(?) (does she count as a rock critic?) was a slight exception when she an MTV2 - cuter than Eric Weisbard. Supposedly Meltzer looks like a handsomer DeNiro.

Doesn't she already have some disease or something? Cause Xgau mentioned her having health problems, or something, but I don't know. I'm not ashamed for liking her, I just liked her writing for some reason. Jancee Dunn is dreamy, it was very sad when she left MTV2, it was the only good thing about the channel anyway (did you see HER replacement there, that "rock chick" she was subtituted with ...oh my gawd! I remember during one interview she described Floetry as "brit-pop" - she'd be too dumb to even host House of Style, if it were still around), as well as her RS articles. I know she still writes occasionally.

Didn't mean for this topic to overtake this thread, but I also can't stand that Spin guy, Alex Pappademas. So many of them suck but him, ugh.

In all seriousness, I don't know about Ann Powers' health problems (if she has any). My abject hatred for her and Weisbard, however, was cemented by that SPIN/VH1 "history of Punk" program a while back (the one narrarated by Lou Reed). Despicable.

I'm sure they're all perfectly nice folks, though. It's not a high-paying field, and it'se pretty cut-throat, so good luck to'em. I just wish they weren't....well, y'know...the way they are. Credible, thoughful, intelligent, dignified rock critics are woefully few and far between.

mark s -- you've had a recent quarrel with reynolds or wot?

http://a552.g.akamai.net/f/552/606/1d/image.pathfinder.com/ew/img/writers/sinclair_l.jpg