critics are the devil

Oh, and music is manna from heaven!

I'd say *90%* of my listening in the past few years has come from critics, since the majority of my friends have horrible taste (but I love them anyway.)

did you ever read Greil's chapter on The Band?

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Hell no! Whadda ya take me for, some crazy guy? :) I'll never read any word on Dylan or any band close to that tosser. Esp. not by Marcus. Although Lipstick Traces is fun (can't remember that description of the Slits though).

Erm, hmmm, actually, this may be the ONLY sense in which it is a "grate record": as a Slits=Most-Important-band-of-All-Time nutcase (retd.), I owned Bongos for years before GM wrote abt it, and always — for perfectly suspect ideological reasons — insisted it was PURE GENIUS, which it, um, kinda wasn't. Until it was validated. Hurrah!!

A music critic cannot write only bad reviews. Usually he/she is depending on the music industry. Definitely not objective.

What I try to do is find reviewers who have a similar taste to mine and then checking out their recommendations. Another good source of information on new music are good radio programmes. I have been listening to Bernard Lenoir at France Inter (has he ever been mentioned here before?) who very often likes music I like. He is a little bit the French John Peel (That's what I heard. I do not know a thing about John Peel.).

There are so many deceptions when only following the critics. I just list a few: Van Morrison - Astral Weeks (not crap but no masterpiece) , Radiohead - OK Computer (Amnesiac is great but OKC is shite, old stuff which bands like Pink Floyd did much better in the 70s), Oasis - everything (most hyped band ever). Britpop except Blur belongs in the bin.

And those bloody critics. They miss out so much. The first Smashing Pumpkins Gish is as masterpiece. Almost better than their second good record Mellon Collie. And which critic realised that the first Red House Painters Down Colourful Hill was their chef d'oeuvre? And what about Swell? From San Francisco. Their first three albums are psychedelic rock at its finest. And Idaho and Your Precious You (just ordered the EP) AND AND AND. Critics are blind. Most of them have dollar bills in their eyes. They are paid for reviewing, never forget that!

I think my last post was my overly precious way of saying that getting paid for doing something is perhaps not the best criterion for dismissing critics. The guy who shills for your local shopping circular or the "Entertainment Radio Network" (what the hell is this...I see it popping up more and more on movie ads) ain't Pauline Kael. Or even Roger Ebert. (Who I think is a fine critic in his own right.) They're both getting paid, but I have no trouble beleiving that the opinions being spouted by Kael or Ebert or Ian Penman are their own. (They've also given me reason in the past to trust their critical judgement, something that, say, the average staff writer for Entertainment Weekly hasn't.)

Amount of money I have ever got from writing about music: zero. Not all critics are paid critics.

Melissa, as Sterling already said there is my own standard. I do not know if it is yours, but very often it differs from the standard of the well-known critics.