George Starostin: Destroy or Destroy.

I'm not trying to change anyone's opinion on his site, but his musical outlook has definitely changed since he wrote that creed, which *is* admittedly really, really close-minded.

I haven't figured out his MP3-rating system either. I *think* that a "roach" corresponds to a "0"-star rating but he doesn't seem to have a set system worked out about those pages. I'm probably looking too far into it though, they really are just numbers.

And may I point out that he's sung high praises for Dire Straits, the Police, the Talking Heads, Elvis Costello, the Cars, Pere Ubu, Ian Dury, etc. Go to http://starling.rinet.ru/music/chrono.txt where you can see the list of music he possesses. Then go to the list of bands he's willing to review at bands.txt and tell me he's still hung up over the 60's and early 70's.

Before I go, George does seem to be lacking in humor to the inexperienced reader. But a subtle irony and sarcasm is decodable if you read enough of his stuff. Check out the Kiss reviews if you don't believe me. Now I will go and sing praises for Mark Prindle.

The reason I know these numbers so well: I am an obsessive freak.

Mm.

He might as well be classifying insects.

You, sir, are more of a prophet than you know. For here is Starostin himself, doing just that:
Short note about the classification.

The Ants: bands and artists that are good, but hardly much more than that. Usually, I like their general style and find their output to be consistent, their talent obvious and their music enjoyable, but hardly essential or going too far beyond the "general limits" of rock. This is a rather problematic section - certain artists on here probably deserve to be included onto the main page with at least a General Rating of One, and some of them probably will make it in the future if I live long enough to do that. Their output is generally recommended, although proceed carefully and don't start your love affair with rock music from any of them.

The Locusts: bands and artists that are also good and might even be great - certainly worth including onto the Main Page if not for the fact that their catalog is abysmally enormous and padded out with bucketloads of filler which I really have no wish to buy in audio CD format. Other reviewers would probably concentrate on the five/ten great records and completely disregard the other fifty or eighty; but since this site is band-oriented rather than album-oriented, isolated treatment of records is out of the question. Highly rated albums are very much recommended, but stay away from the filler, and if you're a crazy completist, maybe you should better steer clear of these guys altogether.

The Roaches: bands and artists that I absolutely despise, but am still ready to give 'em a try because: a) they are hugely popular and can't be simply disregarded like that; b) they do have a certain stylistics of their all, which mostly has to do with bad taste and cheap "public-pleasing", but is still worth investigating if only as a cultural phenomenon. It's not that they are completely worthless - I mean, I would never review Britney Spears or the Spice Girls, for Chrissake! They might even have some really good stuff, and a lot of this is what people call "guilty pleasures". But in general, roaches are roaches.

i didn't want to bog up the other threads with this but it would be fun to play "find the most tedious passage on this website" - here's my entry:

All of Vangelis' earliest, pre-1973 records have never been officially released on CD and are extremely hard to find... anywhere but in Russia, where an almost de luxe MP3 collection of the man's entire work has recently been issued. Thus I'm not sure if this review will ever find a grateful reader, but who cares? Let's pretend I'm just penning a short blurb to the Almighty God of the Internet, whoever he might be. Or she?

Speaking of 'he' and 'she', Vangelis' first solo album was the soundtrack to a porno film. You could guess that by the name, I suppose. I also suppose he took the offer of Henri Chapier simply because he was out of money and it was a way to make a few quick bucks. Either that, or Vangelis was really into porn at the time. Who am I to blame him, anyway? I've never seen the movie, and it's said to be almost as impossible to find as the record itself, but from what I've read, it had a real cool plot and was somewhat similar to the, ahem, to that great psychedelic showcase of all time, Zabriskie Point. So perhaps it wasn't really porn, you know. Or at least it was SoftPorn!

But anyway, soft or hard, the music here ain't half bad - definitely not the kind of music I'd expect from a porn flick. I guess in a real porn flick, you'd have to have really lengthy and really monotonous simplistic sound combinations that wouldn't allow you to be really detracted from, you know, that other thing (boy, I gotta have had Mark Prindle write this review for me).

So he's not beloved around here, but on New Years' Eve I was pleased to see him announce that he is reviewing records once again, after an 18-month hiatus. The site is now called A Subjective History of Rock’n’Roll (And Its Neighbors) 1955-1964:

https://starlingdb.org/music/

i associate this guy with all the other online-only music critics i used to read before i discovered ilx, way back in the late 90s/early 00s. mark prindle was the most famous one, i guess, but the first ones i remember reading were wilson and alroy (who wrote capsule reviews, mostly of 60s and 70s stuff, in a very sober, almost humorless style) and then another guy whose name escapes me who only seemed to like sloan and big star and bands that sounded like them. i guess starostin is probably the only one of them still writing?

mark prindle was hilarious. weird guy, super friendly. hope he's doing well.

starostin otoh . . . meh. the most inoffensive rockist i can think of.

iirc john mcferrin was the first WRC dude i read?

wilson and alroy

Their reviews were too brief and dull for me to get much out of them. The funniest thing about them was, despite each review only being a paragraph, they would cram in half-a-dozen names of trivial guest musicians at the end. Like, you're only writing four sentences about an album, why would one of them be "The band is Frank Carillo (rhythm guitar), Andrew Bown or Ricky Wills (bass), and Mike Kellie (drums); Del Newman arranged the strings on several tracks", or "Guests include Toni Tenille and the Brecker Brothers"?

another guy whose name escapes me who only seemed to like sloan and big star

I think that blog was called Creative Noise. I looked up his Big Star reviews just now and there was a comment from an ILXor who was posting about Alex Chilton today!

starostin is probably the only one of them still writing?

John McFerrin still posts every month or two (and I wonder if he is the poster "John Mc" above).

creative noise, that's right! i actually bought a big star album when i was 19 because he raved about them so much.

the only wilson and alroy review that sticks in my mind all these years later is their dismissive review of astral weeks, where they say something like "not recommended unless you're into new age music."

Wilson and Alroy occasionally had Christgau-like wit but that's not really something to aspire to. they seemed to dislike pretty much everything. but I took that as a sign that their high rated albums were worth checking out, which, for the most part, they were.

Starostin and McFerrin are both too robotic and predictable to really find interesting. There's a podcast called Discord & Rhyme that he's on sometimes. I think the others are regular WRC people as well (Rich Bunnell, Chris Williams, Amanda Rogers, Phil Maddox, Mike DiFabio...? those guys ring any bells to you?). It's a good listen but as you might imagine pretty dorky.

There was also Adrian Denning who I believe had the one of the very first of these sites. Idk how active it was but I found out about a lot of good UK music through him. Sadly he appears to have committed suicide last year.

the ones I really liked were Chris Williams' Disclaimer site (which reviewed stuff like TMBG, Mouse on Mars, Stereolab, Plaid etc. - way more interesting than the 1971-centric stuff everyone else was doing), and Mark Prindle, of course...some of his edgelord stuff hasn't held up so well but I follow him on FB and he seems to be in a much better place than he was a decade ago. so, good on him!!

I liked Prindle’s site at the time, and I still think there’s an untapped market for funny music reviews, but it hasn’t aged well at all.

The Discord and Rhyme podcast is GREAT. I could listen to these people yammer on and on and on about their favorite albums all day. Like, the recent one they did on Synchronicity is chock full of trivia I never knew about. I didn’t know Stewart Copeland taped a photo of Sting to his snare drum head so he could beat the shit out of it with his drumsticks.

There was also Adrian Denning who I believe had the one of the very first of these sites. Idk how active it was but I found out about a lot of good UK music through him. Sadly he appears to have committed suicide last year.

― frogbs, Monday, January 3, 2022 3:48 PM

wow, had no idea. that's kind of upsetting. used to read him way back when as well. i liked his reviews. interacted with him a bit on a forum (the name of which i can't recall right now) and he seemed like a genuinely good person.

its a real bummer. we were FB buddies and it definitely seemed like things were not going well for him the last few years. his site is completely gone, too. as are so many of the others I used to visit back in the day...75% of the links on the new Creative Noise site are dead. I used to waste so much time in high school computer labs reading those. they wound up shaping my music tastes, for better or worse.

amusingly, this Tripod site is still active:

https://jhendrix110.tripod.com/Music.html

despite being a Wilson & Alroy-style curmudgeons I always liked this dude's writing. I also suspect he is from rural Wisconsin, just like me. fun fact that "2014 update" was because I emailed him then to tell him I liked his reviews and asking if he was writing anywhere else. he responded "thanks for reminding me, I meant to upload these reviews 7 years ago"

Yikes, I didn’t know that about Adrian Denning. That’s awful.

agreed.

Yeah, wow. I hadn't checked in on many of these guys in awhile now.

It makes total sense to see Starostin narrow his focus, I had idea how he was going to get through his previous plan.

Don Ignacio was another guy that I lump in with this crew, although it appears he has fully transitioned over to movies instead of music.

wow that site's still up! and he added a new message board last year which is one of those Boardhost 1997-style ones! gotta give him credit for sticking to a style I guess.

always thought Starostin's attempt to write longform reviews on every album ever made IN ALPHABETICAL ORDER was remarkably nuts...his reviews are so dry that I'm not really interested (especially since he stopped giving things ratings which seems to defeat the whole point!!) but I always cheered him on and hoped that by 2040 he'd at least be up to the Rs so he could get to his beloved Rolling Stones

Yeah, his reviews seemed to be even more dry with the blog, at least he could sometimes be brutally bitter about albums on his original site.