Anyone else here not like giving bad reviews?

i've never felt bad about mean movie reviews, tho. those fuckers beg for it.

i see it as a waste of my energy...

and you know once upon a time the rolling stone gave bad reviews to a number of records that are still part of the cannon, so fat lot of good they did.

then theres the side of me that says if the new wierd record from some wierd band does suck, i should warn people not to waste their monies. and i appreciate it when the wire doesn't just convince me i need to buy yet another collection of field recordings or something.

I never had to get over feeling bad about putdowns. Getting insulted by someone in print in 2006 -- wow, now there's a real reason to commit suicide.

But what's the point of even reading - let alone writing - a bad review of someone you've never even heard of? Why point out an unknown face to the public, only to rubbish it? I want to read about albums I might like, or to be warned against albums I might be tempted to buy. To be warned against albums that I wouldn't even have heard of if I hadn't read the review is pointless. The best thing to do with bad albums by unknowns is to ignore them.

It's called journalism. Often, it's something you see in every section of the daily newspaper.

i mentioned this on another thread, but my favorite was when the dad of one of the members of some local band called to bitch about a review. it was like, "quit picking on my kid."

Because exactly what it is that you hate about it may make someone with different tastes to you read the review and think "hrm, I might like that".

I think that's a reasonable compromise which will make all parties happy.

I dunno. I used to review first novels for a newspaper. You get an avalanche of books from publishers every week, and you only have space to review two or three. I chose novels I found at least some merit in, and ignored the mountains of terrible ones.

That was a given in my experience. The locals, due to experience, had a sense of entitlement about the purpose of the newspaper section. It was to portray their nobility to waiting fans. The well never ran dry.

I dunno. I used to review first novels for a newspaper

So did the newspaper I worked at. About once a year, a good feature could be made out of entertainingly describing the awful nature of them. They copy editors, I found, always liked the results. Something to make you laugh out loud, which is one of many good reasons to read.

i guess the question to ask is, "who benefits from my knife throwing?"

Meeting the Press

The Yakuza review was assigned to me on the knowledge that I really liked their last album (oh yeah, pdf, they've dropped most of the mathy stuff in favor of a taut, Unsane-style chug and have lots of ballads that sound like bad mid-'90s grunge-metal-lite. I liked it better when people compared them to Borbetomagus).

In a perfect world, I could just write a review of the Sword record on Kemado and turn that in instead.

When I edited the college paper, I went on a strictly "if you can't say something nice don't say anything at all" policy on the local bands.

A major-label shitpile like Kasabian deserves all the red hot ire they can handle and then some.

in that case, blur come to mind as strangely benefiting from his rage.

That's easy, on a couple levels. It's not necessary in writing to meet a cost/benefit analysis. Now, the shareholders of Knight-Ridder think so these days, but that's another sotry. Second, mentioned above, often people enjoy being entertained over their morning paper or favorite magazine.

WHERE WERE YOU WITH THIS ADVICE 8 YEARS AGO?
OMG, have I been doing this for that long? I want to cry.

For features, I've actually been praised/slagged by local acts for merely presenting "The Story of This Local Band" and never venturing an opinion within that space. Though, I'm pretty sure it's easy to tell which local bands I like from my accumulated coverage of them. Like most local bands only get a write-up when they release an album. (There's one local guy who emails and then calls before every show he plays, "What's it take for a local artist to get some press in this town?" I told him I try to limit things to when acts have a new record out. So now, everytime he plays, he calls it a CD release show and gives out home-burned EPs. I wish he'd just burn down my house or steal my bike or something.)
But there are a few bands about whom I'll write if they're, y'know, DOING SOMETHING INTERESTING.
A lot of musicians have rather imaginative definitions of newsworthy--or even NOTEworthy.
In actual reviews, opinion pieces, however, I won't review anything local unless it's really boffo, and even then, my editor doesn't like me to do that, because it gives the acts who aren't so boffo the idea that they should be pestering me to review their records.

But the Sword album is a tired, third-tier High On Fire clone!

xpost: "It's not necessary in writing to meet a cost/benefit analysis"

oh, im not saying that it should. doing so would prove pointless.

but in deciding whether or not to run with a bad review, i do think it would be useful to ask that type of question. there are many ways through which a bad review can be helpful to various people in various ways. i do think those things should be considered if were going to take responsibility for what we write.

Guess I'm just waiting for a new High On Fire record.

Can't you at least grant them second-tier status?

OTM, and also applicable to good reviews. I have a few pet favourite acts who have ZERO profile and are not local or even regional, and I kinda realized after a while that me giving them glowing reviews to an at best indifferent readership is really just a vanity trip.

Helpful, if it happens, is frequently at best incidental. Reviewing and interviewing musicians isn't investigative journalism. On a day to day basis, I'd be skeptical anyone claiming to think about being helpful on everything he or she commits was just making it up to sound like a good citizen.

Now take The Rolling Stone "red book" record guide. It is well known to be helpful in looking for hard rock by observing the really supercilious and funny one-line reviews and inversely correlating them with the band in question's quality. That is, if Dave Marsh said Thor ought to have been chewed by the dogs shown on his album cover, then you'll probably like the album "Keep The Dogs Away."

As for being helpful to bands, also not a big consideration. Constructive criticism is an entirely squishy area. Many people can't tell when they're being constructively criticized, particularly if it's delivered with barbs. And it's an entrenched American practice to regularly dismiss anything critical on the canard of it not being constructive.

Anyway, there's so much copy produced on even the most trivial of items, just writing about something as one sees fit works for me.

this is the book that made me a rock fan.

(hmmm whats up with wfmu right now....spiriualized followed by the cure? ... whos show is this?)

ummm...i was..oh,

Helpful, if it happens, is frequently at best incidental. Reviewing and interviewing musicians isn't investigative journalism. On a day to day basis, I'd be skeptical anyone claiming to think about being helpful on everything he or she commits was just making it up to sound like a good citizen.

ill totally go along with you there. and really when it comes down to it...thinking on it too much would give all of us a bit too much credit.

I don't recall, but it probably didn't reprint Marsh's original one from Creem that went to about 2,000 words. It was a ranting nutbag job, accidentally amusing -- a piece of real work, that didn't actually mention the band at all until three-quarters of the way in. It's laying in a pile somewhere around here. If it comes to hand easily, I'll excerpt some of it.

Although it would be fun to do a publication competely full of bitching and complaining. I propose calling it "HATAS"

Anyway, here we go, Dave Marsh in CREEM (Dec 1970) on Grand Funk Live Album --

"Enough's been said about Terry and GFRR to fill three books and most of all of it has been negative and you know what? It didn't do any good at all. Because Grand Funk gives people what they want, and the scary part is not that they do that, it's that people want it.

"Well, William Burroughs said in Naked Lunch you don't get rid of addiction by offing the pusher, you gotta get rid of the addict..."

[rim shot]

And, the closer:

"P.S. I really tried to listen to the music but, halfway through, I had to shut it off."

Other vignettes: Are they as slow and doped out of their wits as their audiences?

And a red state slur, ha-ha:

Look where Grand Funk is most popular - the South...that's where they started out and blew minds, down in the very heartland of honk. How many people did Cream draw in the south in '67? Were there any people there to come see them? And how many now, now that marijuana is a rampaging beast wreaking havoc in Agnewville?

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(I seem to recall Dave Marsh giving [Christ Child's Hard]
a nasty review in both Rolling Stone and the second, blue-cover ROLLING STONE RECORD GUIDE.)

-- Rev. Hoodoo (hoodoo12...), January 6th, 2006.

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Heh heh, yep! Here it is: "Inane attempt to cash inon punk by band that developed "their expression in the hills of Malibu and Topanga Canyons" according to the liner notes, which conclude, "You will love it - you will hate it - you will not ignore it!" We haven't, but it's our job. The rest of the world has, quite wisely, resisted more successfully. A truly putrid artifact."

-- Myonga Von Bontee (scottyfield...), January 6th, 2006.

Yeah. Marsh appeared to turn around on Grand Funk after 1970. It's human. I have scads of artists in my clip files I crapped on and either changed my mind about much later or appreciated later work.

"I remember many dud reviews, and particular comments from hecklers at specific events. This is accurate. What is not mentioned is that I also remember many positive reviews & comments, and much else that is ancilliary & associational. On the Wiltern gig there is, however, Group Memory of the comment from a LA freebie that trailered the KC Wiltern show: prog rock pondscum set to bum you out! Recalling this is not a negative memory, and it is difficult to imagine anyone taking offense at a comment as dopey as this."

I remember it showing up in either the old Reader or the LA Weekly in the mid-90s and laughing which, of course, is not a bad outcome to reading a newspaper in the afternoon. Fripp imaginatively used it in packaging for a live box set of the '69 edition of Crimson and has used it in press conference. See here:

PRESS CONFERENCE/INTERROGATION
Fripp: 'We are, as I am, prog-rock pond scum. Our hopes for the future are to bum you out'

Included in press detritus:

Legs to Make Us Longer: Insanely great new age acoustic- guitar shredding and tapping for all those adults who buy CDs not to listen to, but for lifestyle." - October 27, 2004
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Of course, that sentence, was a set-up for the closer -- not appended -- which was:
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The girl's from Atlanta, studied at NYU, resides in Brooklyn, and dresses in black on her CD cover, which reminds one of a cemetery custodian, someone with the biggest job in town. Why? Because she has 40,000 people under her. Unequivocal 2004 winner of the Record You're Most Likely to Fall Asleep To prize.
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Nah. The assistant managing editor in charge of the features section always received angry telephone calls on Monday morning, after the weekends allotment of pans had run. It gave him heartburn but no one ever came close to being fired although there were regular petitions and requests for firings from the aggrieved.