Most Humiliating Critical Mis-Step?

anyway, my "worst call" would have to be The Afghan Whigs "1965". i hardly listen to it at all anymore, but when this came out a couple years ago, i considered it one of the best of the year...oops...another 1998 album that fits this description is Hefner "Breaking God's Heart". a few good songs does not a good album make.

going back earlier in the decade, there were albums by artists like Sebadoh and Beck and Blur that I thought the world of but have since banished from my record collection.

on the other hand, an album that i initially misjudged as poor and later wound up loving is "Seacaucus" by The Wrens.

The "seen it all before" attitude that arises out of listening to and talking about music a lot (ie. being a music critic, professionally or otherwise) can actually be a positive thing because it generally means you can think of many different pieces of music that can complement or articulate a certain idea you have about music, and you can work out which one best fits the idea (and, to go in the reverse order if you're reviewing a particular piece of music, which of the ideas contained within the music are the most interesting and fruitful to engage with).

Perhaps the *most common* form of humiliating critical mis-step is of the type I'm talking about - getting so excited (enthusiastic/angry) about the link between a piece of music and a particular idea that you temporarily distort your perception of the music in favour of that idea. A bit rarer, and often maybe *more* humiliating later on, is being not being excited by the wrong *music*, but by the wrong *idea*.

Completely otm. But not necessarily a bad thing.

"But not necessarily a bad thing."

I agree, and I think it might even be a necessary precondition of being able to think interestingly about music - being able to leap from the music to the idea and back again fairly easily. The advantage of experience though is knowing which leaps to take, such that there'll be something firm to stand on when you land. Which isn't to say that I or anyone stops making these sorts of critical missteps, but hopefully you learn not to make the *same ones* again.

Past misjudgements I'm not that ashamed about, for the reasons others have cited above - tastes change, what the hell. The ones that do annoy me are the ones where I *knew better*, but let hype and wish fullfillment control me: "Rated R" by Queens Of The Stone Age (which is a OK album) and "Origin Of Symmetry" by Muse (which isn't) figure in pretty highly in that category.

Still, am I the only one who is most embarassed by factual errors? Or does that not figure in the question at all? Coz my sending an angry, condescending letter to the biggest portuguese music magazine due to my (wrong) belief that Redman is a member of the Wu Tang Clan is definitley the most humiliating music writing moment I've ever had.

Right, so anyway, rewind back to the balmy, carefree days of 1991. I was scribbling at the time for an ill-fated and equally ill-executed musi tip-sheet called The New York Review of Recods (the concept behind the rag's title was to get sued by the prominent New York Review of Books and generate publicity -- which never happened, of course), In any event, said rag was edited by a crazed music critic named ___ ______ whom I'd met when I was interning thanklessly at SPIN in `89. He was nuts, anal retentive and rude and alienated just about every individual he came into contact with, despite his arguably good intentions. Imagine a scary visual cross between convicted subway gunman Bernard Goetz and Joey Ramone and you've got a pretty decent picture in your mind of the man. Couple that with apalling hygene (let alone scabby hands that he was constantly picking at due to exhuma) and the picture is complete.

Anyway, ____ threw EMF's debut album, SCHUBERT DIP at me one month, telling me to review it. Fair enough. So, I review it for the issue, but I don't pull any punches. While I'm not needlessly cruel to the album, I don't dress it up to be anything more than it was: disposable pop that was destined for the one-hit wonder pile (and I was right). In any case, mission accomplished.

Despite the fact that ____ hated running negative or even non-flattering reviews (lest they alienate potential ad-buying record labels), he miraculously let it run as-was. A month goes by, and ____ tells me that the band (EMF) are in town doing press, and he wants me to interview them. While they were (quite) far from being my first choice, he promised me the cover for it, so I figured it'd be at least worth it as a clip I could show future potential employers. So, fine, I accept. There was, however, a catch. Because the interview was to take at posh New York hotel, ____ wanted to tag along -- in the hopes of getting a free meal out of it (yes, he was THAT CHEAP!!!!) Very begrudgingly, I agree and off we go.

We meet two members of EMF; keyboard/sampler guy Derry and bassist Zac. While I wasn't remotely interested in their music, these two guys were completely likable -- fresh-faced kids, basically, caught up in the whirlwind of their recent success ("Unbelievable" had become a runaway hit single here in the States at the time). They pretty much had the world at their feet at the moment (it wouldn't last too long), and they were clearly enjoying it. By the same token, they were nothing if not completely professional and friendly. Almost immediately, I started to regret my harsher words in the review -- a review I was certain they hadn't read (our magazine barely made it out of the office, let alone into any news agents or record stores.)

In any event, I interview the two over a plush luncheon, ____ interrupting annoyingly when not stuffing his pockets (!!!!) with h'ors d'oevres. Once again, when they weren't being interupted by ____ -- making needless observations with his mouthful, spraying crumbs and spittle at them -- the two band members were enthusiastic and gave me pretty much everything I needed for a routine profile of the band and its success.

The trouble started, however, when they started asking US questions. Well, one question in particular: "So, what sort of magazine is this interview going to appear in?" A fair question, I suppose, but before I could answer, ____ gets an erection (he loved talking about the magazine, as he considered it the crowning achievment of his life) and leaps into a frothing sermon. I start sweating. I'm reasonbly hopeful that ____ is familiar enough with the copy -- the copy IN HIS OWN MAGAZINE THAT HE SUPPOSEDLY EDITS -- that he'll know better than to allude to the review I'd written. Well, not only did he allude to it -- he whipped out two copies of that issue that he'd stashed in his bag, and presented the to the band, saying "the review's on page 14!"

:::::I start to positively panic and stammer helplessly::::

Both EMFers dutifully turn to the page and read my terse, now-seemingly-needlessly nasty review of their perfectly acceptable, capably crafted pop album. I glance furiously at ____ -- whose grinning like a lobotomized mongoloid with an icey stare that could pierce through plate-steel -- absolutely mortified and livid. ____ had absolutely *NO CONCEPT* of the content of the review I'd written.

In agonizing silence, Derry and Zac scan over the review in disturbing
silence. Both of them glance up at me accordingly (my byline written clearly beneath the review), looking both slightly hurt and not just a little pissed. Clearly, they felt deceived. While still maintaining admirably professional composure, both excused themselves curtly from the table without saying very much and adjourned upstairs. Interview very much over.

By this point, I'm positively roiling in fury and embarassment. ____ is still stupidly, whisteheadedly unaware of what just transpired. "What happened?" Incapable of stringing together a single sentence, I gather my things and leave the room too, ____ trailing behind me cluelessly. Once out in the street, I lash out at ____ with all malice blazing out of my ears. The phrases "fuck you, you stupid fuckin' idiot" and "never in my entire life" are repeated loudly several times. I stop just shy of fisticuffs and leave him standing dazed and confused in the middle of Lexington Avenue.

Now, in all candor, while the episode still makes me squirm, it proved to be a valuable lesson. For a start, NEVER let your editor accompany you to ANY interview (he'd simillarly hampered an interview with Sonic Youth a few months earlier, though not as catastrophically), but more important -- it was a valuable experience in seeing how one's seemingly trivial scribblings actually affect the subject. It made me think twice about sinking the critical harpoon. I mean, EMF may have sucked, but how many albums have I sold, eh?

Ah well....that's that.

Me: "The new EP really embraces recent trip-hop/ambient-dub material, acts like Massive Attack and Seefeel. Was that an overt decision?"

Simon "That was the whole point (laughter)-- Mark Clifford did the EP!"

Awkward concession that I didn't know they'd just been touring the UK with him and had no liner notes on the EP. Interview actually went well apart from that exchange, which required some embarrassingly self-serving reconstruction. He was beyond gracious and extremely informative, though.

As for writing-off records: I'm very anti-Goodrich. History is evidently proving me wrong by I'm sticking with the position for now.

And let's not forget how most of us former indie-types felt when we heard our first techno record...

The irony is that the Meat Puppets by the end of the tour found out that opening for Nirvana and their stupid fans did indeed suck ($$$ excluded).

Cynicism is always the safe play, but it's also true that 80% of music deserves to be eviscerated for its failings.

As a 16-year old, I had the guitarist of Overkill throw a copy of my zine in my face after reading a dis of the Saxon retread crowd raps on their FUCK YOU EP. So sensitive. Luckily the singer stuck around and did the interview, and I've always hated the former and hugely respected the latter for how they handled the situation. It really made me feel like a creep, but stealing from Saxon is still wrong.

Over-reaching, absurd theories, wild praise of mediocrity...all excusable within the context of weekly/monthly rock journalism. Wait till you've made all those mistakes in the context of a book. Especially one that's pretty much the only book out there on the subject, and you've got a couple of dozen other writers who follow the same subject/scene, but didn't have the time or the opportunity to write a book of their own, reviewing it. That's when the fun really starts.

Phil, sorry for not knowing the facts about your book, but that's also been my lot in life since SOUND OF THE BEAST came out. Imagine the tightrope act of putting Darkthrone and Exodus in context for mass market. The couple dozen other writers were actually incredibly kind. So were the Hellhammer-obsessed mothers of five, sending their heart-warming letters from Idaho.

Among the teeming throngs of factually well-informed fans, however, are many less-forgiving souls, some of whom even consider Glenn Hughes to be Sabbath's finest singer. Pity the fool who writes a book believing otherwise!

If I've learned anything in life this year, it's that absent-mindedly calling Slayer's drummer "Tom Lombardo" (a kid from my high school), will cast a blight on whatever is said in the entire rest of a chapter. Thank god for paperback, and oh boy now this is really off-topic.

In all fairness, I do maintain that ____ ______ had good intentions, and could be quite a decent gent on occaission (though plagued by borderline obsessive-compulsive behavior and paranoid delusions). My experience working there did open later doors for me, so I don't mean to sound so ungrateful. But, let's face it, there was a lot of extraneous shenanigans involved that were a big, wasteful pain in the ass.

` <-- A real tear.

Eep! God help me if I ever end up like that.

D'oh! Er, I can remove that if you like...

Me on The Darkness.

Add a year to this estimate, and you seem pretty dead-on to me. But then, I live in America. I'm guessing you're in England.

Haha, you know, I never got that issue...do they reply to my apology letter?

"Dear Daniel: Ana Markl accepts your apologies. She only adds that she knows your address and she has a baseball bat at home."

I did the same thing, except the band was Counting Crows! ugh!

Ian you should definitely read this thread on CD Review. I thought I was the only one to remember it, but we have a former writer here! Fantastic.

Shame that Save Ferris review seems to have gone down the memory hole. It used to be fun to go through the early days of Pitchfork and compare/contrast them to my early college listening habits (I loved Save Ferris in my little Toyota while I delivered pizzas. Trying to listen to it a couple years ago was terrible.)

I'm not a critic, but oh lord, this thread reminds me that when I was 15 or thereabouts, I was firmly convinced that Sigue Sigue Sputnik were years ahead of their time and the future of music, everyone else give up and go home.

Jesus christ. Well, I was only 15.

the world just hasn't caught up with them

I still like the band, but I'm kind of regretting making a big deal out of how unique Flogging Molly's sound was in my review of their last record... before I had heard The Pogues.

By saying you like something you expose yourself, while being a cantankerous cynic offers protection from humiliation.

AKA the ILX motto

Liking the Strokes when I saw them live.

^^I don't give a shit, I like that first album.

oh, God, where do I fucking BEGIN?! wait, don't answer that, it's hard enough to run from the past to begin with.
― M Matos (M Matos), Friday, November 7, 2003 1:10 PM (5 years ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

But this, basically. Dear Keeper Of Universe, eighty-six one me.

I mean, EMF may have sucked, but how many albums have I sold, eh?

― Alex in NYC (vassifer), Thursday, November 6, 2003

Just amazed this doesn't get more mileage here.

i pushed really hard to put Sage Francis on the cover of CMJ because I thought he was set to cross over really big into the MTV2/KCRW/Lollapalooza indie world in 2005.

I thought his record that year approached hip-hop from an indie/punk sensibility in a unique way, and it would resonate with the Neko Case crowd.

But everyone decided to pretend to like coke-rap instead. :/

http://www.cmj.com/images/features/2005/mar/sage_nmm.jpg

Badly Drawn Boy. It seems like only yesterday that I thought "Bewilderbeast" was a fantastic and super-classic album. In fact, one half of it is a kinda good album, but let's not go nuts.

Restraining yourself from going nuts should be the first thing they teach in Critic School.

lol BDB is like my #1 artist i went from loving to not being able to listen to at all, ever because he disgraced himself so thoroughly

I once dissed Nirvana while interviewing the Meat Puppets who were going out on tour with them. I said something along the lines of, "It must suck opening for them and their stupid fans." Curt Kirkwood looked at me like I was a total asshole and said "We are their fans. We love Nirvana. They invited us on this tour, and they recently let us play with them on MTV Unplugged, and they even let us do a couple of our own songs. We're gonna get to be on MTV because of them! They're the best thing that's ever happened to us." It was right at the start of the interview and I rightly felt like a total jackass. Fortunately, I had a friend with me who sort of helped pick up the pieces and finish the interview. In my defense, the interview was for a stridently independant zine that was always bitching about "commercial alternative" phenomenon. Also, I was young and stupid and a total indie snob.

It's better to be a prick and have a funny story to tell later on than to look like a schmuck.

Not mutually exclusive, sadly.

glowing 800 word review of Thompson Twins' Here's To Future Days. oh boy. i even had kind words for their Beatles cover. honestly I was trying to tweak rolling stone's rockhead readers and while I didn't hate the album I haven't listened to it since 1985, either. stuff like this is why I am ambivalent about "poptimism". oh god i gave good review to Simple Minds' ham-fisted Once Upon A Time in the very next issue.

I totally wrote off Lifter Puller as bland indie rock back in the day when a friend lent me Fiestas And Fiascos. Later exposure turned that around, fortunately, but o_O

Double embarrassing cuz I'm from Minnesota.

I'm trying to think about stuff I wrote for Snipehunt that was really off or humiliating, but really I was just guilty of overenthusiasm and hyperbole more that outright mistakes in judgement. My worst moment was doing an hour-long interview with Psychic TV for the mag and then erasing the first 45 minutes.

I gave Sonic Youth's Washing Machine a terrible review, full of stupid "youth" jokes about how old they are and umb jam band comparisons. I especially harped on Diamond Sea being long and boring.
I don't regret giving it a bad review even though I like it now - that's happened a lot, I can live with having done that. It's just how boring and predictable my review was.

i think i've reviewed a bunch of Jay Farrar's solo discs favorably -- not that they are bad records necessarily, but I sure as hell didn't listen to them after reviewing them. Also, I can't seem to find it online, but I gave Damien Rice's first record a good review ... I am sorry. I thought it sounded kinda like John Martyn or something. I can't remember.

glowing 800 word review of Thompson Twins' Here's To Future Days. oh boy. i even had kind words for their Beatles cover. honestly I was trying to tweak rolling stone's rockhead readers and while I didn't hate the album I haven't listened to it since 1985, either. stuff like this is why I am ambivalent about "poptimism".

You're not to be blamed. (Scarily, I actually remember about half that album offhand, if not your review -- and I haven't listened to it at all since around then either.)

4/5 to Ani DiFranco's Up^6 -- I was 19 and self-conscious about reviewing something a) I wasn't an expert about and b) I was sort of predisposed against. So I listened to the album like a dozen times to try to understand it and in the process convinced myself I liked it more than I really did.

Two singles I originally gave low scores to but wound up loving:
5/10 to Ciara's "Oh"
3/10 to Kanye's "Gold Digger" (tbf, this was based on a really shitty mp3 that included all sorts of weird glass-breaking sound effects)

Here's something to chew on while I'm off.

Shame that Save Ferris review seems to have gone down the memory hole.

it lives on.

I called Bowie's 1. Outside a masterpiece in my college paper. Lots of early stuff buried in The Miami Herald archives, thank god – good reviews for The Streets' A Grand Don't Come For Free and Joe Strummer's posthumous album make me go "oof" when I think too hard.

hey, mark, I read your review of Stevie Nicks' Rock a Little. On the money! (The TT review is unusually long; was it the lead?)

glowing 800 word review of Thompson Twins' Here's To Future Days. oh boy. i even had kind words for their Beatles cover. honestly I was trying to tweak rolling stone's rockhead readers and while I didn't hate the album I haven't listened to it since 1985, either. stuff like this is why I am ambivalent about "poptimism".

Not their best record, but no shame imo - grebt act that deserves to be name-checked and cribbed from a ton. Some young a&r dude's going to figure this out soon i think.

more than once i've picked up that save ferris album in a record store, usually used, and turned it over a few times before saying to myself "no, it can't be good, i mean...look at it" and putting it back (also thinking "this is like mid-90s cocktail party ska or something right?").

i really liked that first mescaleros album at the time xxpost

I think there was at least a year where every review I wrote included the word "emo," rightly or wrongly. It was like, because folks around me had decided that Weezer was emo, I was like, fuck it, it's all emo now.

Thank God that pretty much all of the stuff I wrote was cut under when the magazine was bought by different folks.

Oh, and I was all about some funk-rock band called Cloud Nine and even mentioned how much my girlfriend liked to dance to them in a column. Most of that band is now Nomo, which I like, but I found a CD of Cloud Nine's the other day, and, uh, let's just say that I think getting laid regularly biased my taste.

ps. Thanks for finding that genius Save Ferris review!

glowing 800 word review of Thompson Twins' Here's To Future Days.

Which is still a great album, although not quite as brilliant as the two albums before it. :)

Not their best record, but no shame imo - grebt act that deserves to be name-checked and cribbed from a ton. Some young a&r dude's going to figure this out soon i think.

A bit late for A&R now innit? And Edsel/Demon have already released most of the albums that counted (plus a couple early ones that didn't)

I savaged The Fall's "Grotesque" in Op Magazine, calling them something like a third rate Rough Trade soundalike band, obv having never heard (of) them.

I got a phone call from Steve Montgomery (as seen spouting rhetoric in the recent Rough Trade - DIY program on the Beeb) who gave me a real schooling. Fortunately (or not), I handled the tongue lashing gracefully enough that he subsequently offered me my 1st job in distribution...

I used to write reviews for one of my college newspapers, mostly as leverage to get free concert admission & CDs (this period was my lone dalliance with music journalism). Once, I was assigned to cover a concert & ended up getting stoned instead, only to stumble into the show to catch the last two songs. I wrote a review of the whole concert anyway.

A bit late for A&R now innit?

You mean in a state-of-the-industry it's all grassroots/myspace now sense? Kings of Leon are on the cover of rolling stone so I'm going with no.

Baby acts have plumbed the fuck out of punk (early 2000s) and postpunk (mid 2000s) tho so the table's pretty much set for a young act that's not The Bravery to break out the synths and melodies and gospel hooks.