Rolling Stone record guides. Anyone else get irritated???

Discussion in 'Music Corner' started by BrentB, Jan 6, 2018.

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  1. Zeki

    Zeki Forum Resident

    Well said.
     
  2. beccabear67

    beccabear67 Musical omnivore.

    Location:
    Victoria, Canada
    I think you misunderstand me. The magazine chooses the reviewers based on criteria of producing useful reviews, that's regardless of the authors opinions, that's all. Rolling Stone often had inept and incompetent reviewers. Some were actually very good writers but not of useful reviews, they got things as wrong as Ridley Scott got two Roman emperors in Gladiator, some were just someone's friend or a stray employee, and maybe even told to pick something to slag off. Sure Lester Bangs can hate on the Hollies, but make clear it is based on ignorance of their original single b-sides, the sound quality of the Parlophone albums, and entirely based on one re-engineered Imperial covers-heavy collection of their earliest recordings, and then Rolling Stone should not publish it as a comprehensive guide or review of the group's work in total. All I got from that was Bangs got off on slagging The Hollies like he did James Taylor and various other targets, wrote about his own alcohol consumption, and Rolling Stone gave so little of a acrap about their paying audience and The Hollies that they went with it. A proper review can detest something and give me enough useful info and knowledge to want to go and get that album. For example someone could write about how boring and un-Springsteenlike a John Renbourne album was, how it's all songs they've never heard before and he didn't like any of his previous albums and that this is more of the same, and I, having liked those albums and not caring for Springsteen might get even more interested in getting that album the reviewer disliked so much. You can write an actual negative review that is still useful or you can just be some kind of ego-tripper trying to be entertainingly bullying and show a lack of knowing what you're writing about. I have no Springsteen but given an album of his to review I could compare it to at least some past works and if I feel it compares well or not regardless of it being my bag or not being James Brown.

    I maintain that a lot of Rolling Stone criticism ('70s and '80s anyway) in the form of reviews was mostly all 'tude and not much useful. If someone can't produce some useful feedback on someone they should also know that, which would be like giving me any number of classical recordings, I would be unable to produce much that would useful to others there, and likely be way over my head with a large area of jazz too. Having reviewers be celebrity egos with lots of character was not the maturation or legitimization of that area of writing some portray, though it may have been entertaining that came at the expense of the supposed purpose of a guide/review. Like saying someone saying 'is not' back over and over is an argument (ala the Monty Python sketch). Chrissie Hynde's reviews in NME were probably no better, they went through a very fad jumping who is in and who is out according to type of thing for awhile in the '70s too. I never cared about being cool or buying the fashionable thing, I cared about music and some reviewers are more music haters than lovers.
     
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  3. tommy-thewho

    tommy-thewho Senior Member

    Location:
    detroit, mi
    Still have the red one somewhere.
     
  4. Leaman

    Leaman Has a foggy notion

    Irritation doesn't begin to describe the level of hate I feel for those guides.

    The original edition took Neil Young's Decade to task for cherry-picking his best material from the first 10 years of his career. Uh...isn't that the point of all greatest hits/best-of compilations?

    I remember being age 10 or so and looking up their entry for Queen while at the bookstore. They were my favorite band at the time, and I couldn't believe the thrashing they gave all of their catalog, and A Night at the Opera in particular.

    Then I remember flipping through a friend's copy in college and being appalled at their entry for Galaxie 500. One star for all three albums, and then a review that read something like this (paraphrased from memory):

    "It's easy to say that Galaxie 500 carry on the legacy of the Velvet Underground. But if the Velvets had been this incompetent and self-absorbed, there wouldn't be any legacy to carry on."

    That's the extent of my interaction with Rolling Stone guides. While I read the magazine fairly faithfully from 1988 to 1999 or so, I was so turned off from the above crap that I never seriously considered buying the guides.
     
  5. I always felt that they had their head up their butts. On the other hand, it was a consistent point of view even if I didn't agree with their POV.
     
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  6. Well actually they did have two Roman Emperors in Gladiator. Marcus Aurelius played by Richard Harris and Joaquin Phoenix as Commodus so, technically, they got it right.
     
  7. JozefK

    JozefK Forum Resident

    Location:
    Dixie
    I pretty much agree

    But I've never forgiven the RSRG for dissing The Dictators -- all their albums getting 1 or no stars. I accepted that judgment, and as a result did not learn of the Dictators' greatness until just a few years ago (b/c I was listening Little Steven's Underground Garage)
     
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  8. JozefK

    JozefK Forum Resident

    Location:
    Dixie
    I'll go with that
     
  9. JozefK

    JozefK Forum Resident

    Location:
    Dixie
    is not
     
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  10. JozefK

    JozefK Forum Resident

    Location:
    Dixie
    Was RS as dedicated in the early days to promoting the Frisco bands as it later became to fluffing LA acts? By the mid '70s RS was essentially a press handout for David Geffen and Irving Azoff.

    By the time I was old enough to read it (late '70s- early '80s) the New Wave era was on and RS for me, with its continuing emphasis on the El Lay acts, was pretty much a relic of a bygone era. Except of course it still had the power to aid an unknown act with a positive review.
     
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  11. Zeki

    Zeki Forum Resident

    The 1979 edition gave Decade a 5 star rating.
     
  12. Endicott

    Endicott Forum Resident

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  13. Mark H

    Mark H Senior Member

    Location:
    upstate N.Y.
    When the blue book came out, I was very ignorant of musical history. No internet back then, obviously, and my music collection was , a bunch of Beatles Capitol and Apple US Lps, Stones Hot Rocks, Beach Boys Endless Summer. I regarded Elvis as a joke, Jazz as a college professor's music, and my blues knowledge was the Allman's Fillmore set. Had Zep II, and IV around but that was it. I tracked down as many of the 5 star rated lps as I could, at that time .
    Was the late 70's, or early 80's, and had my mind, and wallet, blown and exposed ,to stuff I never had listened to really. So the book had it's place and time,
    for me at least.
     
  14. Roland Stone

    Roland Stone Offending Member

    Same here: you could have ghostwritten my own experience with the first guide. The illustrations of the five-star albums were a big help perusing the record store bins. The tome may not have loved some of my favorites as much as I did, but it didn't steer me wrong with its five-star recommendations.

    My meager part-time department store paycheck typically went to a contemporary hit album and one of the mysterious five-star records. Guess which are still in my collection thirty-some years later?
     
    Last edited: Jan 14, 2018
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  15. Endicott

    Endicott Forum Resident

    In a (mild) defense of rock critics, don't most of us re-evaluate our own musical tastes over time? What sounded sensational to me whan I was 15 could very well sound tired and trite to me now that I'm in my fifties, and vice versa. I don't understand why rock criticism should be immune to that effect. And I, for one, like seeing all kinds of different takes on various works, as long as they're arrived at honestly and sincerely (something the RS guides often lack).

    That said, while the red guide was extremely useful to me in furthering my education about pop music and its history, I learned eventually to adjust for critics' biases. Most critics have/had a disdain for metal, so if Black Sabbath got savaged in the guides, I took that into account. Rolling Stone (the magazine) is to the Rolling Stones (the band) what Coors Field in Denver is to major-league hitters, so once you're aware of that, their reviews can still be useful. But in this day and age relying on corporate magazines for music perspectives is completely unnecessary, and doesn't have much use besides entertainment value.
     
  16. Weren't there four versions: orange, yellow, blue, and a red white & blue?
     
  17. Roland Stone

    Roland Stone Offending Member

    First: Red
    Second: Blue
    Third: Multi
    Fourth: Teal
     
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  18. Cheepnik

    Cheepnik Overfed long-haired leaping gnome

    The jazz guide was yellow.
     
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  19. Roland Stone

    Roland Stone Offending Member

    And the second edition, which included blues, was blue and black.
     
  20. Terrapin Station

    Terrapin Station Master Guns

    Location:
    NYC Man/Joy-Z City
    I agree with your view of what the ideal review would be like, but:

    (1) It's always seemed to me that reviewers writing pop-rock reviews for popular publications have been oddly incapable of writing that sort of review, because every single one of them that I've ever read seems to be completely inept when it comes to understanding what they're listening to on any technical or theoretical level--so they wouldn't be able to describe what the music is like in any sort of concrete detail even if they wanted to, and

    (2) A lot of people seem to not be interested in the sort of review that you and I ideally like. I've written lots of reviews designed to be "useful," many of which I posted on IMDb, rateyourmusic, etc., where I've relayed a lot of factual, descriptive info, and where I've made a lot of conditional statements, "If you like A, then you'll probably like/dislike at least this aspect" and so on, and I got tons of "unhelpful" comments, very few "favorite" votes, etc. People seem to want jokey and/or snarky reviews, and they seem to care most whether you share their opinion.
     
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  21. Terrapin Station

    Terrapin Station Master Guns

    Location:
    NYC Man/Joy-Z City
    Yeah, I think everyone's tastes change over time, but I'm relatively weird in that mine have only changed by broadening. There isn't anything I used to like or love that I don't still like or love, and it seems like universally (I can't offhand think of an exception) I like everything even more as time goes on.
     
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  22. power popper

    power popper Forum Resident

    I was 17, I think, when The New Rolling Stone Record Guide (the second edition) was published. As a subscriber to the magazine for a couple years, I took its reviews as gospel. That was more than 30 years ago, and I know a helluva lot more now about mid-to-latter 20th-century popular music than I did then. The book helped me start on what I consider the right path in my pursuit, but it's only a starting point and not the final word by any stretch. Some of the reviews in both this and 1992's third edition are just plain snide and serve little critical purpose beyond casual dismissal of the music at hand. They no longer get me quite so riled, though. Ultimately my/your opinion is as valid as, say, Dave Marsh's, Mark Coleman's or J.D. Considine's, and you're no less of a complete person if you disagree with their or any other's assessment. Ah, maturity!

    Because the most recent edition came out more than a dozen years ago, it could use a fresh update. I doubt this will happen. It likely wouldn't be purchased by this generation of music fans, many of whom would not have time for even a pocket-sized encapsulation of an artist's work. Meanwhile, I doubt the magazine's original/longtime readers would have much appreciation for many of the current artists working today, regardless of those artists' merit.
     
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  23. Leaman

    Leaman Has a foggy notion

    My bad. Apparently it was another Rolling Stone book that criticized Decade for self-mythologizing: NEIL YOUNG by Dave Marsh
     
  24. Zeki

    Zeki Forum Resident

    I wrote a letter to Dave Marsh, a letter pointing out some contradictions on the Uriah Heep panning and the Ken Hensley praise (faint as it may have been). By 1979 I wasn't even listening to Heep anymore (probably not in 5 years, by then), but they had a soft spot in my heart and I always look to see what the reviews will be. If I recall correctly, the UH review had something about "deserving the maternal that they got ", and then the Hensley solo critique was "much more talented than the rest of the band"...or something similar.

    I pointed out to Marsh that Hensley, the talented one, was the one supplying the material! :D

    I had fun writing the letter but I wasn't upset by this type of review. I can't even recall if the same person reviewed both artists...and I knew Marsh didn't. Again, I didn't need the book for albums I already was familiar with, other than as a convenient "log" to place my own rankings with a magic marker.
     
  25. the pope ondine

    the pope ondine Forum Resident

    Location:
    Virginia

    exactly and well put! we can quibble ll we want about our favorites getting roasted but the five star reviews were generally dead on
     
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