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

I never have. Rolling Stone is the penultimate example of the old adage "english lit majors make terrible guitar players"

(of course its not true)

but Rolling Stone is a bunch of snob writers who primarily judge a band by their lyrics, and seem to hate virtuoso musicians.

They're useless, they always have been. It got so bad in the 80s that if they hated something, I'd go out looking for it.

 

I'll let someone else do the "not the same...". Ah, forget it.

 

Not irritated at all. The book was compiled by people who know their stuff and they gave their honest opinions. Frankly, raters that don't do this (things like Allmusic, which awards at least one album by any artist 4.5 stars) are much worse. One might not "agree" on the RS rankings for a particular artist. However, their first two (maybe even three) guides do follow what I consider to be the proper aesthetic viewpoint, which is there is good music, bad music, and all in between, and they're going to try and figure out what that is for potential consumers. A good thing, IMO.

And, frankly, if a lot of knowledgeable people are trashing one's favorite artists, then maybe it's time to at least give one's tastes a second look, no?

 

Ain't gonna happen. Not here.

It's great to be confident and happy in your tastes, but asserting that a preference of yours carries equal weight as a contrary consensus is simply vain.

 

Lots of knowledgeable people have been trashing Rolling Stone's reviews. Have you already given your tastes a second look?

 

I realize you folks are discussing the record guides and I am not, my opinions are based off their magazine and the many record reviews I read and were disgusted/amused by.

Their critics arent knowledgeable, in my opinion, for the most part. They're overly concerned with lyrics and yes, they know a lot about bands and possibly the history of music. What is the one element of their set of knowledge that is missing?

HOW TO PLAY AND WRITE MUSIC.

For the most part, many of them, the more famous ones, dont know their elbow from an Aminor, have never written any music (not lyrics) or recorded or toured or anything like that. They have a fundamental lack of knowledge concerning the topic they are critiquing.

Useless. as are most rock critics, in my opinion. All you really need, or ever needed, was somebody saying, "if you like this band, check out this other band".

 

Rolling Stone was always biased. And the record guides were sometimes infuriating. But it was all we had before the internet.

I haven’t bought that rag or the books since roughly 1995. **** Rolling Stone.

 

Another old fart here, who had - and relied on - those books. I loved them all, as I also did the MOJO record guides, the Roxon, Encyclopedia of Rock editions, etc. etc. Part of the fun was disagreeing with the reviews and reviewers, just as it still is, as you can see from this thread. The ratings in the RS books one always took, I thought, with a grain of salt - but it could help you prioritize which LPs to start with, given one's inevitably limited funds. Anyway, for me the main frustration was that the discographies were often incomplete, leaving out albums (sometimes, I think, because they were out of print or domestically unavailable). Still - the main thing was that it was enjoyable to put some records on and leaf through books such as these. I still do it!

 

I did give it a few minute's thought... 15 years ago. Aside from half-remembering a few funny snarky reviews, I just never think about it. It's not like anyone in the real world is likely to bring it up at a cocktail party or anything.

 

I had that book. I read and reread it in my early 1970s high school days. It expanded my musical horizons, just to read about a lot of artists that were never on the radio in our area. I did not agree with some of the reviews once I heard the albums.

 

Definitely NO, just who are these people, and what makes them more knowledgeable than you or me.

 

I don't consider that to be important at all, especially for rock music, which cannot stand up to a musicologically-based critique anyway. It's popular music, not art music.
Anyway, my point was not to say that RS is "right," but that those guides were written from a particular viewpoint which accepted that there is good music, bad music and all in between, and that they were going to try to figure it out by applying a general aesthetic. IMO, it's refreshing to read that, in today's pantywaist environment where music criticism has been browbeaten into the equivalence of "stating preferences," mostly because people with questionable taste feel an entitlement to not be ridiculed for it.

 

sure it can. A lot of it can. Much of it cannot. To write it all off as not being able to stand up to a critique written by a professional musician or composer is ludicrous. If it was all 3 chord blues shuffles or cut and paste to a quantized grid stuff like much of todays electronica, maybe.

but thats just me. If I wanna read a critical review of a building, I wanna read one by an architect. I still might disagree or think the architect is full of it.

 

I have never taken Rolling Stone very seriously due to their hostility towards artists that are dear to me. It's almost like a willful ignorance akin to anti-vaxxers or flat-earthers. Once you're on to them, you can never trust anything they say again.They're too afraid to admit something's good if they think it's not cool. And they've been so famously wrong so many times...

 

So if you realize it,why comment in a thread concerning the guides? As some have constantly brought up,there is a difference between the books and the magazine. Lots of threads here about reviews and music magazines. Like many a Beatle fan,why not start a redundant thread?

My two high school English teachers would be getting out their red pens on that reasoning. Some of my early writing came back after their criticism looking like a weather map,complete with arrows,circles,question marks and exclamation points. I've been there. Maybe still working on it.

 

I ve never read this RS guide.

Only guide I know is 1995 Spin "alternative guide"

 

The Red RS Guide was probably one of the first, but there were a fair number of similar books by the time I was in high school (early 80s). The RS Guide and Christgau's were probably the largest "critical" record guides. I think the criticisms were maybe a little more "fair" but I still think that all the "collections of reviews" books are at least a little bit worthless because they have too much self-consciously "clever" writing and not enough actual musical insight.

As a list of albums, they're fine, but as far as that goes, you couldn't beat New Rock Record by Terry Hounsome. This was was just a database of albums, organized by artist, with an index by musician in the back, so you could look up every album that Jerry Garcia or Nicky Hopkins or whoever had played on. Essential tool for expanding your "want list" back in the day.

 

This looks fantastic!

 

Personally I liked the NME Book of Rock. Especially the first one that you had to cut out of the mag and fold yourself

Tim

 

I did that already!

I started a thread about the Netflix bob Dylan thing, when I couldnt find one... and then later, found one already in progress, about 50 pages long. Ha!

oh well.

Look, somebody claimed, or seemed to, that rolling stone had a bunch of critics who know what they are talking about, or something like that... and I disagreed with that and offered a counter reasoning, that they lacked a fundamental understanding of the topic of discussion.

Thats it. Thats all it was. I've never liked critics, perhaps because of the savagery they've offered all the albums I ever worked on.

Its like the Grammies. They suck... because they never call me.

And now, back to your regular scheduled I HATE/LOVE ROLLING STONE MUSIC CRITICS.

 

I found them entertaining especially on the putdowns, helpful, educational, and also maddening and frustrating. My favorite reviews or listings in the blue book were the short paragraphs of larger discographies and the 1 star or was a it a 'block' for no stars lol. Hilarious. Time proved more than a few of those ratings wrong or off and even a few of the same reviewers did change their minds years later.

One of the ones I remember most was a review of The Replacements debut, Sorry Ma. 3 out of 5 stars iirc. OK, pretty good, iirc. Said on one hand the record was like a Ramones but with a lead guitar on top of it all - which is not that far off - and that it was maybe somewhat promising? but who knows if we'll ever hear from them again and if so who cares. LoL. Something to that effect. Classic

 

Often i think Rolling Stone is more of a fashion mag

 

Is that the limit of your intellectual capacity or would you care to elaborate further...

By the way are you even old enough to even have seen much less remember the extremely rare 1972 Rolling Stone paperback of which I mentioned?

I wager that the answer is a emphatic no

 

Maybe Yoko doesn't have a five-star album (though she has a few I think certainly can merit four stars), those who demand her albums all get BOMB and * reviews because you don't like her are no more credible.

Season Of Glass isn't my fave Yoko album but I think RS is probably more on the mark than those of you who balk at the idea of Yoko Ono's music are.

 

The "red" and "blue" guides from 1979 and 1983 were not only subjective and biased, they weren't even consistent. The Doors were praised in the first book, then trashed in the second. The Knack was criticized for "sexism" while the Stones (and others) got a pass.

But that said, these books were an important musical education for me in the days before the Internet. They turned me onto a lot of great stuff I never would have heard otherwise.

To this day I remember Ariel Swartley's write-up on Joy Of Cooking, which prompted me to track down their albums, all of which I still own. There was also excellent writing about Phil Ochs, Laura Nyro, and Tom Paxton. Growing up in '80s suburbia, there were no adults I could ask about these things. These books were also important in the way they helped explain classic albums like Pet Sounds, Ogdens' Nut Gone Flake, and The Kinks Are The Village Green Preservation Society to music fans who were too young to buy them in their day.