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

IMO that is a perfect example of Christgau being so far up his own ass as to be literally unintelligible

 

Easily my favorite Clash album, and I like them in general. I'd easily give Sandinista my highest rating.

 

That's nice and all but you're in a small crowd!

 

That's a great example of what I hate about Rolling Stone's reviews, and reviews like that in general, which were were (and maybe still are, but I never read them now) quite common from pop and rock reviewers.

Note that I don't have a problem with the rating. As I just noted in a post above, I give Sandinista 5/5, too.

But that review still annoys me. The main annoyance is this: the first thing he says about the album is "Its three records — thirty-six tracks to get lost in — ask and answer some of the right questions about violence and nonviolence, history and the future, crime and the law, revolution and fascism, worldwide angst and hope."

My interest in music is music. You know, the sounds coming out of my speakers. The timbres, pitches, rhythms, melodies, harmonies/chords, etc. That stuff doesn't ask questions about "violence and nonviolence" etc. So the reviewer isn't telling me anything about what I want to know about. He's talking about lyrics. I don't care about lyrics when I listen to music. I care about vocals, but because I care about singing--melodies, phrasing, etc. I don't care what someone is singing about in terms of its semantic content. (Which isn't to say that I never pay any attention at all to lyrics on a semantic level, by the way; but that has nothing to do with how I assess music. The semantic content of the lyrics is ultimately of no significance for whether I like any music.)

He does eventually mention the music, but he doesn't really tell me much about it. He mentions "reggae-dub" and "odd instrumentation," and he tells me that there are eight "instrumentals, dub versions, two-minute novelties and run-on chants" out of thirty-six tracks, and that's it really.

So if I'm reading a review like that and I haven't heard the album already, how in the world am I supposed to be able to tell whether I might like it? That's the only thing I'm interested in with reviews--figuring out whether I might be interested in an album, regardless of whether the reviewer liked it or not. The only way that can happen is via the reviewer describing the music in some detail.

 

Not with those guys, because whenever they tried to describe the actual music you could learn that Rush sounded like a "power boogie band", Can were amateurs "falling back on hackneyed rock chord changes", Henry Cow came off as a "secondhand Bitches Brew" tribute band and Tom Verlaine (of Television) sounded like a Jerry Garcia disciple devoid of "melodic ideas"...

 

If a reviewer doesn’t like a band he simply shouldn’t review that band’s work for the public at large. I wouldn’t give any Journey album more than one star either, regardless of how many hit songs they had, but I don’t work for RS.

 

The second edition is well worth the Google search. What I like about it is that the blues and jazz listings are not glutted with EU/UK public domain releases, like the Penguin and AMG guides. I don't automatically reject such releases (some are the preferred masterings) but a string of reviews of multiple PD CDs covering the same sessions gets wearying when all I wanted was a career overview of the readily available titles.

 

Great lyrics can make for a great song. But if all we cared about were the lyrics, we'd listen to spoken word and poetry readings...

 

I have the red book and I have to laugh at the bands that they listed as worthless. A few that come to mind are Rush, AC/DC, and Uriah Heep. They really had a bug up their ass over hard rock in general. But Bob Dylan or Bruce Springsteen could put out an album of fart sounds and they'd give it 4 or 5 stars. I also have to laugh at the first Captain Beyond album getting one star in the blue book too.

 

Although there are lyrics I like more than other lyrics, I look at lyrics in a weird way. For me, it's impossible for there to be bad lyrics. The idea of that doesn't even make any sense. That's because I look at lyrics as words (or just sounds) to sing. Any word or phoneme will do, really. I don't have much interest in lyrics for their own sake. The vast majority of pop-rock (as well as hip-hop etc.) lyrics are completely uninteresting to me as lyrics, including stuff that I see people praise. I just don't get what folks like about them as lyrics. I also have just about zero interest in poetry, by the way. That's the case even with someone like Poe, whom I consider a favorite author. I don't care about his poetry. The closest I get to liking poetry is that I'm a huge Dr. Seuss fan. And probably the closest I get to liking lyrics when I'm listening to music (aside from the occasionally oddity like Lou Reed) is that I enjoy most country lyrics. Well, and comedy and novelty stuff works as comedy/novelty partially because of lyrics, obviously. Plus I like artists like Laurie Anderson and Ken Nordine, but there aren't many folks working in that vein (which seems odd to me--I would have expected both of them to be more directly influential . . . even Anderson kind of quickly moved away from her Big Science/United States Live style).

 

This is exactly why some of us gravitate to instrumentals - because we don't want to waste our time with bad lyrics.

 

I remember the '78 version that dissed the ISB's first album for being full of "self-righteous protest songs". The critic had obviously never heard the album.

 

I have the 1979, 1983, 1992, and 2002 editions (not sure if those years are exactly right, but they are close).

The 1979 and 1983 versions I have just for informational purposes only, just to have info about some of those early '70s groups that didn't make the later editions (e.g., Joy of Cooking). I think many of the reviews in those two books (especially things they rate badly) are very poorly written, bordering on childish. They didn't even get the history of the late '60s Beach Boys correct in those early books (see what they say about Smile and Smiley Smile).

The 1979 and 1983 editions also are bad because they only list what is in print at those respective times --- therefore the listings are nowhere near complete, and are pretty close to useless as far as I am concerned.

On the other hand, the 1992 edition is the one that made me aware of both the Velvet Underground and Big Star, and I consider that to be a good thing.

So, for the early versions, the main use for me is for artist information, and very limited release information (titles, dates -- but beware even that). The later versions I use for both artist information and release information (but even 2002 is starting to be a ways back timewise, so it's losing its usefulness there too). I have learned not to put much stock in their ratings, because I disagree with many of them. But once again, it was their glowing ratings for Velvet Underground and Big Star that caused me to stand up and take notice. Take it with several grains of salt.

 

Well, Penguin Jazz Guides guides were never glutted with PD material, at least not when it came to post-war jazz. They reviewed some stuff published by Fresh Sound, Lonely Hill and alike, but it was a margin; most entries (by far) were original or legitimate releases.

 

I've been reading the magazine for a very long time, but have
only perused through it lately, for maybe the last 7-8 years.
The reviews have always been entertaining first and foremost;
I like reviews of any kind if there is a smidgen of sincerity and
knowledge. I have old hardbounds from 1969 thru most of the
70's. Now those reviews were fun, watching the writers get a
little better, a little snarkier with their trade. But even the
better writers sure missed the mark on a lot of classics and
indeed, lost some of that sincerity, becoming shameless homers
to some artists no matter what, and slamming others that didn't
deserve the print abuse.

The book, History of Rolling Stone Magazine is pretty entertaining,
and many of the review writers went on to author some excellent
books. Greil Marcus' Mystery Train and The Old Weird America,
among others, doesn't get any better subject-wise; some others
were Stephen Holden and Robert Christgau whose review books
are as pompous as his mag pieces. Wenner is trying to sell
Rolling Stone and I wonder if that means it might make a turn around
and lose some of the fluff. I doubt it. Lou Reed always said it best,
'I don't know anyone actually who does care what a critic says.'

 

I eagerly await your thorough review of the musical content of this album to show why giving it five stars is such a credibility killer.

To help you off on the right foot, the album’s title is Season of Glass.

 

Lyrics are words to sing. But if any word or sound would do, they could just scat.

 

I'm sure you're right. I'm conflating using all my Penguin, AMG and Rolling Stone guides and then going on eBay!

 

I can understand why a particular individual may not care about lyrics, and I also understand that most music reviews do very little reviewing of the technicalities of the music, but to suggest that reviewers should ignore lyrics because a particular individual doesn’t care about them seems odd.

 

Yeah because as we all know there are no bad instrumentals.

 

Oh, there are plenty. But if you gravitate toward the great artists - Morricone, Sun Ra, Morton Feldman - you don't have to worry about that. Instrumentals are a great way of avoiding trite or poorly written lyrics.

 

Never owned one of these guides, but I’d look through them at book stores. The revisionism killed me. I remember seeing McCartney’s Tug of War getting either 2 or 3 stars in one of those books - never mind that RS had given it a five-star review, hailing it as a “masterpiece” upon release...

 

Gotta agree here. Books of this sort -- along with the Trouser Press Guide --- before the age of the internet were crucial just because they compiled so much info in one handy resource.

I used these guides to help me decide the first LP I would seek out by an artist I had interest in but had not heard any of their material previously.

That's exactly what happened to me with Moby Grape as well. I was interested in hearing this band's material after reading about them, and I consulted the guide first for a place to start. The guide raved about the first LP, so I ended up scouring the used bins for that LP first before any of the others.

 

Feel free to disagree all you want; we both are entitled to our opinions. And for the record, I tried to listen to it when it first came out, and regarded it and most of her output as pure crap. Plus that cover just struck me as tacky.

We're all entitled to our opinions, but RS lost some credibility with me for promoting that record.

 

Different writers in the guide versus the original RS reviews, different opinions. I remember Jann Wenner gave Dylan's Slow Train Coming five stars but in the 80's blue guide there was a more lukewarm take on it by Dave Marsh.