Nazareth / Rolling Stone
- Thread starter AM Matt
- Start date
His second-most concise review in that book was of the Surf Punks' "My Beach", in which he wrote:
"My record player".
I let my copy go a while back, too.
In fairness, there were songs I discovered that I never would have without having read it (Linda Jones' "Hypnotized", for starters).
But yeah...below one star was the black square (“Worthless: records that need never (or should never) have been created. Reserved for the most bathetic bathwater.”). Yes, the Surf Punks' MY BEACH got that. But so did all these:
https://rateyourmusic.com/list/laikehao/1979-rolling-stone-record-guide%E2%80%99s-bullet-albums/
And, on page one----EVERY Burt Bacharach album.I felt like half the second page was dedicated to various forms of The Osmonds.
F&*% Dave Marsh.
jfiedler17
Well-Known Member
As someone who's extensively moonlighted as a music writer and album reviewer (for the now-sadly-defunct The Great Albums), I just don't get the approach to music criticism demonstrated by the likes of Marsh (and many others at Rolling Stone). They just seem to take a perverse glee in trashing particular artists or types of music, and I've never understood why you would even include an artist in an album-guide book whose entire discography you've seen fit to giving the worst rating in your grading system. I mean, anyone who would want to take the time to read a review of, say, the John Denver or Paul Williams catalog (just to mention two random artists included extensively in the list of bulleted albums linked to earlier) clearly must have at least a passing interest in those artists, so if you can't find anything nice to say about their music, then it feels like the only reason you've covered them at all was simply to be snarky and snobbish. A truly first-rate and professional reviewer should approach reviewing a discography by comparing the albums by any one artist to their other albums (or to music in the same vein, i.e. judging an adult-contemporary album on the basis of other adult-contemporary albums as opposed to, say, a punk or new-wave album), not by measuring an artist or genre they abhor by the standard of some completely different kind of artist or genre they prefer more. If you can't find anything nice to say about a particular artist, it's kind of silly to even tackle reviewing their full catalog, because it ultimately doesn't serve any real function. If I care to read about the latest Toto or Richard Marx album, for instance, I just want to know how it stacks up against their older records - I don't care to read a diatribe about how much you despise the artist in general. That, to me, is the true test of how good any particular publication is when it comes to reviews - can they fairly judge music of all kinds, no matter the genre or hip factor?
Bobberman
Well-Known Member
I've read Rolling stone reviews on Burt Bacharach and everything I read was nothing but nasty to him and this was in the late 70s when I first read them afterwards I never trusted or relied on any critical music reviews I relied only on my tastes and that for me was and still is sufficient for me
