Words Of Mutilation

I’ve always pipe-dreamed about making some foray into freelance music writing, but I usually bring myself quickly back to reality by reminding myself that good music writing is damn difficult. I’m rarely satisfied with any of the writing I do here to begin with, and that’s already about music that stands out to me. So I worry that if I had to churn out something about music I was indifferent to, simply because I was getting paid to do it, the end product would be dismal.

I really hope the same reasons were at play for some of the bad writing I’m about to “showcase” – a rather bitchy thing to do, I know, but what are blogs for if not for occasionally venting the impotent fury that would bemuse and bore everyone else around you?

From Juice magazine, I’m not sure which edition (I photographed the offending text and threw away the rest), Pavan Shamdasani reviews a Pixies tribute album. Here’s the full text of the review:

“This is odd. There’s a considerable chance that you’ve never heard of The Pixies. They were never a mainstream band, and most of their popularity appeared years after their break-up, when Kurt Cobain admitted to ripping off their stop/start dynamics. So to put out a tribute album for a band that has no casualties, was never that celebrated and was still touring up till last year is a strange occurrence. And even stranger are the cover choices – a male emo singer extolling the pleasures of a big, black cock on “Gigantic”? A clubby remix of lovesick stalker-ballad “Hey”? A Mogwai noisefest on “Gouge Away”? A psychedelic journey through muffled vocals and drunken horns in “Where Is My Mind?” OK, maybe the last one makes sense, but still, this is by and large a terribly incompetent compilation that pays little tribute to what made The Pixies so special.”

  • There’s a considerable chance that you’ve never heard of The Pixies. Way to start off a review, dude – with a big dose of condescension for your readers!
  • …most of their popularity appeared… Popularity does not “appear” fully formed from Zeus’s head, it is “gained” or “garnered”.
  • So to put out a tribute album for a band that has no casualties, was never that celebrated and was still touring up till last year is a strange occurrence. Where do I even begin? 1) Ferry disasters have casualties. Bands do not. 2) A huge number of tribute albums are made for people who are live and kicking. Google this if you need proof. 3) It is either misleading or ignorant to describe a band who broke up acrimoniously in 1993 and didn’t reform until 2004 as “still touring up till last year”. 4) The act of putting out an album cannot be described as a strange “occurrence”. It may be a strange “move” or an odd “decision”, but it is not an “occurrence”.
  • And even stranger are the cover choices – a male emo singer extolling the pleasures of a big, black cock on “Gigantic”? Because male emo singers aren’t allowed to enjoy big black cocks, clearly.
  • A clubby remix of lovesick stalker-ballad “Hey”? A Mogwai noisefest on “Gouge Away”? A psychedelic journey through muffled vocals and drunken horns in “Where Is My Mind?” OK, maybe the last one makes sense, but still, this is by and large a terribly incompetent compilation that pays little tribute to what made The Pixies so special. What’s so self-evidently wrong with any of the cover choices described? Why do they pay little tribute to what made The Pixies so special? And given that the writer starts off the review by assuming most of his readers don’t even know the band, how on earth are they now supposed to understand this conclusion if he doesn’t throw them any frickin’ bone machines?
Music Geekery
6 Comments

6 Comments

  2. Look at it this way, if most music writing is so bad then your own contribution would have to be pretty decent.

    Most reviews make me cringe because they’re always second guessing their readership. Why can’t they write a fucking review about wether they enjoyed the CD or not and explain it clearly enough that if I disagree it still seems reasonable. Of course most magazines are full of letters from nit picking idiots complaining their favourite album got 3 stars instead of 5 and whingeing on about cancelling their subscriptions so most publishing seems to have lost any sort of individual voice.

  3. Read that same review and sniggered my way through it. I guess its only virtue was that it was brief. On a fairly related note, it brings to mind the recent piece in Sunday’s LifeStyle about record and CD (non-)buying whereby Stephin Merritt was referred to as an ‘obscure American songwriter’.

  4. I tihnk you’re going at it a bit hard to pick on “occurence”. It’s an occurence whether it was The guy is a moron. I’m right with you on the “Touring up until last year” point – Joni Mitchell is still alive and still singing from time to time, and actually appeared on Herbie Hancock’s grammy-winning tribute album. There are three or four tribute albums to Metallica done by violin-based string groups alone, and only Cliff Burton has died from their ranks (last time I checked). There are at least two Rolling Stones tributes in the Bossa Nova style (highly recommended, by me at least) and they refuse to die.

    But my favourite bit is where he spends an entire review saying that The Pixies weren’t special, and ends by slating the album for paying “little tribute to what made The Pixies so special”. He’s so keen to give in to that fashionable cynicism that sits under most music journalism that he undermines his whole review by being cynical about both the tribute album and the artist it’s paying tribute to. And by assuming his readers don’t know who the Pixies are, he’s also being cynical about their enthusiasm for music. Congratulations, Pavan, you have demonstrated you are too cool to have any enthusiasm for anything.

  5. Oops. I was going to disagree with you and then agree with you afterwards, but decided just to agree with you. But my editing skills are weak. So please ignore everything up to “The guy is a moron”.

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