Rolling Stone's 500 Worst Reviews of All TIme

I was looking up rock music history on the net and found this little gem on "Rate Your Music".

Rolling Stone's 500 Worst Reviews of All Time

The person who makes the list - schmidtt - compiles what he thinks are the 500 worst reviews written by the Rolling Stone magazine writers. He breaks down the reviews into 5 categories - poorly-written reviews, reappraisals, curmudgeonly reviews, hack reviews and anti-reviews. schmidtt covers plenty of reviews - including a number of them dating way back in the early years of the magazine. He sounds his opinions after every review, sharing his thoughts on why the choices make the list. Although some of his selections are there based solely on his bias, the others are just absurd. Some of these albums' reviews are just painful to read at in 2014, especially when you found out a few of these albums made it on the magazine's "500 Greatest Albums of All Time". Some reviewers weren't actually interested to review their given albums. A few albums aren't being described even a little in terms of music.

Enjoy laughing and cringing to these Rolling Stone reviews, including John Mendelsohn's review on Kraftwerk's "Autobahn" that literally teaches you how to maintain your car. Also, J. Thompson's review on The Incredible String Band's "The 5000 Spirits or the Layers of the Onion" is interesting to read... if you're on drugs.

edited 3rd Mar '14 9:05:35 AM by tropeslave

The forum ate your link. Here's a shortened one: http://bit.ly/1hYb743

I didn't know that forum can eat links. Why does that happen?

Can I use the shortened link you have in your post to replace the link above?

Yeah, you can use it. For some reason, the forum eats links if they're too long.

Thank you.

Mediocre review for I Am What I Am, the George Jones album with freakin' "He Stopped Loving Her Today" on it?! Wow, Rolling Stone really, really doesn't like country music.

For the most part he's pretty damn good...

Except when he describes Frank Zappa's Sheik Yerbouti as "the yuckiest, most offensive record I've ever heard."

Seriously? Yuckiest? Is this guy 5?!

Otherwise he's fine though.

The funny thing is, the comment you remarked on is actually the opinion of the person who compiled the list, not anyone from the magazine staff. Sometimes, his bias just gets the better of him.

One of the reviews from the magazine that I find absurd is the one in which three Leonard Cohen songs were described as "flaming shits". Yes, readers can understand that the reviewer disliked those songs, but did the reviewer really have to call them "flaming shits"?

edited 3rd Mar '14 8:33:16 PM by tropeslave

I do know that.

I actually find "flaming shit" to be a useful word in a critic's vocabulary. More critics ought to use it.

"[Joni Mitchell's song] "Shadows and Light" suffers from too many vocal overdubs and a synthesizer that sounds like a long, solemn fart."

There you go, "a long, solemn fart". A great term to be used in reviews!

Thanks for the toilet humor, Rolling Stone!

I don't see anything wrong with the references to shits and farts.

It just underscores how awful the critics think the work is.

Don't you find those references critical? Insulting? The thing is, if a critic calls some music "shits" or "a fart", that doesn't tell me anything about the music. It just tells me that the critics hate them. They could have used any other terms to describe the sounds better instead of writing like a 10-year old. A critic's work is to give reasons on why he hates or likes a product and, thus, persuade the readers whether to buy the product or not. They need to use eloquent words in their reviews to appear mannered so they can be taken seriously by the readers. "Shits" and "a fart" are not eloquent to be used in reviews to describe music unless the music is literally one of those!

I don't find those insulting because, well, it's not that big of a deal.

I do admittedly think that you should not describe a song as "a flaming shit." It's better to say, for example, "The backup on the song sounds as great as a flaming bag of shit."

I remember a really awful Dave Marsh review from the first edition of the Rolling Stone Record Guide where he described Magma as sounding like "a cross between Deep Purple and Tangerine Dream." Which, apart from being lazy and glib X Meets Y reviewing, is also grossly inaccurate. He was inordinately fond of the X meets Y formula, though, having once described the Hamburg-based AOR act Lake as "the Eagles meets Tangerine Dream." Toto would have been closer to the mark; they may not be your thing, but at least describe them accurately. (I also love how anything with prominent keyboard playing is immediately likened to Tangerine Dream.)

Marsh was also notorious for dismissing entire artists' catalogues with a single sentence. He was a terrible reviewer.

We definitely have different opinions when it comes to reviews.

Although the example you provided is clearer and talks more about the music, I think there's surely a more effective way to describe the backup.

edited 8th Mar '14 11:14:16 PM by tropeslave

It'd be really helpful if he'd organize the reviews/commentaries into the categories he assigned for them. But, after reading a few of his comments, I don't think I care enough to suggest it myself. I'd like to see the same concept applied to Pitchfork, though.

Sadly the author of this list also seems to have a bias vs progressive rock.

It's another opera entirely how music critics have approached that genre. Really a fascinating subject for a thesis or something like that.

And apparentally he doesn't like Pearl Jam or The White Stripes either.

"Bjork sucks without a band..."

Ha ha ha nope.

That aside, he has some good points about some things, and some bias steamroller with other things.

I've always hated how the music press and fans of opposing genres wrote up Progressive Rock as "overly pretentious", "confusing", etc. Yes, while I'll agree that certain bands probably took it too far (looking at you, Emerson Lake And Palmer), the same could be said of any genre, really.

I like to think that prog rock's downfall (as well as what lead to it being out the door as soon as the '80s entered the scene) was that it was ahead of its time, but, well, looking at the music landscape today... not really many prog rock bands out there anymore, are they?

edited 8th Mar '14 6:17:30 PM by LightPhaser

One task I'd like to undertake one day would be to comb the 1979 and 1983 editions of the Rolling Stone Record Guide and review every album that received a "bullet" rating (i.e.: zero stars).

I find ELP to be one of the most musically adventurous big groups of the time. The first 5 albums are for certain on par with any other prog in terms of the interest and excitement of the compositions alone. (If containing annoyingly many quotations from various classical composers) They too did the creative crash and burn that most of the other bands went through. I guess since they were the most popular group of the style then that crash and burn was more noticeable and left a bigger stain.

Speaking of rock "criticism" though - I have no idea, most of the time, what the critics are actually basing their opinions on. Almost always it is a description of the music based on some cunning analogy, comparison to other artists/styles and a judgement either in the tone or stated outright. The description almost never ties into the judgement, literally the opposite one could be derived from it in almost any case. So I have yet to find critics in the popular music genres that I actually hold in high regard. Most of the big names I find outright insultingly stupid.

edited 9th Mar '14 4:35:25 PM by Yachar

I wish reviewers would try to describe the actual song structure, composition, and thematic development (or lack thereof) in music more.

I mostly just review country, where melody and composition usually take a backseat to lyric. But if there is something cool about a production, I usually make sure to point it out.

Another thing I've noticed is that he thinks Lupe Fiasco's ''Lasers'' is a case of selling out instead of Executive Meddling despite talking about how much he liked ''The Cool'' earlier in the same paragraph.

edited 9th Mar '14 6:40:15 PM by RooTheRipper