Hurt their feelings
I started reviewing music for anyone who’d listen in about 2007. I think the first show I ever reviewed and sent away to anyone was Johnny Foreigner and ¡Forward,Russia! in Cafe Drummonds. I was nervous as hell about sending it, not only because I was a huge ¡F,R! fan at the time and said they were average, but also because I was worried the band would read it somehow, and it would upset them. A sensitive one, for sure.
I don’t know if they ever read it but I ended up writing for Is This Music? for a couple of years, and then inexplicably, I was allowed to review for The Fly. The Fly circulates hundreds of thousands of copies, which means now, I could end up pissing off a huge, huge number of people in 100 words or less.
From that first review, I tentatively made steps towards a growing reputation, or indeed notoriety. I became known for being ruthlessly harsh with shitty bands - Elliot Minor fans wrote some nasty comments on a particularly bad review (“Christ, this is terrible. I’ve honestly heard more inspired lyrics from my 4-year-old cousin after watching Thomas the Tank Engine”, I noted, like an idiot), and an Aberdeen band I described as having “limitless arrogance without the tunes to back it up” actually used my quote as a tagline for their MySpace page. Yeah, MySpace, we’re going pretty far back.
You start to worry yr words will catch up with you at some point. To this day, I’ve never had anything more threatening than being called various swear words (mostly by fans of The View) and some anonymous person saying I should die in a fire. But honest to god, I was scared something would happen because I’d slated someone. It’s not happened yet, and I don’t know any reviewers I work with to have ever been physically threatened or challenged on the internet by some keyboard warrior beyond being called something questionable.
You learn to stop giving a fuck, really. Subjectivity is absolutely key, and you’ve got to be as cold and brutal as you can if you have to. Maybe in the past (and present) I’ve been needlessly catty or critical, but music is about passion, and I’ve written countless reviews at the very apex of my critical nastiest. Because bad music doesn’t deserve to be told it’s good, does it? Get it out of the way and carry on with trying to raise the profile of something genuinely interesting, that has some sense of fuckin’ art. You know?
If you’ve ever read this blog and thought about writing about music, that’s my one bit of advice: Don’t care if you’re going to hurt some feelings. Don’t try to lighten the situation with off-compliments, call the problems out.
Especially if you know the musicians personally. Friends are going to respect you a lot more if you’re honest with them. Where does bullshitting about their music get them? Nowhere fast.
As a critic, you have to adopt the persona of someone who is attached from the music listening for the first time. Or if not the first time, with a decent knowledge of the music’s past, origins and background, but viewing the record you’ve been sent separate from that, until you analyse properly. So if you need to be mean, do it.
I’m off to answer some hatemail.
