Cliches in music journalism that you hate. And those that you quite like too.

(that's in my hate column)

But, y'know, 500-wd reviews generally pay more than 50-wders.

Lester Bangs wrote a very funny essay mocking some of the cliches of rock journalism (circa the mid-70's). It's included in Jim DeRogatis's biography. That's the only example of the latter I can think of right now.

No, i'd say that's exactly what this thread is about. Cliches that you hate to write just as much as those you hate to read.

saying in 50 words what would have been better said in 500.

ha! you so weren't looking hard enough. matos found two, but here are a whole bunch more, which are all better than this thread:

USE OTHER WORDS PLEASE

Pop Cliche: Advanced Level

Lazy Music Critic-isms

Alternate-Universe A-List Cliches

Abolish One Word from Pop Music, Pick its Replacement!

Let's Bitch About Lame Metaphors in Music Reviews!

Dumbest Music Journalist Term

Words You Irrationally Dislike

OTM!

A quick trawl through some of my own stuff uncovers the likes of:
"atmospheric"
"infusion"
"elegant" - I use this A LOT
"genuinely"
"absorbing"
"experimental" - although i used the term ironically
"back-to-basics"
"anything-esque"
"potential"

yes! as if pop music isn't all about planned obsolescence.

now let's have a moment of silence for the "late lamented" and rather short-lived Traxxx magazine with its unintentionally ironic slogan: "music built to last."

Pop music doesn't deserve to be underrated the way you do. Pop music at its best is just as valuable as timeless and lasting art as classical music at its best.

And I strongly disagree with alex's last statement. Mozart captures any moment for the greatness of his music in itself, and that goes for the best pop too.

although recently I used " sounds like LSD on Acid" just to get a reaction...didnt work

I remember talk of 'intelligent' drum n bass, which was used to refer the same music made by white guys, i think

More like "Everyone knows these guys have left their creative prime behind forever, but this album does contain a couple of decent songs, which is something at least..."

and, of course, STUNNING RETURN TO FORM is worth 100 "blisterings."

looks like someone hates the new york times!

-Beatle-esque
-Feature articles that start with "so-and-so is running late," along with that whole meta article-within-an-article type shit. btw they ALL start with "so-and-so is running late"

If I become a pop journalist I'm going to begin every review with "I've never seen a shooting star before."

"troubling" the charts, or sometimes "failing to trouble" the charts.

Helplessly Young's publicist just sent me this Spin review excerpt, which is classic for many reasons, including the deathless x-on-acid scenario:

"Imagine if the strangest folks behind the sunshine pop records of the
‘60s swallowed Syd Barrett's LSD stash and rocked out underwater with
the Electric Light Orchestra while breathing helium. Then envision
something even more fantastical" SPIN

anyone who says that a soundtrack album is only a partial experience

Which reminds me of "a soundtrack to a movie that doesn't exist yet" (see: all trip hop/ambient albums from the 90s)

lol: a classic cliche of the 90s, usually applied to programmatic trip-hop muzak, was "soundtrack to an imaginary film".

ha xpost

'low slung'

"A certain Robert Zimmerman"

terrible

haha otm

Anyone who refers to Dylan as Zimmerman is doing me a favour by altering me to their utter cockishness and saving me the bother of reading further. You don't get this with most artists - nobody refers to Chuck D as "a certain Carlton Ridenhour". Maybe they should.

They would if it was sufficiently well known that that was his name

"Pro-Tools" or "Auto-Tune", usually used in an inaccuate manner just so the critic can show that they are hip to the latest music tech.

xpost. OK, then, who calls David Bowie David Jones? Or Elton John Reg Dwight? Or Snoop Dogg Calvin Broadus? Anyway, lots of people don't in fact know Dylan's real name but using it is indicative of the cosy, tiresome assumption that he's the centre of the fucking world which afflicts so much Dylan writing. Only defensible use of this kind of thing is when the artist does it first, eg calling Eminem Marshall Mathers.

every rapper gets referred to by their birth name at some point in an article, usually in a "lol their real name is a bit nerdy" sneery context! don't like the sneery undertones but i like knowing artists' real names so i don't really mind. indeed i have this thread to thank for learning today that bob dylan wasn't his real name.

I feel like I've seen Reg Dwight used in a similar way before... I agree it's none too edifying but music writers like to be corny mofos innit

Ice-T or is that TRACEY MARROW amirite

I basically just hate people who write about Dylan in a fawning, clubbable way as if every reader will automatically agree that he is music's greatest living genius and thus immune from normal criticism, and this is indicative of that.

i just realised i had no idea, none at all, whether dylan had died yet or not. (wikipedia says he hasn't.)

I love that on the other thread you're calling journalists lazy for not checking out Electrik Red and on this one you're admitting you don't even know if Dylan's still alive. lextastic

The thing that bothers me in "A certain Robert Zimmerman" is the "a certain" bit. As though we're all meant to gasp when we hear who it is. It's SUCH a hackneyed device.

i know he's alive now! honestly since getting halfway through one of his albums in 2001 before flinging the cd across the room in disgust, i don't think i've given a minute's thought to dylan - he doesn't even crop up in conversation ever

People calling Dylan Zimmerman is Bowie's fault, innit?

The article every year in Uncut that proclaims it have been Dylan's greatest/strangest/happiest/whateveriest year. In fact, all Bob Dylan coverage is my least favourite music press cliche.

I'll see your "Failing to trouble the charts" and raise you a "failing to trouble the chart scorers".

And I'll add one I find myself slipping into when I'm being lazy: castigating the "churlishness" of those who hate something utterly inoffensive.

Lex, you know every track on The-Dream's solo album uses at least one sample from every track on Highway 61 Revisited, don't you?

Use of the word 'all'; "such and such a song is all timpani flourishes" or "so and so's new album is all shoegaze-soul" or whatever. I think I hate it so much because I used to do it myself a lot.

^^^
YES

Nothing makes me angrier than "all x-s and x-s". It's the biggest setup for a completely superfluous adjective shit.

Lex, you know every track on The-Dream's solo album uses at least one sample from every track on Highway 61 Revisited, don't you?

the pj harvey song?

oh god is this where i find out that that song's a bob dylan cover or something

luckily it's not one of my favourite PJH songs so w/v/s

This IS an act, yeah?

Lex ... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Highway_61_Revisited

it is a dylan cover, yes.

(and it tears me up inside.)

i might go and see how dylan's "highway 61 revisited" compares to harvey's, when i finish rinsing lisa hype & gaza kim on the go-go club riddim

What does go-go sound like now, Lex? I used to go to see Troublefunk and Chuck Brown and EU and Redds and the Boys when I lived in DC ... but that was 22 years ago and I rather suspect things have changed ...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lvZnD4A-PC4

nah lex pj>>>>>dylan and i like a certain robert zimmerman. not worth yr time.

it's such an addictive riddim - i have elephant man and vybz kartel versions of it too

xp

"And I'll add one I find myself slipping into when I'm being lazy: castigating the "churlishness" of those who hate something utterly inoffensive."

Yes! Don't call the reader a churl if they have the audacity to disagree with you!

Start of a review I just read:

Nite Jewel’s Good Evening is a great Los Angeles album. It’s impossible to imagine this music being made anywhere else.

^fraudulent nonsense every time, if you ever find yourself writing something like this KILL IT

Not too sad about the decline in ethnic drums.

"reclusive" as used to describe any artist who doesn't masturbate the media 24-7

Icon or genius, when what the writer really means is famous or talented.

Just seen Lex use "in equal measure" which really has to die.

the word 'pretentious' to describe art-rock or prog

'with a dub undercarriage' or 'welded onto a dub chassis' get my goat

Also: 'mash-up', 'blissed-out' 'woozy' and 'sun-dappled'

And 'whiskey-soaked' as in 'x's whiskey-soaked vocals' usually means a poor Springsteen impersonator fronting a 3rd rate bar band.

Don't really think of "in equal measure" as a music writing thing or a cliche so much as a fairly prosaic descriptive term, tbh

I guess. It just seems so unimaginitive.

i was much rather x100 someone said "in equal measure" than "mashed with" or "having sex with" or "x on y drug" or any of the million other much much worse cliches that bad hacks use to say the same thing

I don't know if music journalism could even exist if it followed all these rules. (Pushed over the edge by "blissed-out" and "woozy", two descriptors of a quality I appreciate in music, though I guess if I'd read more music criticism in this here year of hypnagogic chillwave I would've seen both way too much)

That said, I am glad that the early-00s fad for everything being "coruscating" is over.
coruscating, ppl. adj.: rocking in the vaguely arty manner of the loud part of a quiet-loud-quiet post-rock track and I probably don't know what this word means and just saw it in someone else's review and thought it sounded heavy, punishing, and mostly importantly like the writer was cleverer than me

xp there's no hierarchy of cliche. orwell would be appalled.

Yeah it's very much a YMMV thing - most of the adjectives ppl are mentioning here are fundamentally OK to use in writing, it's just that they get repeatedly used over time, ie how cliche babby is formed. Of course you only realise this if you read acres and acres of record reviews like some sort of weirdo

No mention of the ol' "The bastard step/child/of X and X/If X and X had a baby" (various permutations).

Using Simon Reynolds derived diatribe as if it was part some kind of hybrid genealogy/science lesson

(xxpost) Well, I know, but on the other hand genuine sonic descriptors with no exact synonyms seem a different ballpark to e.g. "sophomore effort" or some other phrase which keeps cropping up and embedding itself inexplicably in that perpetual swirl of things music critics* write because other music critics write

(* well, kids who write for indie webzines/student papers, at least)

But yeah, my varying levels of irritation at these words and phrases are pretty much a function of having read quite a lot of this stuff 5 years ago and almost none recently

I'm getting tired of "forward looking."

which probably is useful and everything, but I am still getting tired of it.

WHAT'S IN THE WATER IN [city name]?

USUALLY WHEN YOU THINK OF [city name] YOU USUALLY DONT THINK OF [genre]. BUT [band]...

THE FIRST TIME I SAW [band]...

"In this age of" [bullshit]

a strong candidate for album of the year (and it's only February).

Because you KNOW November is hopeless.

"In this age of" [bullshit]

nah this depends on what follows it, it's not the construction itself which is bad - eg i LOVE maura's coinage a while back of "in our current panoptic age".

Been going over my last decade of music writing. OH THE HORROR.

From frogsb on another thread:

Spring is here, and throughout the land, baseball fans don their caps and root, root, root in the glowing warmth of... ..their computers?

Cliche...cliche...whaaaa?? **record scratch**

'this isn't your usual jangly indie band with four lads playing guitars.' then go on to describe exactly that.

"musical gumbo"

Spring is here, and throughout the land, baseball fans don their caps and root, root, root in the glowing warmth of... ..their computers?

Cliche...cliche...whaaaa?? **record scratch**

big lol, I was literally just reading a review on Yelp that did this and thinking how much I hate it. It's p much a Yelp standard though...

Anytime something is described as "sweeping" I've come to consider it a turn-off

My three main pet-peeves in music journalism are:

- The constant requirement for music to be groundbreaking and "different" all the time. I don't want stuff that sounds completely different from what I already like. I want more of what I already like

- The pathetic idea that rock (and other related music forms) should be "rebellion". Just because it was in 1955, 1967, 1977 doesn't mean it was to be all the time. And the ones that rebelled in 55, 67 and 77 are the current establishment so what exactly is the point about rebelling against them then?

- Overfixation on lyrics over music. Music is music, first and foremost. And should be judged largely by musical content. If you want good poems, buy a book of poems instead!

Oh, and another annoying thing that has been around since punk is this anti-cleverness thing. Like being a technically good musician or a composer/arranger who likes to do intricate things harmonically and in arrangements is supposed to be a bad thing. Of course it isn't.

Overfixation on lyrics over music. Music is music, first and foremost. And should be judged largely by musical content. If you want good poems, buy a book of poems instead!

wtf Geir, don't you think the two of them kind of go together in a way. that's why a song is called that. it has, you know, words.

A song has words because it makes it easier to sing along to it.

oh. my god.

Ha, cut him some slack, most ilxors would agree with Geir.

Even though I don't agree with him, what Geir said is an awesome thing to say.

"Achingly beautiful"

http://twitter.com/solovelyithurts

"would have made a great EP"

^ Truth be told, of most 12-song LPs, there are always four songs that stand out above the other eight to varying degrees. I would much rather have a band/artist put 100% of their effort into making one brilliant song, than make 10 songs at 10% apiece. Yet even now, in the age of downloads, you'd think there would be more non-album singles, but there aren't.

"...is a revelation" or "revelatory."

I hate to say this, because I use it quite a lot but "cathartic"

Maybe the funniest parody of x-meets-y descriptions I've come across.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TxIivXR33Qc

I really hate the passive "___ has been compared to ___, ___..." -- it's so lazy and uninteresting. Maybe if someone REALLY SIGNIFICANT thinks the artist you're writing about is comparable to ___, that's sort of interesting (although still kind of lazy to just cite someone else's opinion in music writing), but otherwise it could be your drunk neighbor or even your own unattributed opinion that you want to give more weight.

You know what really bugs me? When they call music "smart." God, that just sounds so stupid.

...chanteuse... Nico....

Never a singer, that singer.

It's a bad sign when certain admired bands or artists get their latest efforts described as "lovely". That's almost always boring middle-aged noodling with nothing much to say.

(artist) puts an intellectual spin on (genre) and proves that (genre) is capable of "depth"

thinking man's (genre)

what I really mean is metal but I'm sure people do it to other genres too

"Their best album since (only two albums ago)"

Mostly it doesn't annoy me in context so much as when used as soundbites in Wikipedia critical reception sections.

Counterpoint: "Her first album since (album released a year ago)"

MV & EE’s first album since last month

Buckethead's best album since last Thursday

The use of a year as a possessive before the album title, e.g. 1988's Daydream Nation. 2002's Sea Change. 2013's Random Access Memories.

Most of the time I'd rather just have the year in parentheses after the title.

"tasty" when used to refer to guitar solos

One of Lester Bangs' funniest lines ever: "Tasty licks and all that Traffic twaddle."