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.

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."