In the March 19 issue of Entertainment Weekly there’s a record review for Hands, a new album by an artist known as Little Boots, that is shockingly devoid of musical content!
The reviewer’s name is Melissa Maerz, about whom I know absolutely nothing. It goes without saying that EW is not the sort of magazine a music lover’s music lover like myself should fret over for lack of musical content, but at least I think my beef is justified as a bathroom reader’s bathroom reader. Check out the mini-review, which I’ve copied in full, after the jump, and see if you can spot any actual music references.
Litte Boots
Hands
POP (ELECKTRA)She’s been called “new Kylie” and “little Britney,” but U.K. sprite Little Boots thinks she’s more underground than that. One video even finds her in a backless minidress, dancing with prostitutes, gang members, and homeless people. Still, musically, she’s great at taking superstar glamour to the streets: It’s megaclub gold for the broke-ass rest of us. B+ Melissa Maerz
Ms. Maerz, congratulations on having written as dumb-ass a record review as has ever been written.
It’s called Entertainment Weekly, not Music Weekly. I’d rather her focus on what Lil Boots does well (apparently entertain) rather than try and justify her music as being “pretty good, no, really…” which is the kind of review I recall reading for albums by Paris Hilton, Scarlet Johansen, etc in which the reviewer tried to make the point that it was a credible musical venture in it’s own right.
Yeah it’s so ‘underground’ to have professionals doing synchronized dance moves while portraying homeless people and gang members.
Maybe the review is designed to have approximately the same amount of musical content as the song.
The video is certainly hilarious.
“stars are blind” by Paris Hilton is a great tune. I think it is Gwen Stefani on the recording though.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0L8IDX8DM_g
Do you think the Paris Hilton song sounds a bit like this:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZmZcKnv4upA
So sue me, I didn’t mind that Little Boots song, I thought harmonically it was more interesting than most of the other stuff in this genre/demographic.
Maerz seems like she is trying to take a page from the Christgau handbook, where he is able to somehow able to say something about the music while not always actually addressing it directly. Still, reading her review gave me absolutely no impression of what I was going to hear, maybe that’s why I thought it was better than I expected.
PS. I dare you:
http://www.facebook.com/melissa.maerz
To be clear – and this is not to deny the power of anyone’s comments so far, because I’ve enjoyed them all – my beef is with the review. It reads more like a publicist’s attempt to plant notions in the reader’s mind about this artist than anything remotely having to do with the record or even the artist herself. Then, after seeing the models cavorting around as homeless people and gang members I wanted to vomit. Hell, even someone as tasteless and out of touch as Michael Jackson crawled out of his grave to vomit.
I guess she’s trying to say, in her own retarded syntax (“megaclub gold for the broke-ass rest of us”), that it’s got a good beat & is good to dance to. It’s as horribly written as the video is conceived.
Mr. Mod, you tap into my deep contempt for, oh, I don’t know, about 95% of all music reviews: they don’t say anything about anything, and usually do so very badly. Spoken like a frustrated would-be music critic? So be it. They suck.
Sorry: for “reviews” I meant “reviewers.” For which also read: “critics.” And so on. As you were.