'We like the songs, but we hate to pay'

Welcome to the Errordome! And a playlist of songs about critics

VLADIMIR: Moron!
ESTRAGON: That's the idea, let's abuse each other.

They turn, move apart, turn again and face each other.

VLADIMIR: Moron!
ESTRAGON: Vermin!
VLADIMIR: Abortion!
ESTRAGON: Louse!
VLADIMIR: Sewer-rat!
ESTRAGON: Priest!
VLADIMIR: Cretin!
ESTRAGON: (with finality): Crritic!
VLADIMIR: Oh!

He wilts, vanquished, and turns away.

ESTRAGON: Now let's make up.

My music blog in the oughts was jokingly called Zoilus, after an ancient Greek writer who became famous for attacking Homer. Later his name became a metonym for a bitchy critic who was always wrong. When I decided to do this newsletter, I considered reusing Zoilus as a title, but it would be weird to double down on a joke nobody got 20 years ago. Still, I do think it’s wise for a project in criticism to bivouac under a banner of humility, since we are so often wrong and everybody hates us even when we aren’t. So this time I’m borrowing from a less-obscure source, Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot, from the scene in which our two unmoored tramps stage an insult contest and Gogo wins hands-down by spitting, “Crritic!” In your mind’s ear, sound that double-R’d version with a growl and a tongue roll.

So, welcome to “Crritic!” In the unlikely event that you’re reading this first post without having heard of me, I’m Carl Wilson, best known as the music critic for Slate (and sometime guest on the Culture Gabfest), and the author of a book people seemed to like, Let’s Talk About Love: A Journey to the End of Taste (I repent ever changing the subtitle). Generally, I’m a freelance writer, editor, sometime speaker, etc., based in Toronto. “Crritic!” will be my venue for subjects and ideas either too small and immediate to pitch to publications, or else too big and slow.

That might include short reviews and live-event reports, sallies into some public debates, meta-thoughts about culture and criticism, personal essays on unpredictable subjects, and maybe excerpts from larger works in progress. And jokes. Most of my paid writing is on music and books, and that will probably be true here too, but I’ll range into movies and tv and who knows what else. For local readers, I may recommend upcoming shows and events I’m excited about. Though for complete Toronto music listings you definitely want to sign up to my friend Michael Barclay’s newsletter.

We’ll settle into some regular schedule, but for now I’m going to keep it loose and find a rhythm, feel out the room DJ-style. While that works itself out, posts will be free, though you’re still welcome to send money. I do hope this project will generate income in the long run, as you may have heard faintly that this whole line of work (criticism, journalism, hopes, dreams, etc.) has been cratering.

The “Crritic!” logo was supplied by my dear friend Sean Dixon. The overly flattering thumbnail portrait of me is by my former Globe and Mail colleague Anthony Jenkins. Anything wrong with how this feed is working is my fault, so please let me know.

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Were this not the intro post, I might offer you reviews of the shows I saw this week: One, a satisfingly raucous reunion of pioneering Ontario 1970s proto-punk band Simply Saucer at the Mule Spinner studio space. A convivial Edgar Breau was backed by original bassist Kevin Christoff (“returned to the mothership”) and newer ringers Mike Treblicock (Killjoys) on guitar and Glenn Milchem (Blue Rodeo) before the gathered, touchingly aging punks of Hamilton, Ont. …

… And, the next night, a moving and surprisingly raucous show from Nashville singer-songwriter Madi Diaz at the Axis club in Toronto, getting a fully rounded sound accompanied only by drummer Adam Popick (who sometimes doubled on keyboards and tripled on background vocals). Diaz’s new album Weird Faith might be my favourite record of the year so far. But I’d forgotten that in recent years she’s also been invited out as an opener on a couple of Harry Styles tours, so I was a bit startled (though delighted) to see so many kids in their mid-teens out for this show by a 37-year-old singer-songwriter. You should have heard the high wolf-pack echoes of their supportive howls.

… Yes, I agree, don’t subscribe to this newsletter for the sake of the photos. I have a decent eye but unsteady hands. I’m short of stature. I do what I can.

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But since this is the first week, I thought it might be more suitable to give you a present. In the form of a playlist. Making themed playlists is kind of an addictive vice of mine, and for the first edition of “Crritic!” why not a playlist about critics? Both the pain and the pleasure of songs about critics is that they’re usually made by artists in a resentful snit. Somehow this variety of hurt feelings, compared to say heartbreak, doesn’t tend to produce their best songs. But I searched, asked friends and colleagues, made a giant list of about 120 tracks, and culled them down to a Top 40 for a playlist I’ve called “Let’s Get Crritical.” You can find it on Spotify, YouTube, Apple Music, and Tidal.

I spared you the 17-minute-long Take No Prisoners version of “Walk on the Wild Side” in which Lou Reed speculates on whether then-Village Voice critic Robert Christgau was an “anal retentive… toefucker” and tells The New York Times’ John Rockwell to fuck off. But there is at least one shot at Xgau here. Along with other specific callouts, slanders of critics and the press in general, and even a couple of friendly references. If it’s missing something you were expecting (like Guns N Roses’ “Get in the Ring”), that’s probably on purpose. The range of styles and genres is fairly indicative of what my playlists tend to be like. Full liner notes follow. I hope you’ll enjoy both the hits and the duds till we meet again. Feel free to share with friends, and maybe direct them this’a’way.

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‘Let’s Get Crritical!’ Playlist

1. Nick Lowe, “They Called It Rock” (Jesus of Cool, 1978, London): Lowe is, of course, a (the?) pivotal figure in the pub-rock-to-New-Wave subcultural shift in London in the late 70s, and today a brilliant veteran songwriter. This song is pretty much an ur-example of how artists stereotypically think of critics, encapsulated in the journey from, in the first verse, “They went and cut the record, the record hit the charts/ Someone in the newspaper said that it was art” to the final verse’s “They cut another record, it never was a hit/ Someone in the newspaper said that it was shit.”

2. Jimmy Webb, “Dorothy Chandler (Music from an Unmade Movie, Pt. 2)” (Words and Music, 1970, L.A.): The composer of the timeless “By the Time I Get to Phoenix,” “Witchita Lineman,” and so many more, also had his less timeless moments. Words and Music was his first attempt to break out as a singer in his own right, and a lot of it conceptually is about the creative process, but especially this pack of sarcastic taunts against “Mr. Critic”: “How many songs of love have you written in your life, sir? How many have you to destroy?” In alternate verses he seems to back off from the feud, assuring, “I wanna be a rock’n’roll Christian,” and perhaps offering his forgiveness. Dorothy Chandler was the wife of the publisher of the L.A. Times. Later the city named a pavilion after her.

3. Stew & The Negro Problem, “Birdcage” (Post Minstrel Syndrome, 1997, L.A.): Nearly three decades after Webb, L.A. artists were still pissed off at the L.A. Times: “But what does Robert Hillburn know about rock’n’roll?” In his 35 years on the beat, Hillburn also got villified in songs by the Go-Go’s and Oingo Boingo, among others. I came within a visa’s breadth of becoming the L.A. Times’ music critic a decade ago. I lament the songs never composed to excoriate me.

4. Prince, “All The Critics Love U In New York” (1999, 1982, Minneapolis): In which Prince wrestles with the dilemma of being a critics’ darling. His star started shooting when the likes of Bob Christgau fell for Dirty Mind (famously writing that with Prince around, “Mick Jagger should fold up his penis and go home”). But what did that mean to the public at large, and especially the Black public? Zach Hoskins wrote a great blog post a few years ago about those ambiguities and how, sonically, the most important part of this song isn’t New York but Detroit. Whatever its ambivalence, though, this song is positively cuddly toward critics compared to 1994’s “Billy Jack Bitch,” reputedly about Cheryl Johnson (“CJ”) of the Minneapolis Star-Tribune. That one’s spicier, this one’s better. And an artifact of a day when critics kinda maybe could make careers.

5. Public Enemy, “Don’t Believe The Hype” (It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back, 1988, New York): P.E. had a lot of songs about the media (“Bring the Noise,” “Letter to the New York Post,” “I Stand Accused”) but this is the classic. It was partly aimed at radio DJ Mr. Magic, but also part of an ongoing tussle with critic John Leland, the Village Voice and others. (In that 1988 Leland interview, he even says, “The only one I’m furious at over the past year is Greg Tate. That motherfucker sold out. I’m pissed at him, man.” … Chuck, in this house, we do not diss the late great Ironman Tate.) But he’s also said it was inspired by reading Noam Chomsky’s Manufacturing Consent. I might wince when Chuck declaims, “All the critics, you can hang’ em, I'll hold the rope,” but the phrase “don’t believe the hype” is still a cornerstone of media literacy 101.

6. Amy Ray, “Lucystoners” (Stag, 2001, Georgia): I didn’t know of this solo tune by half of the Indigo Girls until the shitstorm over ex-Rolling Stone editor Jan Wenner’s sexist and racist NYT Magazine interview broke out last fall and some folks mentioned its rousing taunting chorus from two decades before: “Janny Wenner, Janny Wenner/ Rolling Stone's most fearless leader/ Gave the boys what they deserve/ But with the girls he lost his nerve.” (On the other hand, I’m not sure what lucystoners are, except apparently they don’t need boners.) Female artists always knew: Joni Mitchell wrote “Lead Balloon” about the futility of arguing with Wenner in 1998, rhyming his view of her as a “bitch” with her view of him as a “frozen fish.” (It’s not on all the streamers, but it’s in place of “Lucystoners” on Tidal.)

7. Leon Russell, “If The Shoe Fits” (Carney, 1972, L.A. via Tulsa): Speaking of Rolling Stone, this is a pretty hilarious West Coast insider caricature of its journalists and/or hangers-on, trying to cadge benefits from artists. Have to admit I felt a little genuinely guilty by association/recognition, which is why I took this post’s title from it: “Can you get us in free/ My girlfriend and me?/ We like the songs, but we hate to pay… Can I follow you home?/ Can I use your telephone?/ Can we crash here for just a few days?/ We're from Rolling Stone, so it's okay.”

8. Charles Aznavour, “La critique” (Je Voyage, 2003, Paris): A later song by the great chanteur, which, after stretching his press nemeses on the rack, concedes a little ground (loosely translated): “You chose your camp. You have to admit that their choice is to be, even if they are wrong, the one that informs. Even if they deform your thoughts. To each their ways, and their skills. To each, their job.”

9. The Kinks, “Mr. Reporter” (Arthur, 1969, but not released till 1998, London): Wisely shelved till becoming a bonus track decades later (“I’ll kill you” might not have been the most politic approach to the press at the time), this levels the usual clichéd charges at the media (“is it that you can do nothing else?”). But it’s the Kinks, so it’s a catchy version.

10. Elton John, “All The Nasties” (Madman Across the Water, 1971, London): I wonder so much how listeners understood this song at the time. With hindsight, it’s clear that it’s agonizing about how the press, the industry, and Elton’s peers would react if they found out that he was gay. (“Maybe I should let them.”) Whenever he seems to be autobiographical, of course, we have to remember that his lyrics were written by Bernie Taupin a continent away.

11. Tokidoki, “Ira Robbins” (2000-ish, Chicago): A twee ad-hominem curio from a lo-fi Chicago band about the editor of Trouser Press and The Trouser Press Record Guide: “I have a few things to say about the words you wrote about my friends/ Or if you had nothing, was it lack of space or mere ignorance?”

12. Sonic Youth, “Kill Yr Idols” (Confusion is Sex, 1983, New York): The song perhaps more famously known under its live-album title, “I Killed Christgau with My Big Fucking Dick.” An Oedipal art-movement manifesto from the next micro-generation after punk against seeking approval from the gatekeepers who anointed the CBGBs crowd: “I don’t know why/ You wanna impress Christgau/ Ah, let that shit die/ And find out the new goal.” But we wouldn’t remember it if Sonic Youth hadn’t gone on to become Sonic Youth; in the back half of the track, the guitars cash the cheques their mouths just wrote.

13. Trumans Water, “Aroma of Gina Arnold” (Spasm Smash Xxxoxox Ox and Ass, 1993, San Diego): The twist on “Smells Like Teen Spirit” in the title to aim at one of the journalists and critics most associated with the “year punk broke” can’t help seeming misogynist. Gina Arnold was an alt-weekly Bay Area writer who wrote the first big Nirvana book, Route 666: On the Road to Nirvana. I didn’t know her then, though we do a bit today. But aside from that barbed hook, this song from a San Diego noise band I liked a lot at the time is really a general outburst of Gen X anti-sellout rage, sentiments that feel obscure to a lot of people now. Not to me, though I no longer know quite how I feel about them.

14. Paramore, “This Is Why” (This Is Why, 2023, Tennessee): By this point in assembling the playlist, I realized it was leaning way heavy to the past. So this song occurred to me, but it’s certainly more about social media than professional critics. And the implications of that shift speak for themselves.

15. Eminem, “The Way I Say I Am” (The Marshall Mathers LP, 2000, Detroit): “In the paper, the news, every day I am.” Eminem’s Popeye proclamation is actually, typically for him in this era, pretty keenly attuned to and expressive of the mirror world of media. It’s also incredibly pissed off about things like being half-blamed for school shootings or accused of illegitimately crossing racial lines. (An appropriation critique is one thing, but recall that at the time the mainstream blamed him more for exposing white kids to “bad” Black influences.)

16. Half Man Half Biscuit, “Bad Review” (Voyage to the Bottom of the Road, 1997, Merseyside/Manchester). On one hand, it’s a typical pissed-off screed from an artist against a hostile critic. But by the time these northerners start chanting “Ooh, ooh, what to do? It’s, a, bad review!” it seems pretty clear that they think it’d be ridiculous for them or anyone else to get upset about such a thing.

17. Pete Townshend, “Jools and Jim” (Empty Glass, 1980, London). “Typewriter bangers, you’re all just hangers on.” A vigorous little temper tantrum on an album I love, apparently directed at UK writers Julie Burchill and Tony Parsons for disrespecting the then-recently deceased Keith Moon in an interview. As Townshend later admitted, he was drinking a lot at the time. The Truffaut reference doesn’t mean anything.

18. The Clash, “Garageland” (The Clash, 1977, London): My nomination for possibly the greatest anti-critic song ever. It’s a direct response to Charles Shaar Murray of the New Musical Express (NME), who wrote snappily but incredibly meanly after a Clash gig in 1976, “The Clash are the kind of garage band who should be returned to the garage immediately, preferably with the engine running, which would undoubtedly be more of a loss to their friends and families than to either rock or roll.” So Joe Strummer replies in the song’s opening lines, “Back in the garage with my bullshit detector / Carbon monoxide making sure it's effective.” The rest of the song is more concerned with firing back at punks who criticized them as sellouts for signing with CBS Records, so the “garage band” sobriquet actually did the Clash a favour in this context. “The truth is only known by guttersnipes.”

19. Belle and Sebastian, “Chickfactor” (The Boy with the Arab Strap, 1998, Glasgow): Stevie Jackson misses his girlfriend back in Glasgow while being interviewed by Gail O’Hara of the titular fanzine in New York, a key chronicler of B&S and other exquisitely sensitive 90s bands. “Pretty girl says hi/ ‘What's the worst job you've had?’/ ‘What do you read?’/ ‘What's driving you mad?’ ”

20. Red Garland Trio, “Ralph J. Gleason Blues” (Rojo, 1961, Dallas/New York): I’m not 100 per cent sure of the backstory to this number named for the longtime San Francisco Chronicle music columnist and co-founder of both Rolling Stone and the Monterey Jazz Festival. (I’m on the advisory board of the Ralph J. Gleason Music Book Award, named in his honour.) But I hope it was a tribute rather than a snipe.

21. Original Broadway Cast of “Pal Joey” ft. Elaine Stritch, “Zip” (Pal Joey, 1952, New York): The lady who one day would lunch plays Melba, a showbiz gossip reporter, in this number from a semi-classic musical. Here’s a little decoder ring to some of the cultural references. Genius gets some of the others.

22. Pet Shop Boys, “Your Early Stuff” (Elysium, 2012, London): Whether it’s meant to come from a fan or an interviewer, the pain of late-career interrogation is communicated all too viscerally in this track from 2012. And of course the PSBs’ Neil Tennant is probably the most famous critic-to-performer crossover artist after Patti Smith. (He worked for Smash Hits in the early 80s.)

23. Destroyer, “Kaputt” (Kaputt, 2011, Vancouver): “Sounds, Smash Hits, Melody Maker, NME/ All sound like a dream to me…. All sounds like a dream.” For a person with a famously fraught relationship with the music press, he wrote one of the swooniest verses about it ever recorded. While Dan’s layers of irony are never to be underestimated, I can assure you this one is utterly sincere.

24. Thee Headcoats, “We Hate the Fucking NME” (The Messerschmidt Pilot’s Severed Head, 1996, Kent, UK): After a couple of tracks relatively soft on the U.K. music press, Billy Childish & co. provide a counterpoint. Its main point is about record and PR companies buying ads and the NME therefore covering those artists and creating “fake youth culture” and “fake independence”—though it smartly eventually gets to “even me in the NME.”

25. Capleton, “Critics” (More Fire, 2000, Kingston, Jamaica): I admit I’m not entirely sure which critics Capleton is going after here, but they seem to include the White House, the United Nations, Buckingham Palace, and Scotland Yard. Which makes the NME seem pretty small-time.

26. Madonna, “Joan Of Arc” (Rebel Heart, 2015, Michigan/New York/London/L.A.): We think of Madonna having a resilient, manipulative relationship with the press. But she confesses to the opposite in this late mixture of ballad and mellow dance: “Each time they write a hateful word, dragging my soul into the dirt/ I want to die/ Never admit it, but it hurts... One little lie can ruin my day… One word of kindness, it can save me.”

27. Terry Allen, “Amarillo Highway (for Dave Hickey)” (1979, Lubbock on Everything, Texas/California): Allen has written all kinds of sly satires of the art world in which he moves parallel to his music career, of collectors and exhibiting and more. But this song dedicated to his longtime pal, the superb art critic (and sometime songwriter) Dave Hickey who died in 2021, is just a playful romp about which of them was the more authentically Texan—from the POV of their mutual transplant to the art and music scenes of California. Even though it doesn’t get into the matter of criticism at all, any song that namechecks the author of Air Guitar gets on my list. Plus, if you didn’t know Terry Allen and Lubbock on Everything, well, now you do.

28. Pere Ubu, “My Friend Is a Stooge (for the Media Priests)” (Raygun Suitcase, 1995, Cleveland/London): David Thomas would probably dispute it (as that’s what he does), but if Pere Ubu weren’t such critical darlings, their career might have ended after their first breakup in the 1970s, rather than going on to this day. At the same time, their surreal and paranoid skew on reality always has been at deliberate odds with the media; their early title/slogan “Datapanik” was about info saturation and doomscroll fog decades before anyone ever came up with “fake news.” So this is a song in which Thomas plumbs that set of contradictions. I don’t know if the “stooge for the media priests” here is any specific friend of Thomas’s, but they’re much more likely to be a music critic than someone who “does the weather map for Channel 3.”
(Sidenote: Thomas has been in ill health for the past several years. I’ve been supporting him at the Ubu patreon. He provides as much content there as he can manage, much of it very amusing and/or cranky and/or personal and/or archival. Consider doing the same.)

29. The Fall, “Mere Pseud Mag. Ed.” (Hex Enduction Hour, 1982, London): “His heart organ was where it should be/ His brain was in his arse…. A fancied wit that's imitation of Rumpole of Bailey.” No doubt any magazine editor Mark E. Smith ever met fancies it’s about them.

30. Saint Etienne, “Record Doctor” (Words and Music by Saint Etienne, 2012, London): Probably not about a critic at all, but Bob Stanley of Saint Etienne came from music journalism and to music journalism has returned. So any ditty of theirs about the music biz feels like it qualifies.

31. David Bazan, “Selling Advertising” (Fewer Moving Parts, 2006, Phoenix/Seattle): Not a great song from the former Pedro the Lion leader, musically, and what is the “are you a Jew?” bit about? Allegedly a reaction to a Pitchfork review. But still, any self-conscious media person of the past 20 years has to wince at the lyrics, “So if it starts to get you down/ Just pretend that you don't make your living/ From selling advertising/ Tracking trends/ Corralling demographics/ And maximizing traffic.”

32. Jean Grae, “You Don't Know” (The Bootleg of the Bootleg, 2003, New York): One of several rap tracks that went after my friend Oliver Wang in the early 2000s. I can’t quite grasp how someone as nice as Oliver became such a target, except that the indie rap world of the time must have been hypersensitive. Jean Grae, who’s now known as such a smart focused writer, wilds out here: “I dropped the tack, critics hollered back with a thumbs up/ Exposin’ those who didn’t, Oliver Wang, you dumb fuck/ Untuck your spine, gun-butt you with a super-soaker/ Make you scream louder than the sound of the background vocals/ Choke you with a magazine page, then in a rage/ Flip you over like quarters on the back of your arm in Happy Days.”

33. Joan Baez, “Time Rag” ( Blowin’ Away, 1977, New York/Bay Area, CA): Um, Joan Baez raps, sounding way more like “Rapper’s Delight” two years early than a Guthrie talking blues. What Bronx street parties had she been going to? It’s about an encounter with Time magazine. I’ll let her tell you the rest.

34. Slovenly, “Old/New” (Riposte, 1987, San Francisco): This enticingly elusive SST band’s third album began with a song called “Enormous Critics.” But that was really more about their social circle having compulsively hostile personalities. (Gen X social realism.) This song could be about that, too, but it’s more specific: “There’s a song I want to sing/ And I know it must sound like something or someone else/ Because I trust your musical prowess/ What are we doing wrong, please I want to know/ Give me some more terminology.” It gets worse from there. As intelligent as it is passive-aggressive.

35. The Mr. T Experience, “I Wrote a Book About Rock & Roll” (Alcatraz, 1999, Bay Area). A 1985-formed novelty-punk band I mostly try to forget, but I have to acknowledge the Nick Lowe-like riffs and sub-Randy-Newman-but-trying level of caricature. This song still makes me feel a little skewered with, “I know words like sobriquet, malaise, and plutocrat/ And I compare the Shaggs to Wittgenstein/ How cool is that? … Sometimes I even stump myself/ But it's all in my book about rock and roll.” Though this song definitely hates both books and rock and roll.

36. Toby Keith, “The Critic” (Shock ‘N Yall, 2003, Oklahoma/Nashville): Frankly, Toby Keith doesn’t sound here like he’s ever met a living human journalist, with all his focus on the supposed failed musicianship and the supposed rolling in money. But it’s droll and his voice is just so nice. The lowest-common-denominator version of this kind of rant. Still, RIP.

37. Scroobius Pip, “Death of the Journalist” (Distraction Pieces, 2011, Essex, UK): By contrast, a pretty incisive analysis of (and attack on) the media by Essex’s David Meads, which calls back pointedly to “don’t believe the hype.” It does eventually get around to the music press in particular, though: “Don't skim intros, listen to each track through/ And maybe run a spell check before you post a review … Your opinion’s next to nothing, that's all you’ll amount to/ You're so vain you probably don't know this song is about you.”

38. Venom, “In Memory Of (Paul Miller, 1964-90)” (Kissing the Beast, 1991, Newcastle): No doubt the very nicest song from a band to a writer in this whole set, even more than Belle and Sebastian’s. Paul Miller, who died far too young, was a writer for Kerrang! metal magazine.

39. Logic, “LaDonda,” Vinyl Days, 2022, Maryland/San Diego): Not sure how I feel about Logic as a rapper, but couldn’t resist a song that’s largely about YouTube music critic Anthony Fantano aka The Needle Drop: “You plaid-shirt wearing motherfucker/ Yo, I used to hate you because you shit on my music/ But now we homies, I take your criticism and use it… And your opinion is just your opinion/ Like your legion of fuckboy minions.” Plus shoutouts to RapGenius and Reddit’s HipHopHeads.

40. Cat Power, “Ballad Of A Thin Man, Live at the Royal Albert Hall” (Cat Power Sings Dylan: The 1966 Royal Albert Hall Concert, 2023, Georgia/Miami): It’s a hard call, among critic-catcalling Dylan songs, between “Thin Man” and “Positively Fourth Street,” which is supposed to be about a Sing Out folk journalist who saw him as a sellout. But “Thin Man” is such a superlative stoner satire of the clueless straight reporters Dylan parried with in those mid-60s scenes from Don’t Look Back—or, even better, in Cate Blanchett’s versions in Todd Haynes’ I’m Not There. In which spirit, I’d rather have Cat Power sing us out here. Put your eyes in your pocket and your nose on the ground. You should be made to wear earphones.