What's the worst mistake that has been inadvertantly added to a review you've written?

kate - minor indie celebrity sex tittle tattle as album reviews? it's a future.

The most recent worst for me was my Good Charlotte review for the voice said 'the song My Bloody Valentine starts like the best MBV song in the world. The sentence should have continued 'and then gets better'.

For the teen page, "Off Centre," of the Centre Daily Times I did a review of Pinkerton back in high school. I made a comment as to the sound being "dirtier" than on the Blue Album. So they made the headline "Pinkerton is dirty, but it works." Ech.

Oh, and proving they never read the stuff, they printed my review of the Cure's Wild Mood Swings twice on nonconsecutive occasions. Nobody but me noticed.

(BTW, which My Bloody Valentine EP is that "lick lick suck suck" song on coz I'd love to play it tonight...)

I am going to get a BAD reputation at CTCL if I keep this up... Heh heh. I said keep it up.

KILL ME. KILL ME NOW!!!

i was sure that despite it being the best thing to ever grace that rag's pages and given the narrow-minded britpop-centric consensus of the fascist editors that the review would never make it in, but it appeared complete with a half page promo photo of Placebo. turned out they never noticed that the review wasn't about Placebo at all..

(of course Placebo was PRECISELY what the review was about, but you know what i mean)

This pales into insignificance to an Australian paper that changed a Nirvana story I wrote to, "Kurt Cobain died of an overdose". (None of the readers noticed.)

Rah!

The sentence should have continued 'and then gets better'.

Should it? ;-)

When I worked at my first daily/weekly newspaper job, my editor employed what I like to call "slash and burn" editing to make stories shorter. He'd hastily scan a story then cut what he thought didn't need to be there for the sake of length without any concern for continuity (or, in many cases, grammar or punctuation). I was terrified that I wouldn't be able to get a job at any other newspaper due to the quality of my clips; fortunately, I was mistaken.

Regrettably, years ago I was dating a girl who (among many other things, lord help me) was pathologically jealous. Once, inexplicably, she demanded that I include in my next column a declaration of hatred for Lois and Cibo Matto. Browbeaten and weak-willed, I complied, and my editor left it in! It read something like, "I hate Lois. I hate Cibo Matto" and really had nothing to do with the rest of the column. How sad is that? (Of course, I adore Lois and Cibo Matto). This was a mistake, and the entire relationship was one, also.
― Ernest P. (ernestp), Friday, February 21, 2003 1:11 PM bookmarkflaglink

omg - i have so many questions

but sadly i don't think this person be here anymore

When I was in college, I reviewed a Korn album (Life Is Peachy) for a national publication. The editor condensed a somewhat subtle and underhanded (but wordy) point into the much briefer phrase: “But who cares? 'Cuz it rocks.”

Don’t know if this counts as a “mistake,” but it sure pissed me off.

there was a dude who used to write for the webzine I wrote for, and he was a terrible writer, but also knew very little about the music he was writing about. it was bad enough that writers complained to the editor about him, and he always defended him. even though almost every time he got called out, he blamed the editor for mistranscribing what he wrote.

the biggest mistakes he made:

1) Writing the phrase "Grindcore has never been a political genre" in a review of Circle of Dead Children. after being clowned for his obvious ignorance of the origins of grindcore, he backpedaled to "I just meant it SHOULDN'T be!", which made even less sense (why should a genre inherently be apolitical?)

2) Writing "self-defecating" when he actually meant "self-deprecating".

3) Writing "blastbeat guitar riffs" because the doofus didn't actually know what a blastbeat was. He then backpedaled and said he wrote "blasting guitar riffs" and that the editor must have mis-copied, only for the editor to respond "no, actually, that's exactly what you wrote".

2) Writing "self-defecating" when he actually meant "self-deprecating"

I laffed out loud at this

This is somewhat off-topic; but it's late on a Sunday night, so I'll take the liberty (it's another college story).

In or around 1996, I wrote a humor-ish piece for the school paper titled: "The Book of Luke: For Today's Twentysomethings, Star Wars Is a Sacred Text." It explored the idea that the movies were key to Gen X childhoods, and ended with the "joke" that millions would never recover if the then-forthcoming prequels turned out to be bad. (This was at a time when the world was not flooded with Star Wars thinkpieces -- hard as that is to imagine today -- so the premise wasn't quite as hackneyed as it seems now.)

Anyway, I misremembered the name Anakin Skywalker as "Attican Skywalker," and it ended up in print that way. I eventually realized the gaffe, to my embarrassment. I could have avoided it by going to the computer lab and running some AltaVista searches on the references I was making as I wrote (why didn't I think of that?)... but student editors went over the piece, and presumably had WWW access. Couldn't they have helped out a hacky feature writer?