OK, is this the worst piece of music writing ever?

I'm sure this guy has his fans and making an effort is better in principle than hacky boilerplate but sweet Jesus no.

http://thequietus.com/articles/11264-my-bloody-valentine-live-review

haha he is overreaching somewhat

"jungle love"

holy shit. i obviously fast-forwarded to the end, which was even worse than i had imagined.

I mean he can obviously write and there are some good sentences but that ending is unforgivable. Also, the meaningful epigraph thing has been done to death.

"teenhood"

His style's given to hyperbole and flights of fancy, but JC's a good sort in my book.

The sort of writing that helped hasten the end of Melody Maker in the nineties.

made it to "de-materialised"

"Maybe God"

perhaps he was thinking of Tricky's short-lived 90s project Nearly God.

To be fair, I remember finding this kind of overwriting very exciting as an MM-reading teenager circa 1989, so I'm sure that some Quietus readers think of Calvert the same way I used to think of Chris Roberts at his purplest, which I now find unreadable. I blame shoegazing. Sonic cathedrals redux.

nah, i love florid prose and this isn't a case of "too much" this is just v. bad florid prose

The sort of writing that helped hasten the end of Melody Maker in the nineties.

Naw the music they covered did that perfectly well.

Well, yes.

I suspect here that MC is referring to the last year or two of the tabloid-sized Maker, and AG to the magazine-sized one that hatched as, presumably, a misguided attempt to bump up its sales

well, the writing on the wall was when they gave Catatonia album of the year and that was old style broadsheet MM

By the time MM reached its terminal phase nobody was writing like this. This has much more of a late 80s/early 90s pre-Britpop-triumphalism vibe. I don't remember when the relaunch happened.

And I was just about to say Catatonia never got AOTY but I googled it and holy shit you're right. Catatonia > Beastie Boys > Mercury Rev > Pulp > Air.

I never forgave them for it

http://www.rocklistmusic.co.uk/mmlists_p2.htm#1998

Head Music getting AOTY in 99 was just as bad (and I loved the 1st 3 Suede albums)

If you're going to be purple, you have to communicate accurately and choose the right words. Calvert doesn't. So it reads like undergraduate wanking, interspersed with odd sports commentator asides.

Easy sample: "MBV are, in a very real way, able to summon divinity. That, or the secular equivalent." Well, no, because the very nature of divinity is that it has no secular equivalent.

"MBV are, in a very real way, able to summon divinity. That, or the secular equivalent."

LOLz

xp Head Music?! Christ.

I know 1998 was a weak year but it can't have been as bad as that MM list makes out. There are maybe 10-12 albums on there that I would bother with now.

Here's the NME list for 98: http://www.rocklistmusic.co.uk/1998.html

MM had obviously "invested" in Catatonia that year. Or Allan Jones loved it above all else.

MM just sunk so low in its final years.

That Born To Do It "send-up" was maybe the final straw.

I'm pretty sure I did the worst piece of music writing at some point in my life.

I'm sorry about that.

When he finally gets to describing the actual performance, it's a lot better: his imagery is tied to some sense of impressions of particular sounds and how they were generated. If he'd concentrated on the sense of his KV quote, rather than just slapping it up there, could've been really powerful: here is this outer awkardness, this crap sound system, ths bit with changing guitars, maybe stage fright of people who in any case are no longer used to the vagaries of live performance if they ever were--but here comes this MBV reach for transcendence, this stubborn audacity. Anyway, some of that did come across. I'd say start with some backstory, telling the noobs why and how the band mattered in the first place, without boring or pandering to the old fans, the kind of balancing act you gotta/should do do with this stuff. (Some of this may also be the anxiety of writing long by today's usual standards.) And yeah lose that ending.

I just went and downloaded the Holopaw promo and discovered, yes, the ID3 tages were correct, so this writer probably sorted them fucked up in their own iTunes

A friend who works on an online title said she was horrified that one of her fellow editors thought that writers filing long (because no word count) were going the extra mile and giving them value for money, when in fact it can take longer to edit a piece than it can to write the first draft - cutting extraneous words is how you go the extra mile. The freedom of online may be better than stubby little 80-word magazine reviews but it needs to be tempered by some kind of awareness of the appropriate length. Pitchfork, for example, is much better now at not letting writers ramble on ad nauseam. Even the tiniest limit on this review's word count would have meant removing the worst bits and tightening the best sections and if editors won't impose those limits it falls to the writer to exercise a bit of self-censorship, otherwise a potentially excellent review can become a florid mess.

The Quietus - which is generally a useful site - does seem to be a little light in its editing. Even the good pieces feel like drafts.

I enjoy reading The Quietus a lot

me too, but it does have the occasional wtf piece on there, and is no worse for that.

cutting extraneous words is how you go the extra mile Exactly. A lot of the overdone opening, in my experience, is revving up the engines, and sometimes the self-confidence/motivation/will to write. Once I get the whole thing "done", can see it, often happily, as a first draft (not that I always cut enough, or well enough).

The thing that causes me most shame - and that is the correct word I'm using - about the Quietus is the standard of editing. There is no subbing because there are no subs or production people because we don't charge a cover fee like, for example, the old Melody Maker or the Guardian. I work 6am to 1 or 2am at the moment to do the second job that allows me to do the Quietus. World's smallest violin right?

We'd need to be twice the size we are to afford a production editor and even then I wouldn't hire one, the money would go on making sure all the writers got paid, rather than just some. This is simply what it's like now and will remain like for the foreseeable future. We'd need an audience of tens of millions per month to be able to afford one sub editor part time. And this is not going to happen given the lack of click throughs, listicles, lowest common denominator features, features on MUSE and Mumfords etc.

So if anyone wants to lend their skills to a "useful" site and do us a few hours of subbing gratis we'd love to hear from you. It's a problem that I'd really like to get on top of. John at the quietus dot com.

I'm not going to say anything about Calvert other than I love his writing. For all it's madness and gauche purpleness etc. he nails MBV for me. I first went to see them when I was 16 when Isn't Anything were out. This is exactly how I felt about them.

I totally get why people hate him though... it's not like there aren't plenty of other dry pieces to read on the site.

thanks for the thoughtful response D. As I said, I never mind the occasional o_0 post on The Quietus, it's part of the fun, and you have so many great writers there's always something worth checking out IMO. Keep on keepin' on!

To be fair to Calvert, he's got a regular slot reviewing live shows for tQ. I wouldn't like to imagine trying to write an original, interesting medium/long-form live review once every couple of weeks - think I'd go a bit mad.

XP: We want him to write shorter pieces on the whole. And this is my favourite one of his. If we saw it as a "failure" we'd discontinue the series. And a lot of people read him.

Seriously, we totally expect to get the grief over Calvert! We'd be idiots if we didn't! I'm not bothered about it but the editing thing ruins the little sleep I have. Also, the way I see it is everything is pretty much in balance. So at the other end of the scale from Calvert we've got Matthew Lindsay who is such a forensically brilliant journalist.

I don't know if you saw his pieces on Nico: The Marble Index Trilogy Kate Bush: The Dreaming and David Bowie: Ziggy Stardust. I'd stand these pieces against anything published in MOJO, UNCUT etc. In fact I'd say they're a lot better.

Secular Divinity would be a great name for a terrible band/album.

(re reviewing live gigs so often)True, and it would be hard to deal w finding yourself finding patterns, however useful to yourself and readers; plua a lot of live bands present songs in very predictable arcs. Good to see that the New Yorker's Anthony Lane has found fresh ways to entertain/console himself and his audience, even/especially while slogging through blockbuster movies.

And, before heading out the door, I meant to just glance over Linday's Marble Index Trilogy piece, but got hooked. Wow! Would like him to indicate sources for some biographical stuff (the Nico Icon documentary, perhaps?); also, the pre-VU Jimmy Page-produced single, "I'm Not Saying/The Last Mile" and Chelsea Girls are already Nico as hell--she always needed a producer, but even pre-"trilogy", she came across pretty strongly (would also have liked to see him talk about her performances on VU albums, since it's long anyway). But she really, really comes across vividly in this, and he's got details that even old Nico junkie me never saw before. Thanks!

Thanks Dow. I'll ask Matt about his sources. He's working on a Kraftwerk related piece for us at the moment.

No prob; I guess some of his references might be from Cale's What's Weish For Zen, which I'm finally about to read, rather than skim; also of course he mentions Young's memoir. Looking fwd to the Kraftwerk-related!

I'm late to this but Zadie Smith's Joni piece is one of the most incoherent pieces I've ever read in the New Yorker and it tells you nothing at all about why she came around to Joni's music (or specifically Blue - she seems to have written the whole piece without venturing any further). When she began a long aside about Kierkegaard that took up most of the penultimate page I gave up on expecting anything useful from this piece. Is it about Joni Mitchell? Or her childhood? Or race? Or how to deal with overwhelming cultural choice? Or insecurity about artforms you don't fully grasp? Or why you change your mind about certain art? It's all of these things and yet none of them. I can't imagine a less famous writer getting something so garbled past an editor.

haven't read it but i'm pretty sure the piece is about Zadie Smith.

Yeah I think we talked about it extensively in either a Joni thread or the NYer thread or a Zadie thread, don't remember. It was very childishly narcissistc, like "I used to not like pizza, but then, one time, I went to my friend's birthday party, and there were like 8 different kinds of pizza..."

or like "it bums me out that my friends know more about pizza than i do. I guess it's because I spend all my time knowing everything about french cuisine"