Don't Cry for Me, Alexander
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The New Arts Journalism? [UPDATED]
David Menconi sends along this item from Gawker:
In the March issue of Maxim, writer David Peisner reviews the new Black Crowes album, "Warpaint." The verdict: Ehhh. Two and a half stars, out of five. The problem: Maxim didn't listen to the album.
The problem is, the band hadn't made review copies available. So how had Peisner done the review? After contacting the magazine, the band says they got the following email back:
'Of course, we always prefer to (sic) hearing music, but sometimes there are big albums that we don't want to ignore that aren't available to hear, which is what happened with the Crowes. It's either an educated guess preview or no coverage at all, so in this case we chose the former.'"
The band, of course wonders about the credibility of this kind of "review"...
UPDATED: Maxim today posted a response to the band:
Maxim editorial director James Kaminsky responded Tuesday with this statement: "It is Maxim's editorial policy to assign star ratings only to those albums that have been heard in their entirety. Unfortunately, that policy was not followed in the March 2008 issue of our magazine and we apologize to our readers."
A spokeswoman for the magazine contacted by The Associated Press declined to say whether the writer would face disciplinary action.
Man-o-man-o-man ... And just when you thought it couldn't get any worse. Who needs critics indeed.
Not to defend Maxim's deplorable practise by any stretch, but I hope this silly incident sheds a bit of light on a record industry practise (or non-practise) I've been privately griping about for a year now, that being many labels' unwilingness (or laziness, or sheer not-giving-a-fuckness) to distribute promo copies for reviews. I ran up against this wall a dozen times in the last two years, so have now resorted pretty much 100% to just downloading anything I'm asked to review (I'm writing here under a pseudonym; hopefully 'they' aren't on to my IP address....). My editor must've caught on; he no longer even goes through the pretense of sending me label contact info (which brings to mind a different issue: that suddenly reviewers and not editors are required to chase this stuff down).
This arrangement works fine for me, to be honest: I'm comfortable downloading and streaming, and am equipped to do so. A friend of mine, however, has only a wonky PC at home, and thus, no longer writes for the same publication (or any publication for that matter). He got burned on the 'advance promo' thing one too many times.
So yeah, the Maxim folks are just dorks, but I'm not very sympathetic to the label in this case (though the band and the readers are the big losers, I guess).
Couldn't Maxim just review the album in the next issue after it gets it?
Isn't that just ...making things up? Isn't that what Jayson Blair did at the Times? He didn't go places that he said he'd been to ... and wrote the story as if he did. At least he spoke to people on the phone. In this case ... no one heard the music and the album was reviewed anyway.
unfuckingbelievable.
Based on my knowledge of their previous material, which was note for note rips offs (or out and out covers) of certain boring 70s rock bands - and bearing in mind that bands like them get worse, not better, over the years - I could make a pretty educated guess about the Black Crowes new album.