Static Live Magazine January 2020

“Unimpressed!”
“Mutant Gods...”
“Good, Great!”
“It was well done!”
“I fart on this record!”
“Perfectly Awful!”
“Kiss My Ass”
“GODAWFUL”
HAIL TO ( TO HELL WITH) TURD MUSIC
by Rick de Yampert
No doubt you’ve been inundated with
critics’ year-end lists of 2019’s best
music. But what about all the shit
music out there? Where is Leonard
Pinth-Garnell when you need him?
Leonard, you may recall, was the Dan
Aykroyd character on “Saturday Night
Live” who celebrated – celebrated! –
incredibly bad theater, opera, art and
music.
When I was the pop music critic
for 23 years at the Daytona Beach
newspaper and for a time at The
Tennessean in Nashville, I became a
Leonard only when forced to do so.
My fellow reporters had cream-puff
jobs like venturing into the vortex of
hurricane winds or dodging bullets
while covering a thug’s standoff with
police. Me, I had to review Michael
Bolton’s concert in the mid-1990s at
the Ocean Center in Daytona. I was,
ahem, unimpressed. So I reported
that Mr. Bolton’s voice sounded like
he had “gargled with sand” and that
his stage presence and rapport with
his fans were “as stiff as a Vladimir
Lenin statue.”
When my review ran in the paper,
I was able to handle the 1,323 earbusting
phone calls and 786 poisonpen
letters from irate, middle-aged,
female concert-goers who had
fantasized they were going
to be able to reward a
backstage blowjob to the
Rottweiler-voiced singer.
But I winced when my
6
mother-in-law (at that time) reviewed
my review by telling me: “That’s not
very nice.” I felt a deluge of guilt
and shame for having shitted on
one of her idols, for doing what all
negative reviews do to the fans of any
performance, music recording, film
or book being pilloried: A negative
review not only says a supposed
artistic creation is a turd – said review
also implies any fan who enjoys and
esteems said creation is a tastelacking
dumb-ass for liking the artist
and/or the work in the first place.
The shame from my mom-in-law’s
dart slimed me for . . . oh, about 7.2
seconds, then it was back to writing
CD and concert reviews however I
was struck by them: good, great or
yak shit.
Pinth-Garnell-ish negative reviews
are a strange beast.
“We enjoy a bad review more than
a good one,” reads the book jacket
blurb of Laura Ward’s compilation
“Bad Press: The Worst Critical
Reviews Ever.” Except, of course,
when a Leonard goes after an artist
that you personally believe is God.
Then you want to plant your size 12
boot up the pompous critic’s size 9
asshole.
The music section of Ward’s 2002
book leans heavily on decades-old
and even centuries-old slams of
classical music, but it does include
an assessment of a rock band by
conservative political commentator
William F. Buckley Jr.: “The Beatles
are not merely awful. I would consider
it sacrilegious to say anything less
than that they are godawful.” Like
Timothy Leary, I believe the Beatles
are mutant gods, but ol’ Bill’s
dismissal didn’t rankle me. As a
reviewer, he’s really shitty. That’s all
the game you got, Bill? Proclaiming
an artist is “godawful”?
Of course, turnabout is fair play, as
when Michael Bolton lambasted us
critics during a press conference:
“You take a bunch of no-talent
chimpanzees and you give them a
bucket of paint, they’ll destroy any
Rembrandt or van Gogh around. The
critics that are insensitive and rude
can kiss my ass.”
In an interview with Rolling Stone
in 1994, Greg Dulli of the Afghan
Whigs touted the greatest negative
review ever written – and it was of
his own band! “I love the mean stuff,”
Dulli said. “If it’s well done, I really
enjoy it.” He then cited a critic in
“this little fanzine” who “completely
disemboweled our record. The last
sentence of the review was ‘I fart on
this record.’ I must have laughed for a
week every time I would think of that
line.”
Damn, I wish I had penned that
review.
Here’s to the Leonard Pinth-Garnells
of the music world.