Isn’t The Whole Thing Just Clever As All Hell?!

This is just repulsive. First, I really can’t stand it when personal diatribes better suited to blog entries or message board rants are sold off as legitimate music journalism. It’s a sickening lack of professionalism, there’s nothing resembling intelligent commentary in this Matos piece, it’s nothing more than undiluted bile and misdirected anger. Now, it’s fine to express these things, to get them off of one’s chest – but to pass this off as a piece of journalism is disgusting. It reveals a serious dearth of talent and ideas, and offers nothing more to the reader than cheap shock. It’s reactionary bullshit designed to elicit angry letters-to-the-editor. What bothers me even more is that Matos presumes to know Chan Marshall, to understand her motivations, when it seems entirely plausible that he’s doing little more than projecting his own odious qualities onto her in some kind of sideways autocritique. Surely this statement can be taken with a probable “pot-kettle-black” grain of salt, but you know what? This is a blog entry. I don’t think blogs are subject to the same level of journalistic standards that I believe published journalism should be held up to. Maybe I’m just old-fashioned, but I really do think that arts and entertainment journalism should be written with the same seriousness and professionalism as hard news and analysis.

At any rate, it’s insulting and just yet another piece of hack music ‘criticism’ that’s being pushed on us by crap magazines and weeklies who fancy themselves rebellious bad boys; the journalistic equivalent of small-market shock jocks and their cookie-cutter ‘zoo crews’. Every one of these guys fancies themselves the next Lester Bangs or Robert Christgau the same way the shock jocks delude themselves into thinking they’re the new Howard Stern. It’s very depressing.