Over at glossy New York culture title Bullet, Luke O’Neil has compiled a pretty exhaustive yet justified stock of tired phrases and expressions that need to be retired from music journalism.
Read the list and feel the integrity and originality you thought you possessed as writer crumble away: http://bullettmedia.com/article/music-journalism-cliches-that-need-to-be-retired-today/
I’ve only been trying to be a music journalist for just over a year and, ashamedly, I have committed at least nine of O’Neil’s cliché sins.
How many of the truisms from the list have you executed? Are there any other worn out music journalism writing staples you would like to outlaw?
2 Responses to Great Clichés of Music Journalism
Guilty of all of these! (Head hung in shame…)
Great timing, as I was just musing a few days ago that someone should make a list of annoying rockcritical cliches, and thanks to Kate, I see that Luke O’Neil has done so. I’ve read lots of the mixed-up metaphors and overpopulated “sounds like” comparisons he cites. My retirement from active music criticism a few years ago may have saved me from committing most of these latter-day-style examples, though I’m sure I got in some cliches of the time in my own era.
The contemporary rockcrit cliche that irritaes me the most didn’t make O’Neil’s list, however, that being “whip smart,” a verrry lazy way of saying that the artist or song displays outstanding intelligence. Besides being horribly overused, it’s a half-assed metaphor to start with, as the “smarts” one gets from a whip are welts on the back, not an increase in the old I.Q.. If I weren’t a pacifist, I’d recommend that any metaphorical miscreant using “whip smart” from now on be given a good flogging. Those who live by etc..
Back in 1972, when I was setting out to become a rock critic, a cliche that got on my last nerf was all the old-guy (they *must* have been, because I was only 25) commentators who kept saying that Alice Cooper’s rock theatre, which included him being mock-hung on stage etc., was obviously based on “Grand Guignol.” I had no idea what that was, and even after I looked it up, it still din’t seem to fit the auteur of the brilliant-to-me “I’m Eighteen.” I figured that it was just the previous gen’s intellectuals desperately trying to understand the New Rock of Cooper et.al., by placing it in one of their well-worn highbrow boxes. And I saw G.G. cited in so many places I assumed all these graybeards were copying off each other while they were at it. Fortunately that cliche had disappeared by the next twelve months, run over by Lester Bangs’s Camaro on Woodward Av-e-NOO.
“Whip snark” er “smart” should only be so lucky . . .