Today, unknow dog has added a new category, music reviews. Basically, it’s Newspaper Taxi, without the credentials!
For those who don’t understand the context (one step removed from Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds):
NEWSPAPER TAXI provides an online forum for reviews of albums, singles and concerts but with one major twist. They are not be reviewed by journalists, but by other musicians, artists, DJs and MCs.
This is Marty Willson-Piper’s baby, I believe. The description above comes from a cached Google search on a Replacements site because Newspaper Taxi’s website isn’t working today as of this writing.
edit: A lunchtime check shows the site up and chock full o’ content- might have been a temporary hiccup.
So review an album, any album, or a concert, busker’s performance, etc., past or present. Nothing from the future at this time, please.
Unfortuantely I don’t really consider myself a musician, artist, DJ or MC, but am I to assume that I am still encouraged to write some reviews? It sounds like fun. I was actually getting frustrated by reviews at amazon.com the other day. 80% of them are written by people who love the album and the other 20% are by people that think the album sucks. I just don’t see how I get anything objective out of spending my time reading that. People make those posts because they fell strongly one way or the other. I was actually thinking of going on a quest to write a lot of 3-star album reviews for albums that I find to be incredibly average, just as a sort of public service.
yeah, review away, we are the reviewers without credentials
I like Tom’s idea of going out and just browsing through Amazon albums one owns, whether you like it a lot, a little, or not at all, and writing reviews for all of them. I agree it would be valuable to have some seemingly objective advice. It is also possible on Amazon to make lists of shit you like and people, I think, can read your reviews of other things. So a person who really liked your review might be able to view your unbiased views on everything else, too.
Otherwise, if you’re looking at a single album, why are you any more likely to believe the person who says it’s mediocre over the person who says it’s great? I guess you could make a better sounding argument and make good comparisons that resonated with the reader.
In browsing all the reviews on that site, the only reviewers I had ever heard of were Marty W-P himself, Steve Kilbey and Julian Cope (who for some reason I would have thought was probably dead of something or other by now). JC only reviewed one thing and gave it a five. Kilbey reviewed five things and gave four fives and a four. Marty was a little more even-handed with about an even mix of fours and fives. Nobody gave mediocre reviews of anything, and nobody said anything bad about anything. But you can sort of see how it would be hard and sort of cold-up to be someone famous and go online and say something crappy about someone else’s album. You could find yourself getting a cap in your ass like Biggie.
I think part of the reason the scores are in the upper echelon’s is that the reviewer’s are reviewing albums by choice. Perhaps albums they really like are getting the first reviews.
It’s probably the same thing that goes on with everyone at amazon. When I’m trying to figure out if an album is any good or not I find that 80% of the reviews are by people that love the album and who I therefore don’t trust to be objective. The other 20% might be by people who hate the album, but it’s just the opposite effect. A strong feeling drove them to write the review.
Those lists are handy, because then you can see what kind of taste they have and judge it against yours. It’s also handy how amazon shows what other people bought so if you like that sorta thing, you can conclude you’d probably like whatever album you’re looking at. Of course they install so much freakin’ spyware on your computer they should just be able to tell you what album you would really like without any effort on your part at all.