The music press annoys me. I'm not alone in this, I know. Anyone who reads NME or Rolling Stone tends to get annoyed for various reasons; usually it's because they've given a band good slagging in a review. Most of the bands I listen to are rarely actually slagged off, though; underrated and ignored, certainly, but rarely actually completely panned. The bands which really 'suffer' from the music press' wrath are those which are more in your face, the ones with the top 10 album and the inane TV adverts. The ones, coincidentally, which usually get put on the front cover of NME. Some sort of hypocrisy here, methinks.

So if it's annoying that the music press give the most coverage to bands they allegedly hate, it's doubly annoying that they give the least coverage to the bands they allegedly love. Or, worse, they latch on to certain pretty good bands and promote them to death.

But what really irritates me about the music press is their attitude to music in general. Somewhere along the line, they forgot that music is subjective, and an individual's response to music is never, never, the same as another individual's. Perhaps forgot is the wrong word; the press are fully aware of the subjective nature of music, they just think their own opinions are so important that they're worthy of being reported as facts.

This basically flushes the whole basis of reviewing down the toilet. Or rather, the whole way reviewing is presented; reviews are presented as facts, the review score is the law. This album is 6/10 means 'On the scale of things, this album is less good than an album which scored 7/10, but better than an album which scored 5/10'. What bollocks! Not only is a review score fluid (reviewers frequently change their mind about scores or even whole articles), but the subjective nature of this is shown up by the fact that, come next issue, there's a reasonably good chance another hack will be saying the album should've been given 10/10 rather than 6/10. Not so long ago, the fallacy of this review method was shown up by the Stereolab album, 'Cobra & Phases Group Play Voltage into the Milky Night' in NME. The original review (0/10) was followed by another writer saying he'd've given it 10/10.

My objection isn't that reviewers disagree, as it's the disagreement which makes the press so entertaining, but the way that there's never any concession made to the fact that reviews are opinions, not facts. I'm not suggesting hacks change their language, as personally if I don't like something I say, 'It's crap' not 'In my subjective opinion it's crap', I'd just like it to be made clear somehow that there is disagreement, and that a review score is not final. In fact, I'd personally like to see the end of review scores entirely, because it's simply not true that a 7/10 album is inevitably better than a 6/10 album for the reviewer, let alone for the audience.

On the other hand, I would point out that a lot of the blame can be laid at the door of the readers. If they had the sense to understand that just because one hack hates their band, then the rest of the buggers might not, then people might be happier. Instead they send in enraged letters reading something like this;

HOW FUCKING DARE YOU FUCKING SLAGG OFF [insert name of mediocre band here] YOU FUCKING DIRTY FUCKING CUNTS I FUCKING HATE YOU ALL YOU SMELL!!!!!!!!

Which isn't really the best way to get your point of view across, is it?