When Calum Marsh sat down to review electro-house duo MSTRKRFT's (mastercraft) new album, Fist of God, he must have been overwhelmed with disdain. I'll admit that I was offended by the godawful album cover, but this guy is seriously pissed that this music even exists. So instead of articulating why the music itself is so bad, he projects his anger onto the subculture of hipsterdom that supposedly surrounds it by writing a sardonic screenplay type thing.
I appreciated the inventiveness of reviewing an album with a script, but after reading it, I have no idea what the album sounds like. However, I CAN tell you that "The only people who like MSTRKRFT are these samey hipsters. They do lots of coke and read VICE and wear nothing but American Apparel and listen to shitty music like this." With all the snobbish judgment about stereotypes of people that might listen to this album, there's no room for descriptions of the actual sounds on the album. The only ones you get are "hollow and dull" and "They want to be like Daft Punk," which doesn't even count. His bottom line is that the fans of MSTRKRFT suck, and therefore the music sucks.
In terms of consumer advocacy, this review fails pretty badly. But he does bring up an interesting idea about suspending one's standards for things intended to be mindless fun. The idea being that "anything which is aware of its own vacuity and overall dumbness is suddenly and completely exempt from any criticism of it being just that." And it's even more interesting based on the amount of self-awareness this review has, with Calum's imaginary friend asking him at one point, "I’m just wondering why you didn’t just write a few paragraphs about Fist Of God, commenting on its homogeneity and blandness, attacking it for sounding dull and boring and vacuous and so on, rather than writing this script thing, whatever it is, and barely talking about the music on the album at all."
Is his review exempt from the usual functions of criticism because it avoids those goals? It's not informative nor does it give me a good idea of whether or not I should spend my money/time. The (purposeful?) irony is that the only real reason to read this review is for the simple entertainment it provides in the roasting of hipsters.
But seriously, look at how ugly that cover is.
1 comment:
Wow yeah. He obviously doesn't appreciate simplicity. The dialogue form was interesting, but it was obviously just a scene this guy thought up and considered it review-worthy >_<
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