Tuesday, May 08, 2007

Oh Grow Up

Extremely irksome NY Times pop music critic Kelefa Sanneh weighed in yesterday on "Ain't Nothin' Like Me," the latest CD from boringly monikered R&B love man Joe --

One of Joe’s signature songs is “I Wanna Know,” a sublime slow jam. He teamed up with 50 Cent’s G Unit for a club-conquering collaboration, “Wanna Get to Know You.” And this new CD, No. 2 on Billboard’s album chart, begins with a song called “Get to Know Me.” Near the end comes “You Should Know Me.” Think he’s trying to tell us something?

-- and you'll note that, once again, the statistics-obsessed Sanneh proves incapable of reviewing an artist without a mention of their current chart position.

Apart from being a really annoying stylistic tic, this is a manifestation of a form of nerdy fanboy bullshit that's really embarassing for a guy his age.

Note to Sanneh: When I was ten years old, back during the Spanish Civil War, I went through a period when I felt compelled to write down a list of every week's Top Forty Hits as played on WMGM-AM in New York City.

By the time I was eleven, however, I had gotten over it.

Word to your mother.

4 comments:

CyFlorist said...

While annoying habits like that can drive one round the bend, at least he's irritating and correct (I think).

Unlike the genius over at Rolling Stone online that once said Glastonbury Festival took place every summer in Scotland.

Kid Charlemagne said...

I have a friend who still has the notebooks he made between 1968-1976 that carefully list each month's top 20 hits.

Then he got a girlfriend.

When I lived in Chicago, my rock critic to hate was Greg Kot.

Anonymous said...

How much of that, do you think, is dictated by his audience? By that I mean that chart position and Grammy awards do provide a tangible context for people who don't really know that much about music, which I think fits the description of the majority of NYT readers.

dave™© said...

When I grew up, the "chart position" of any given record was calculated as negatively proportional to how "good" it was.

BTW, I used to have a big stash of the weekly "Top 30 Hits" flyer the local AM rocker gave away at better music stores everywhere.

Each one had a picture of one of the station's DJs. Wish I'd saved them...