What a stupid "profession", thanks to the internet we now live in an age where good recommendations aren't hard to get, because you can always find people who are compatable with your tastes.
And thus this makes "professional" music critics pretty much worthless, then again they always have been. Obviously most of them wouldn't know good music if it bit them in the ass so consumer advice is obviously not what they excell in. So what is their job? If it's being a huge music snob that doesn't know sh*t about the subject, then they earn every penny.
Thanks to blogs and music journals, it won't be long until these overpaid c*ntbags will be long forgotten, but in the meantime, let's look back on the ones that really boil our piss. It seems like all they were ever good for was describing everything but the actual music, instead they just make stupid generalizations about the artists backgrounds and intentions which usually end up being far from the truth and falling into the horrible misconception that the only way to review a song is talk about it's lyrical content.
A lot of them don't even give more than an incredibly brief description when it comes to the actual music, it's a lot of linguistic masturbation and what better example than Pitchfork? It's as if talking about the music is too goddamn easy and straightforward, they have to be pretentious chodes about it and rant about how music quality is somehow tied to superficial things like class and "authenticity". Music is the last thing they have on their mind.
If they only talked about what the music means to them, it would be ok. But they don't, they try to be objective, and by that I mean try to pass of their clearly subjective opinions as objective facts. A lot of them these days don't use a vocabulary all too different from the average internet troll.
Most of the members of this forum could do better than these idiots, seriously.
Lester Bangs, Robert Christgau, Rob Sheffield, Jimmy Guterman. Raging retards every last one of them, the fact that they are considered the deans of western music critics is nothing short of horrifying.
I used to say Christgau was the absolute worst, that is until I found this guy.
Only Solitaire: George Starostin's Music Reviews
This guy is a linguistics researcher and apparently one of the brightest in his field. But yeah, being smart at one subject can't prevent you from being a total retard at another. As this guy's other hobby as a music critic clearly proves.
So let's see. He rates artist's whole careers on letter grades. And thus The Beatles, Stones, Dylan and The Who are the only A grade artists in rock music history. Black Sabbath, The Residents and Pretty Things are a D, and Syd Barrett is an E. And ABBA a C. What more needs to be said?
His reviews are even worse, I won't quote them, I let you find out for yourself if you're willing to endure the blinding stupidity.