When the rats run riot

How weasely is Rob Sheffield? The life of a music critic, even one for Rolling Stone, doesn't afford a person much personality, but Sheffield seems like the world's most eager high school journalism student, a beanpole with too many copies of Rosie O'Donnel's Kids Are Punny lining his bookshelf.

I've never liked the guy - his svelt, smug, troll-puppet face slouching in VH1 interviews making bad jokes about, say, Haddaway ("He haddaway, he got away, then he faded away!"), always seemed to me the mark of someone making an annoying and too-easy shorthand for substantive thought. But in reviewing Sonic Youth's recent release Rather Ripped, Sheffield's ascended my list of mortal critic enemies, snuggling somewhere below Rolling Stone colleague Peter Travers (he of the "This movie's got bite!" interchangeable poster-ready aphorisms) and somewhere above the first film critic to say Million Dollar Baby "Floats like a butterfly and stings like a bee!"

Sheffield gave the album a positive review, in a way - he said the record is "One of the strongest to emerge in Sonic Youth's amazing late period." My problem is not with his opinion on the album, because, of course, criticism of any medium is based entirely on a simple and honest reaction, of which two people are bound to experience differently. I say "in a way," though, becuase his review of Rather Ripped is one of the most puzzling and vituperative "positive" reviews I've ever experienced.

Vituperative because it spends a good 60% of its text criticising the band. Puzzling because it gets most of that wrong.

Sheffield's ultimate attempt is, I think, to portray himself as unquestionable Sonic Youth authority. I may have too much of a problem handing over that title, as I think I'd find few other people able to discuss the point-by-point distinctions between, say, 1992's Dirty and 1990's similarly jangly Goo. But that is, of course, not much of an issue. Perhaps no fan is comfortable relinquishing judgmental control over artists that have been meaningful in their lives.

Sheffield offers an odd history of the band, though: "Daydream Nation [the band's seminal 1988 release] sounded like a vision of the future, yet the Youth never dared to follow it up... They marked time in the 90's with drab, quasi-heavy records, but they've been on a creative roll ever since A Thousand Leaves in 1998." I can't imagine anyone with some familiarity of Sonic Youth records would agree with that statement (and granted, most of Rolling Stone's increasingly teenage audience will not have that). Those "drab" 90's records - Goo, Dirty, Experimental Jet Set Trash and No Star, and Washing Machine - were seminal alternative recordings, making the band underground heroes by, including many others, critics like Rolling Stone; describing this string of records on the release of Washing Machine, critic Tom Moon wrote, "With surgical skill and a desire to stretch if not demolish the frontier, they've developed an attack that is astonishingly intricate and jazzlike in its extreme flexibility."

Now, there is no reason Sheffield should be required to stick with this opinion, but I do think it shows his remarks as rather revisionist - Goo, the album Sonic Youth used to help usher Nirvana onto their DGC label, drab? A Thousand Leaves, the album opening with a line like "Alice, it's just a kitten, just a kiiiitten," is exhibiting a band "on a roll?" Even his details seem misplaced - Sheffield claims "embarrasing beat-poetry interludes" have marred their last albums, but this only occurred in one song ever - "Small Flowers Crack Concrete," from 2000's NYC Ghosts and Flowers, 4 albums previous. And hey, I loved that song (although, I'll admit this is probably a minority opinion, as is my worship of that supremely mournful, forgotten album). As I have loved the songs bassist/guitarist/guru Kim Gordon's made in the past decade - 2002's "Sympathy for the Strawberry" and 2004's "I Love You, Golden Blue" are amongst the best songs she's ever recorded. Sheffield claims her songs here are her first worthwhile contributions since Washing Machine (odd such a "drab" album contained such worthwhile tracks, eh?). He says the opposite about Lee Ranaldo's contribution, "Rats," ("Just OK," says Sheffield), but I thought it a terrific song, and a step back into artistic relevance for Ranaldo, whose last song, 2004's "Paper Cup Exit," was boueyed by the silly line "Skimmin' the top of tall trees/ through the clear line of free speech."

I would like to just pass Sheffield's review off as a simple cavil of quirky taste, but considering all the bizarre assertions in his review, I find it mostly indicative of the type of weasely persona Sheffield cultivates - the effete indie rocker of obscure theories and opinions. Music criticism, more than any other critical medium, is a nearly impossible place to form an honest opinion - you're swayed by loyalties to artists you respect and dislikes on principle even before you get to those pesky things like critical consensus. Rolling Stone's reviews are especially all over the map, but I think they do their magazine a disservice with writers like Sheffield, or, for that matter, writers like Travers also - people so willing to chuck whatever opinion they feel is the most quotable, "edgiest," or pretentiously thick, they all wind up sounding equally meaningless.