Critic to record labels: Stop hurting America!

Most of my occasional pieces in the Dig have been snarky, nitpicky rants about matters of extremely minor importance. In my day job, I’m a music critic. There will now be a brief pause so you can all say: “And the difference is … ?”

Don’t get me wrong. I’m well aware I have pretty much the best job ever. It’s tough not to be properly appreciative when your workday consists largely of sitting around and listening to CDs. Even better, my sideline gig is in culinary writing, including a column consisting of reviews of junk food. So I’ve made a career out of pop music and snacks: I swear, if I could figure out how to get paid for watching TV and/or masturbating, then my adolescence will have been more profitable than a Harvard MBA.

Still, any job has its annoyances, and the one that’s frustrating me right now is the trend of promo CDs watermarked by paranoid record labels so they’ll neither load nor play in a computer’s CD drive. Although there are a full half-dozen CD players in active use in our house, my work is done here at my office desk with a nice pair of Henry Kloss bookshelf speakers patched in, for the simple reason that, y’know, this is where my computer is. Standalone CD players are fine for passive early listens of an album, when I’m first getting a feel for it, but when I’m actively listening to an album, trying to discern what instruments are being used in the arrangements, or deciphering a particularly marble-mouthed lyric, I like to be able to sit here at my desk and rewind, fast-forward and otherwise futz with the songs. This is not unreasonable, and one would think labels would encourage reviewers to have such dedication.

(OK, I usually have that dedication. I will admit that, when my relationship with a certain outlet I no longer work for was deteriorating, I would occasionally write full 300-word reviews of albums I had never heard a note of, just to see if anyone up the journalistic food chain would notice. The fact that no one ever did was my key reason for leaving.)