Sound Opinions (PBS)
reviewed 2004

The pair have a weekly radio show on WXRT for awhile, and now have added a weekly local PBS show, which I managed to catch by accident. Sound Opinions is a well-produced local PBS show, sort of a 21st century Sneak Previews, with Derogatis and Kot sitting in a studio, discussing vaguely recent music news items in the first half of the show (e.g. the reformed Napster), and reviewing albums in the second half. Kot looks like the older brother of Neil Patrick Harris, DeRogatis more like a UNIX administrator.

This episode had them effusing praise over Led Zeppelin, relevant apparently because of how well How The West Was Won sold in 2003. It is curious how Zeppelin gets near-universal critical acclaim today, while back in the day, they were loved by audiences, but generally reviled by the critics. Maybe a lightbulb will click one day, and these two will feel the same about Ace of Base in 2025. Doubtful. DeRogatis showed the camera his John Bonham leg tattoo to the camera as a means of establishing some sort of cred. I would've been much more impressed with "Adam And The Ants" tattooed across his back and/or forehead.

A section focusing on the unexpected trend of fans suing entertainers for disappointing shows has them rightfully dissing Limp Bizkit and Creed, although you can read nearly any Fark thread these days to get the same diatribes.

Much more curious is a "man on the street" segment in which a black man asks DeRogatis his opinion about the upcoming Tears For Fears reunion, and he dismisses the band's past output as "pop fluff." If Jim and his crappy band side-project end up creating art that has 1/1000th the lasting appeal and brilliance of "Everybody Wants To Rule The World," I'd be right durn amazed.

The pair's whole critical ideal is ancient and unjustified, catering to aging music nerds who desperately want to hold on to their formative musical beliefs. The "new" stuff they like is inevitably the safest shit around (Radiohead, Flaming Lips, Beck, etc), and while a lot of these kinds of bands are all well and good, the whole notion of pop music being "bad" and rock music being "good" is as antiquated as an "I Like Ike" pinback. As the lines blur and new generations casually accept simply whatever music it is that they actually like, the "importance" and "greatness" of many artists will fall away like chips from a Stalin statue. Why the history references? 'Cause Kot & DeRogatis are history.

The show's rating guide consists of "buy it," "burn it," or "trash it," which makes it a tiny bit more verbose than the thumbs up/down scale of Ebert & his dead friend, but it's not a bad system. I still prefer my ratings on a scale of several Cute L'il Puppies, naturally.

I've been reading both of these guys' columns for a while now, and can predict their likes/dislikes routinely. For instance, any Wilco-related release is automatically afforded bountiful dick-sucking. When DeRogatis muses about a band or an album, very rarely does he mention the music itself, but rattles off his laundry-list of lazy rock critic clichés: "it's full of energy," "the politics," etc.

Yes, I realize there's only so many things you can actually SAY about music after a while, but you quickly get the feeling that Jim just completely misses the point. Does he ever like music 'cause it's wrapped around a well-written song, or it has a melody that gets trapped in his brain that makes me him want to speed down the interstate, or an emotion that lights up his heart, or a transcendent groove gets his fat ass dancing around his apartment?

If it's "energy" and "politics" he wants I'm sure Smithsonian Folkways has an LP of Arizona nuclear blast tests from the 50s in their back catalog somewhere. Influential!

Kot is modestly better than DeRogatis, but that's almost a given. When discussing the most recent glut of Paul Westerberg albums, Kot makes the prescient point that they're largely bereft of any actual songs, to which DeRogatis half-jokes that "songs are overrated" anyhow. That two-second soundbyte alone shows that this guy is a fumbling fool whose writing, at best, should be relagated to a GeoCities blog and not be given space in one of the largest newspapers in the US.

Again, DeRogatis's clumsiness doesn't exonerate Kot. For the weekly "Desert Island Disc" segment of the show, Kot picks the formidable For Your Pleasure album by Roxy Music, but his explanation goes on to rehash every hack's description of Roxy Music's antics at the time and why this music was "important" back in 1973. Ultimately, he does go on to say that the music sounds as fresh today as it did back then. FINALLY, something about the music. But still a cliché.

And herein lies an aspect of music critique that these two and countless others fail to address: that criticism and analysis of art is inherently and inexplicably tied to the time when it's given forth.

Why should I or anyone else care about 30-year-old music in 2004? Because it's "important"? Because it's "influential"? Fuck that shit. No normal human actively listens to music for those reasons, nor should they.

I'm not suggesting that people shouldn't take chances and ought to stay inside their musical comfort zones … I mean, go ahead and listen to a Robert Johnson CD for the first time. If it geniunely hits a raw nerve, then full steam ahead. But you're not obliged to appreciate it, enjoy it, or even try it out if your current kissed-out floatboat is, like, 8bitpeoples.

Even if I didn't know Kot's & DeRogatis's track records, I would've been suspicious by show's end, purely on the excessive utterance of the phase "rock and roll." Yuck. There's absolutely nothing rebellious about an electric guitar anymore, unless it's used to write a f'n fantastically mindblowing song. Or, perhaps, to clock a would-be burglar.

The saddest aspect of Sound Opinions is that folks that watch it might well buy into the bullshit, thinking that these music choices are altruistic and mighty, but in fact are misguided, misrepresented, and narrow-minded. The last thing we need is another generation of adherence to The Rolling Stone Record Guide. So let's start here: What's the most important album ever made? The one you like the most.

Review by David Larch