Music critics have it hardest

In the every decreasing world of entertainment reviews, I still think the poor folk who try to review new music have it the hardest.

You can watch a movie or a TV show, read a book or comic or novel, and if you have to write words about it, you can probably do it with one viewing or reading. Do it for a short while, and you will probably have the angle for your review already settled by the time the credits roll.

(I tried movie reviewing for a couple of years when I first became a journo in the mid 00s, and gave it up because it really wasn't much fun as I thought it would be, and it was ruining my experiences of watching a movie for fun. I found some of those old reviews on our dying PC the other day and they were slightly interesting - I had the knowledge to write with confidence, but was so fucking pretentious).

But it's a different tune for the music reviewers. Never mind the fact that there is so much of it - dozens of albums are released around the world every week, and it is literally impossible to keep up with all the new music that gets up loaded to something like Youtube every single day.

But it also takes so long to figure out if you like a song. I have to listen to something a dozen times before I can come to a decision about it. To see if it has hooked me, has something properly unforgettable to it. Sometimes it takes that long to discover how annoying something is.

Sometimes a song can hit you out of the blue on an instant listen. But that is truly rare. It is only with real immersion into the song that you can find the heart of it.

And musical tastes change over the years, I am far more forgiving of pop music nonsense than I was when I was a teenage metaller, or slightly older raver. So much of the stuff I loved as a young perosn now sounds hopelessly adolescent, and I've always got an ear out for something new.

The only music I write about here is the stuff I have been listening to for years and years, and have some very definite - if occasionally fluid - opinions about it. But to write about everything that is coming in the deluge of the new, that's a real talent.