Everybody’s A Wenner: The “Rolling Stone” Review-Section Revue

Brian Raftery | January 18, 2007 2:31 am

Whenever a new issue of Rolling Stone arrives, we plunge immediately into the magazine’s review section, eager to mock the fact that just about every album gets the same three-star review.

But today, we sit flat-assed and gobsmacked on the floor, as the new issue of RS contains absolutely NO three-star reviews! Granted, there are only a dozen write-ups, but all of them avoid the triple-dipper: Hyphy Hitz? Three and a half stars. Taylor Hicks? Two stars! Romanian violinist Ion Petre Stoican? Four stars! (We really didn’t see that last one coming.)

So maybe the Stoners are listening to us, and we’ve showed them the error of giving a bunch of albums nearly indistinguishable grades (or maybe it’s just a slow week, and all the edit space went to marking the deaths of James Brown, Ahmet Ertegun, and I’m From Rolling Stone). But on the very off-chance that someone over there is paying attention, could you now please do something about “Smoking Section”? We know, we know–it’s supposed to be a return to Cameron Crowe’s “I’m with the band” heyday. But it really comes across like a ninth-grader sitting in homeroom on the first day after summer break, bragging about how many girls he Frenched, and mentioning that he had a 10-minute phoner with Joe Perry about BBQ sauce.

Issue #: 1018 Total number of reviews (excluding reissues): 12 Total number of three-star reviews: 0 Total percentage of reviews that are three-star reviews: 0 percent Number of RS pages dedicated to some sort of new extreme-skiing trend: 3 Everybody’s A Wenner [archive]