Music Critics: Now More Awkward Than Ever

Today’s Guardian Music Blog examines the painfulness of music-critic “listening sessions,” those icky-thump gatherings in which writers and editors have to sit together and listen to an unreleased album play over a stereo system:

Famously, Robbie Williams once invited half-a-dozen frontline critics to hear his new album and berated them for writing unkind words about him previously. I once had the uncomfortable experience of walking out of a playback for a new Mariah Carey album, hosted by producer LA Reid. This meant marching straight past him as he sat on a stage, midway through his droning on between tracks about its brilliance.

Mind you, if the artist doesn’t show, it’s an even more demeaning experience. I don’t think anyone who sat through the one chance to hear the latest Prince album before its release, in a West End club in the middle of the day, relished the occasion.

Granted, complaining about these sort of things in an age of famine and genocide seems awfully trite, but listening sessions are just plain terrible–music writers, God love ’em, are among the most socially inept creatures on Earth, and listening to an album in a conference room is just plain unnatural. But sometimes it’s even worse when the artists show up: One of your Idolators will never forget the evening spent in the studio with Mike Shinoda, listening to the lesser tracks on Meteora, and trying to manage a look of non-committal reaction.

Listening isn’t easy with other critics around [Guardian Music Blog]