Is This The End Of Our Wenning Streak?

Last fall, we took one slightly iffy theory–that Rolling Stone arbitrarily hands out three-star reviews, no matter the album’s merits–and proceeded to run it into the ground. At first, “Everybody’s A Wenner” was kind of fun: We picked through the magazine, dropped a few Mark Knopfler one-liners, and occasionally poked fun at “The Smoking Section.” During the past six months, there were moments when it seemed like we were actually getting our message across, and we could have sworn we saw an uptick in three-and-a-half and two-star reviews. But when we crunched (or “glanced at”) the hard data, it appears as though the magazine is running about the same percentage of three-starrers.

And so, as firm believers in both democracy and meritocracy–or “dermatocracy,” as it’s called by some–we now ask our loyal “Wenner” reader(s) to judge the franchise’s fate. Should we keep it around as a regular survey of each new Rolling Stone issue, or is it the idea of maintaining it less than Perfect?

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