does everything really sound like stooges/mc5/bigstar/vu?

Good point. It usually takes me many months to get to the "reviews" section of a music mag because its often the most worthless section. I usually skim through the review beforehand to determine whether its worth reading. If it mentions any of the band names you've listed, I move on. Always. Witness the some frequent popups of late, the hip- old skool references of the month for record reviewers: Wire, Gang of Four, Neu, Kraftwerk, early PIL and the biggie.... Can.

Its all because record reviewers are generally lazy people who don't know their shit. They don't want to seem "out of it" so they take their cues from a few top notch guys and keep recycling. Having known people who have written many a review for various national print mags, I'll say that more of MY offhanded remarks about an album showed up in some of their writing than their own.

Critics can get away with it because most kids these days don't know who the fuck the Stooges, MC5, Big Star, and the Velvet Underground actually are.

I've been guilty of this a bit lately, because some Toronto indie bands are quite obviously cribbing from Stooges and MC5. While it's true that the influence is so large that it potentially becomes meaningless (Beatlesesque, for example), it's true that these particular references are meaningless for kids just starting to get into the bands to which the reference is being made.

I think it's probably laziness on the part of both. Reviewers can get around the comparison if they really work at it, but for a group of 20-year old kids to climb out of the basement after getting turned on by Raw Power and then try to peddle it to an audience too young to know that it isn't particularly original...well, that's lazy, too.

I think if said over-abused reference points are utilized in site- specific ways (say, recalling the guitar solo in Go4's "Anthrax", or the subway-like beat in the VU's "Waiting for the Man"), then it's OK. I don't know if kids have no clue who these groups are (and who are these kids, anyway), but such descriptions are good for both novices & experts.

Tossing the names like a Cobb salad, though, does good to nobody (unless you're trying to meet a deadline, and could give two logs what you're typing). I am as guilty as the next person in doing this, though, especially in my more recent write-ups. Not having an editor can be a hindrance sometimes.

What bugs me most is that none of those alleged Velvet Underground soundalikes ever sound anything like VU. If you're really lucky, they might come within a few miles of the jingly-jangly 3rd album/1969 Live sound, but I have yet to come across one band that could pull off both an "All Tomorrows Parties" and a "Sweet Jane".

I always got the feeling that the point of name-drop comparisons was, originally, to give as large a group of readers as possible an idea of what the band actually sounds like---meaning you'd want your references to start really general and then fill in the specifics with the rest of the review. I.e., if some new band comes along that sounds a whole lot like Bettie Serveert, your review will be useful to more people if you just name-check the Velvet Underground and work from there. This tends to work okay, when you think about it---it's the equivalent, in a Pete Frame Family Tree kind of way, of classifying music into genres for easy description. All you're saying is that a particular record falls into, say, the Stooges tradition.

I think the problem, though, is that some older references have sort of fossilized, meaning that critics are still using Bowie-periods or Big Star references to communicate with people whose knowledge of Bowie or Big Star is completely historical (or doesn't exist at all). It's interesting to me to watch which bands develop name- reference recognition, especially in new genres where previous namedrops don't exist. Tortoise, for example, is a handy check for a certain strain of music; Belle and Sebastian is an easily recognizable reference for another particular attitude. And now that everyone knows who Nick Drake is, you can say something is Drakeish and hope to be understood relatively clearly.

Biggest resurrected culprits of the past few years: Brian Wilson (in instances where people used to just say something was "really poppy") and Lee Hazlewood (incomprehensible---when did everyone suddenly start knowing exactly what kind of stuff Lee Hazlewood did?).

To summarize, my theory: name-recognition + good example of a particular genre or approach = name-reference status. Not the worst process in the world.

Sorry, just realized: there might also be a feedback loop at work here. To wit: let's say it's generally decided upon that the Velvet Underground is the appropriate reference for a certain style of music. Let's say that some guy or gal keeps seeing reviews of his or her favorite new records that mention VU. That person will probably, at some point, pick up a VU record, if only as background research. The end result is that constant name-dropping of a few particular bands gives those bands "important influence" status, meaning more and more people will be influenced by them as time goes by.

I can probably attest to this myself---I can think of tons of "important influence" bands I never would have checked out if not for the fact that their names kept cropping up in reviews of records I liked.

It's lazy criticism for another reason - if something is 'VU- influenced', does that mean it sounds like "Sister Ray" or like "Candy Says"? Is it the Big Star of "Kangaroo" or "Septermber Gurls"? A disservice is being done to the influences more than the influenced.

Saying that something sounds "like the Velvet Underground" is a total cop-out, because the Velvets had such a wide and varied career. Sometimes it is hard to believe that the same band that recorded The Black Angel's Death Song also recorded Jesus. If critics point to a certain *era* of the Velvets, I have more respect for them. (eg, The Channel 6 sound like White Light/White Heat. Saloon sound like the Banana Album. Tompaulin have more of a Third Album thing going on.)

However, more and more, it's a just a lazy way of saying "well, this has guitars and sounds kinda '60s-ish, but it doesn't sound like The Beatles." Which is rubbish. As I have said way too frequently over the past few months, The Strokes sound like the Velvet Underground the way that Oasis sound like the Beatles. I.E., only in the most superficial, style-aping and substance-ignoring, heavy handed, Neanderthal sort of way.

The whole Stooges/MC5 comparison thing, I believe, has come about, because the phrase "punk" has been given a bad name by MTV jock-punk. If I call a band "punk" do you think first about that Stooges/MC5 garage punk sort of aesthetic, or do you think Green Day/Offspring?

I'm not even sure that critics are even lazy. I blame the shoddy, unoriginal artists that labels are foisting on us, and the fact that critics are forced by advertising pressures more and more to come up with positive reviews for utter dreck!

Sorry for re-stating Patrick's point. I'm at work and people keep distracting me with dumb questions, it's like that guy in Vonnegut's "Harrison Bergeron" who was forced to wear the headset interrupting his brain every 10 seconds.

The Strokes are just so *underwhelming*. Tumbleweed blowing through some wasteground.

http://www.nme.com/NME/External/Reviews/Reviews_Story/0,1069,8273,00.html

kingsbury manx does not sound like the third album from the velvets.