Buncha Fatheads

My digital subscription to Gramophone includes the full text of their entire archive. Every issue of the magazine back to its beginnings way back in the Compton Mackenzie days, before the advent of microphones and long-play discs, back when to play a record was to position a voice box with a screw-on stylus onto the surface of a rapidly spinning disc, no doubt after having given the hand cranks enough turns to ensure that the spring-loaded motor would do its thing. The sound quality was limited, to say the least.

The repertory was even more limited. Most early gramophone records were brutal to orchestras. They just couldn't pick up enough of the sound. Fortunately, microphones and electric recording came along after 1925 and the catalog soon started expanding.

That's when the Gramophone critics really got their game on, and a stuffier, dustier, more flatulent bunch of posturing fatheads have rarely been collected together in one publication. What is it about being a record critic that brings out such holier-than-thou attitudes, such blatant pontificating, such ridiculously overinflated prose? Today's critics are bad enough—I can think of one who I would characterize as hysteric and in bad need of plenty of time spent away from his record collection—but the Gramophone critics were cut out of a different kind of cloth altogether.

It was obviously compensation of some sort, as it always is with critics. They are the palace eunuchs who can watch it being done but can't do it themselves. Like second-raters everywhere, they take great pleasure in criticizing the achievements of their betters. But they are sterile, impotent, and basically useless.

That certainly didn't stop any of those early Gramophone critics, who come off as the illegitimate offspring of stuffy Oxford dons and fault-finding rich matrons, encapsulating the worst of both and none of the (fleeting) virtues of either. Ah, they are judgmental little bitches, with their oozing prose and obscure references. More often than not they're so hypnotized by their convoluted syntax that it's hard to figure out just what the blazes they're talking about. One of them summed up a particularly impenetrable review of two Mozart overtures played by Karl Böhm and the Staatskapelle Dresden, from 1940, by saying primly that he liked both performances very much—this after vomiting up tangles of verbiage that left me befogged even on a third or fourth re-reading. But at least he had the good graces to say that he liked them. Bully for him.

Which, in the final analysis, is all that a record critic can say: me like or me no like. From such ex-cathedra pronouncements were are supposed to decide whether we want to part with our shekels for a particular recording.

But here's my dirty little secret: I have never decided to buy, or to avoid, a single recording in my life from a record critic's verdict. And I have bought a lot of recordings.