Critical thinking ... was Caroline too
hard on Lily? Photograph: Yui Mok/PA
Pop critics are used to dishing it out - criticism, that is - but can we take it? I'm not talking about the feedback received from fans when we write something unflattering about their favourite artist, but facing the wrath of the artist him/herself.
When I reviewed a gig by the much-discussed new singer Lily Allen, I knew that if she read it, she was bound to disagree with the gist of it - which was that at this early stage of her career, she hadn't yet proved that the hype is justified. And she did. She posted a message on her MySpace page after the review ran last month, categorically taking exception to most of the points I'd made. Principally, she argued that having made an album (due for release next month) and received 1.3m MySpace plays, she had proved herself.
Well, we will continue to differ on that, but her post impressed me. Pop stars can be legendarily vituperative (one major indie frontman was so put out by a piece in the NME that he wrote a song just for that particular journalist, entitling it something like You Scum), but Allen, despite her pique, came across as decent and likable. And I began to wonder whether, taking into account that she's 21 and it had been only her second gig, I'd been too hard on her.
Music journalism is an unusual profession inasmuch as you can get away with a great deal because you're not usually accountable to the people you write about. Artists rarely respond directly, so writers have considerable leeway in their criticism, and consideration for their feelings tends not to be uppermost.
That's what reviewing is about, and most reviews, including negative ones, fall under the category of fair comment. But critics tend to forget that even relatively mild comment can be hurtful. Having read Allen's thoughts and felt suitably Wicked Witch-ish, I believe I could've been kinder.
But the review was, as I said, comparably mild, and I gave the show three stars out of five. Some critics might have put the boot in much more vigorously. There are those who insist that, in releasing an album or doing a gig at all, a star is laying himself open to the most wounding criticism the writer decides to inflict. Most grow out of that when they learn that gratuitously nasty reviews are pointless. Anyway, the worst a pop critic can dish out is eclipsed by the kind of thing an angry fan can produce. I once got a rant from someone so enraged by a Stranglers review he was practically apoplectic. I hadn't even written the review in question, so imagine the letter the actual writer must have received.
