beach-boys-pet_soundsYou’ll recall that New Times' music editor, Martin Cizmar, wrote an intemperate screed about his former intern, Sarah Ventre, on the Up on the Sun blog the other day.

So intemperate was it that the screed was taken down after what PHXated hears was a minor uproar inside New Times HQ … leaving no sign that it ever had existed.

But PHXated, for whom all things Cizmarian are not just catnip, but catnip with chocolate frosting and gossamer dust on top, found it and posted it on Thursday.

The upshot of the post was that Martin was ashamed of Ventre.

She’d written a piece for the NPR web site, where she’s now an intern in D.C., in which she describes sitting down and listening to Pet Sounds for the first time.

Yeah, we know—what a stupid thing for Martin to be upset about, right?

It wasn’t like Ventre had been passing herself off as a Beach Boys expert—or that Young Martin had unearthed the glaring lack of exposure through detective work.

Martin lacks many things; perspective is one of them.

If Ventre was, I don’t know, covering the state capitol for New Times and wrote that’d she’d never visited the building, and had never talked to a state legislator—that you could get mad about.

That’s a comprehensive failure.

But there are somewhere between hundred and a thousand what you’d call essential rock albums any critic should listen to—and that’s just the basics. By definition some of these will be heard later than the others.

Anyway, we were perusing Jay Bennett’s “Nothing Not New” on Up on the Sun when something struck us.

It’s a review of the new Belle & Sebastian album. It was posted last Tuesday.

Here’s how it began:

Sometimes, after a hard day spent arguing with co-workers about which records people who write about music should be exposed to, you just want something breezy, something feel-good. Enter the new record by longtime indie darlings Belle and Sebastian.

We think he’s talking about Young Martin!

Given that Young Martin’s jeremiad was taken down without explanation, this is the first indication we’ve had from inside New Times that the post did cause some heated discussions.

Bennet concludes his piece:

Belle and Sebastian are one of those bands I’d heard a lot about but never listened to. You know what else I’ve never listened to? OK Computer by Radiohead. Or damn near 70 percent of Pitchfork’s top 10 records of the 2000s. Does that make me unqualified to write about music? Perhaps it does. One of my co-workers thinks you need to be well versed in “the canon,” a not-quite-clearly defined list of records (culled from the big four of rock writing: Rolling Stone, Spin, Pitchfork, New Music Express) that every rock writer need listen to in order to know what the hell they’re writing about. You know, records like Sgt. Pepper, Exile on Main Street, Nevermind, Pet Sounds, Never Mind the Bollocks, etc. In other words, are you qualified to write about pop music if you’ve never listened to Pet Sounds?

Great question!

PHXated’s opinion, if anyone cares, is that a writer should have something interesting to say and the chops to say it with.

It’s a sliding scale. The trouble with the writing of people who write about music without having heard “the canon”—and the same goes for criticism generally—is that it tends to be trite and solipsistic.

It’s more about the writer than the music. On the other hand, a good writer who is interesting in and of him- or herself can do it.

Now, Young Martin, for example, has listened to Pet Sounds.

But you’ll recall PHXated recently ridiculed a piece he’d written saying that 1994 was the best year ever for pop music.

It was pretty easy to demonstrate fairly conclusively that 1994 wasn’t even the best year for pop music of the early 1990s.

In that case, Young Martin was publicly exhibiting such solipsism. Of course he’s entitled to his opinion; but it was pretty clear from the piece that he was unaware (or hadn’t processed) a lot of the other aesthetic movements of the time. You couldn’t take the piece seriously, in other words, on its own terms.

There was something missing from his piece, and it wasn’t a familiarity with Pet Sounds.

It was thinking.

That’s the answer to Bennett’s question.