Your mother
Posted on Feb 25 2007 | Tagged as: Media, Music, Pedantry
Double disclaimer: Firstly, I know some of Los Campesinos!, have had the pleasure of interviewing them and it’s been a long time since music has got me this excited. Secondly, I know that finding errors in the Guardian - or indeed any of the national news media - is like taking candy from a quadriplegic baby.
But I still feel compelled to give this nonsense a good going over. It’s a piece on Los Campesinos! for the new bands bit, by Paul Lester who, evidently, doesn’t like them very much. Fair enough. However…
“…if they’re going to invoke the majestic spirit of the Castillian peninsula they ought at least to have made the effort to get the cocking grammar right; there should be an upside-down exclamation-mark at the start of their name if there’s one at the end, like this: ¡Los Campesinos!“
There’s so much wrong with this I hardly know where to start. Oh, yes. Here: Mr Lester could at least get the spelling right - it’s “Castilian”, with one ‘l’, not “Castillian”. He could also get the cocking geography right. The Castilian region is a plain in central Spain. The peninsular that is home to Spain and Portugal is the Iberian Peninsular. Tool.
“Los Campesinos! (it means “Farmers!” in Spanish; how cute)…”
How cute? How patronising. And I’d dispute that translation - I’d interpret campesinos as ‘(specifically rural) peasants’ rather than farmers. (A quick check of my dictionary has confirmed campesino as meaning ‘country person’ or ‘peasant’, while the most common word for farmer is granjero in Spain, or estanciero in Latin America.)
“Our quirkysomething septet might aim for the joyous abandon of Broken Social Scene and Clap Your Hands, but really all they manage to communicate is a sense of self-stimulation; seven giddy fools with glockenspiels.“
Check out the semicolon misuse at the end of that sentence. What was that about grammar? Paul Lester can’t punctuate in his native language and he’s criticising others for a minor error in a foreign tongue.
“To be fair, they’ve only been together for 18 months (they played their first gig last year at some whoopee palace called the Fun Factory) and this is only their second single.“
Well, it’s their first single, and someone so dismissive of small venues as to refer to Fun Factory as “some whoopee palace” either shouldn’t really be writing about new bands or is incredibly lazy.
“And maybe it’s time for a cull.“
Too right it is.
on 25 Feb 2007 at 9:22 pm 1 Sam said …
“Throughout the early ’90s Paul Lester was a freelance for Melody Maker, City Limits, 20/20, Sky magazine and The Jewish Chronicle where he covered, god help him, such scenes as Madchester, grunge, shoegazing and Britpop. He was made Features Editor of MM in 1993 before leaving in ‘97 to launch Uncut, where he is now Deputy Editor. In his spare time he rides Japanese superbikes, plays with small children (his own) and writes for The Guardian.”
Interesting….
on 04 Mar 2007 at 12:21 am 2 Ceri said …
Lazy reviews annoy me so much! I especially hate ‘celebrities’ who have film review columns in newspapers. Most of them clearly haven’t watched the film themselves, and have either got someone else to watch it, or have resorted to making up bollocks based on press releases and hearsay.
Also as a marine geographer i feel compelled to get high and mighty about those who liberally apply bad geography to their work. How hard is it to find the right location for goodness sake? It takes 10 seconds on bloody google! Gah! The dumming down of the media…
on 04 Mar 2007 at 10:54 am 3 Christopher White said …
Yes, it’s an awfully slapdash, half-arsed review - I wouldn’t even expect anything that bad in Quench.
I didn’t comment on his evaluation of their actual music because it’s mostly a matter of opinion, but there’s silly remarks there, too.
Such as decribing them as “generic” (when they don’t sound like anything else - and how many indie bands have a violin…) and then complaining that they don’t sound anything like any of their influences. Make your mind up.