I know what some of you are going to say. It's Rolling Stone, so what should I expect, but I gotta get this off my chest.

I loooove me a good album guide. I mean I eat this shit up. All Music Guide, Rough Guides, Trouser books, shit, even Christgau.

Also, I'm not too hard to get over on. Do a decent job and I'll lay down some money.

I'm at Borders and I'm flipping through (The New) Rolling Stone Album Guide and within about 2 minutes I can tell this is a total piece of crap.

I don't care about ratings. Four stars, three stars...I don't give a shit. What I can't tolerate is total omissions of significant artists. I realize it's subjective, but when by your own standards an artist has never made an album that deserves more than two stars, why are you freakin' bothering to cover them?

Also, would it be too much to ask that whoever does the write up about X band or artist actually know what the hell they are talking about. The factual errors I found just through a brief flip through were astonishing.

You fucked up(again) RS. I would have been happy to lay down some green if you would have at least tried. Christ!

I've got 3 "RS" Album Guides - the red one, the blue one, & the multi-colored one. I think the most I paid for one was $4.99.

I'm a dork for those type of books, too. Do you have the one Spin put out? It's pretty good - they did it before the magazine went completely in the crapper, thankfully.

I also enjoy the massive DVD Guides. Not to hijack a thread but does anyone know of any truly great movie guides.

RS is just plain bad.

Yup, the orange one. I've got one from Mojo and a bunch of others I can't even remember right now. I eat that shit up.

Steve

Well, I mean just as far as sheer # of movies reviewed I've got the Leonard Maltin one and it's pretty damn good. I guess Ebert's might be good as well.

Steve

Me too. I actually quite like the first two editions, mostly edited by Dave Marsh. I don't agree with the bulk of the ratings, but both tomes are an admirable, inevitably doomed attempt to place the entirety of recorded rock/pop/blues into some kind of critical context.

I saw a review of it someplace (LA Times maybe??) & it talked about how it changed a bunch of reviews for this edition from the last one. Like one of the first 2 Ice Cube albums (both of which are fuckingclassic) it originally gave a bad review, but was changed to a glowing review in this edition. I wonder if they took back that glowing review of The Orb's "Pomme Fritz" album after the UK media fell over laughing?

I agree...there's all kinds of obscure-assed records in those first 2 volumes. And in reference to the idea that their initial concept was obviously to try & review almost everything , well...that's just INSANITY. lol.

On the movie tip, I 2nd the recommendation of the Maltin books. Before I became an online guy I bought the new edition of those things every Fall.