The Greatest Two-Sentence Rock Review Ever Written

It’s the greatest rock music review ever written. It was put on paper in 1985 by J.D. Considine, a well-known music critic in America. It’s not Considine’s pan of GTR, the self-titled 1986 album from the supergroup led by members of Yes and Genesis. That review, which appeared in the August 1986 issue of Musician, was only three letters. GTR, announced Considine, was “SHT.” The GTR review is, as Ryan Reed put it, “still funnier and more fully realized than most essay-length critiques.”

Still, SHT is not Considine’s masterpiece. That came in 1985 and his two-sentence assessment of Motley Crue’s cover of “Smokin’ in the Boys Room.” Ready?

“They weren’t smokin’ in that boys room. They just went in to take a quick dump.”

More than 40 years later, it still leaves me on the floor. I continue to marvel at its precision. I remember where I was when I first read it in 1985—the bookstore at Catholic University in D.C., where I was perusing a copy of Musician, where it first appeared. The bookstore, the campus, my life receded into the background.

Considine’s masterpiece became a shorthand between my brother and me. We used it as a reference point for years. Whenever we came across a particular cheesy or awful piece of art, lousy TV show, or terrible band, one of us would turn to the other and say it: “They weren’t smokin’ in that boys room.”

We could use more of Considine’s pungency today. In a recent essay in The New Yorker, Kelefa Sanneh lamented the erosion of music criticism. Critics, fearful of blowback from fans, won’t go after Beyonce or Taylor Swift. There’s also the phenomenon of poptimism, which scolds music critics for being too male, too white and not appreciating the skill it takes to produce pop music, and the joy that pop music brings. Sanneh was one of the leading critical voices scolding other reviewers for being too focused on rock and not appreciating soul, country and pop music more.

Yet in recent interviews Sanneh wants some of the old bile back. Talking to NPR, he recalled how Robert Christgau, “who called himself the dean of American rock criticism… literally gave letter grades to albums in the Village Voice.” So Donny Hathaway he described as, quote, “supper-club melodrama and homogenized jazz,” and gave that album a D-minus.

“So there was this idea that rock critics in particular were going to fight about music, were going to have strong and fierce opinions,” Sanneh said. “And to me, as a kid, as I started to read some of these older articles, that seemed like part of the fun.”

Sanneh describes the recent episode where Lorde gave herself a more negative review of her album Solar Power than Rolling Stone, which gave it 3 1/2 stars. “Later in an interview,” Sanneh recalls, “she said that the album was her attempt to be chill and kind of wafty. And she remembers thinking, actually, I don't think this is me. So you had this bizarre situation where professional critics were kinder to Lorde than she herself was. You sometimes hear it said that an artist is her own worst critic. But I don't think we want that to be literally true.”

When NPR asked Sanneh if all of this is even a big deal anymore, what with poptimism triumphant and people afraid to touch Beyonce hem, Sanneh answered: “You’re asking a slightly more polite version of the question, who cares? One answer is that for some of us, it's fun to read slightly unhinged criticism. And it reflects something true about what it's like to be a person to listen to music. If you're talking to your friend about music, you'll probably hear some extremely strong and categorical opinions, right? Whether it's I hate metal, whether it's hip-hop hasn't been good since 2005, people tend to have really strong views. So I get a little skeptical when the critical reviews don't seem that strong. If we can't have a frank exchange of views about Taylor Swift, maybe we're losing our ability a little bit to have frank exchanges of views about everything else.”

Bingo. J.D. Considine once said, “It is weird to have the best-known thing you ever wrote not even be a full word.” He was referring to GTR as SHT. Those three words may be his best-known strike, but his superior quip is still hanging in the boys room.