As it is, music critics tend to fall all over each other to prove that you don't need to be able to write in order to get their gig. This is especially true lately, when a year ending in lots of nines has whipped the media into a frenzy, frantically compiling arbitrary lists of the best of everything and trying ever so hard to tint everything that happens this year with incredible significance. All this trying too hard can only have one effect on music writing: The worst subgenre of journalism just got worse. Observe:

"I like to stare the future straight in the face. Trying to find the fuse of the Apocalypse. Tweaking for weeks on methamphetamine, reading Phillip K. Dick, trying to break open reality's circuit breaker.... The future is scary when it starts to become real, but when reality starts becoming the future it's no longer scary, it just seems natural."

-- I sincerely hope Philip Guichard was "tweaking" when he wrote this for New York Press.

"No other band could have followed dogmanstar with Coming Up... and then followed that with Head Music."

-- Dave Thompson in Alternative Press, marveling that Monday comes after Tuesday, and then after that... Wednesday!

"Dare it be said: Face to Face have gone... emo!?!?"

-- D. Shaft, in Buffalo, NY's Artvoice. Dare he be so ungrammatical? How he get paid to write such as this? When 800 words you write, sound this good will you, hmm?

"The tome remains detached, authoritative, as if crudity were as objective and value-free a quality as color or chart position. This is how the controlling discourses that Foucauldians bitch about operate. Despite some lovely countervailing passages describing the first Beatles records...."

-- Robert Christgau in the Village Voice, not letting on until the end that he's actually writing about rock 'n' roll. Maybe that extra year of grad school wasn't such a good idea after all.

One final note regarding the Hamptons' newest country club member: Mr. Combs calls his latest album Forever. Does that mean he'll never record another album? -- MIKE VAGO