Annie Zaleski: "Show Review: Radiohead in St. Louis at the Verizon Wireless Amphitheater, May 14"

Despite what you might have heard, predictability isn't always a bad thing. It can save you the trouble of guessing what's going to happen in the future. In fact, I'd say predictability is the best friend of the impatient man (just man; woman need to learn patience). For example, because I know that all music reviewers are not fans of music, I can expect to read vitriolic attacks based on arbitrary factors including, but not limited to, how much a band sounds like Pavement.

Imagine my surprise when I read a review of a recent Radiohead concert by Annie Zaleski. Annie Zaleski is not a music critic. How can I be so certain? Because she's a fan. A BIG one, if her review Show Review: Radiohead in St. Louis at the Verizon Wireless Amphitheater, May 14 is any indicator. There are several obvious clues:

- She attended the Radiohead concert she reviewed.
Actual music critics do not need to attend shows, or even listen to albums, in order to write their reviews. If anything, the lack of participation actually makes for a better review. How can you maintain your journalistic objectivity if you get caught up in the frenzy and atmosphere of people actually enjoying listening to music? The answer? You can't. (For the sake of disclosure, I did not actually read Ms. Zaleski's review.)

- She took her own photographs.
What's worse than Zaleski attending the concert? Attending AND taking photographs! So much wasted effort--she might as well have attended the concert twice! Standard protocol for concert reviews is to send the staff photographer to snap some pictures, and then you write your review based on what was captured with the camera. If you don't have a staff photographer, then you just do a Google Image Search and base your review on whatever non-pornographic images come up. If the search yields nothing but porn, then it must not have been that good of a concert (surprise, surprise).

- She took a photo of the back of someone's head and considered it a success.
I may not know much about "composition" or "exposure" or "a lens cap," but I do know that never ever has anyone ever thought that the back of someone's head was interesting (unless the front of their head was actually on the back of their head because their mom was drunk every day of her pregnancy).

- She posted the entire set list (including both encores).
Nobody likes a know-it-all, Annie.

- She wrote sooooo many words.
It's not unusual for a review to be lengthy. What is unusual is when the majority of that lengthy review is actually based on the subject being reviewed. Annie, I understand that the name of the blog is 'A to Z,' but was it really necessary to cover everything about the concert from A to Z? To make matters worse, it wasn't even the standard 26-letter, English alphabet, but one of those weird alphabets with about 4,786 distinctive characters.

I can appreciate your enthusiasm (sort-of), Annie, but let's leave the reviews to us professionals. How about we make a deal? You won't write any more reviews, and us critics won't wait in line for hours to buy an album, or attend a concert unless we're on the comp. list. Sound fair?

Since Ms. Zaleski's review wasn't actually a review, it's hard to decide what kind of rating to give Show Review: Radiohead in St. Louis at the Verizon Wireless Amphitheater, May 14. So I'll just give it a 1965 Mustang GT Convertible.