Tyranny of the Twit

There's an old Internet theory which posits that any web review sites will be hindered by twits who for reasons either contrarian or ignorant, will inevitably post bad reviews of great works, meaning the ratings of consensus classics will inevitably be eroded down to about the same average as more mediocre works.

Waxy.org plays on this theme with the Amazon knee-jerk contratrian game, which seeks out the most asinine one-star Amazon.com reviews of acknowledged classics.

A few of my favorites...

Of Miles Davis' Kind of Blue:

"If pretension, tedium, and self-indulgence are your idea of what should animate music, then this is the album and Miles Davis is the 'artist' for you."

Of the Beach Boys' Pet Sounds:

"It's full of bland harmonizing by guys that could barely swim."

Of Bob Dylans' Highway 61 Revisited

"He set the precedent that doomed rock 'n roll to always being a semantic eunuch."

Of John Coltrane's A Love Supreme:

"Nobody will care about the technical achievements of these guys in 100 years."

Of Orson Welles' Citizen Kane

"Please stop the hype on Citizen Kane. It doesn't work. It's like you are trying to convince people that poop smells good."

Of F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby:

"Anyone who is an ancestor to that worthless excuse of an American novelist should be offered sincere consoling and extreme sympathies."

Here are a few I found of my own... Of Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird:

"...about as deep as a rain puddle.""...one of the most overrated and hyped books of our time. It's an uneven paste-job of short stories and pieces by Harper Lee promoted by her liberal New York publishing friends.""I can't say enough negative things about this book. It takes place in the South, shortly after the slaves were freed. It's told from the point of view of an 8-year-old (that alone should tell you how stupid this book is) and is written as she would talk."

Of Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita:

"In my mind Lolita is nothing more than trash wrapped up in a pretty package by a famous writer. People continue to be drawn to it (men mostly, I suspect) by its titillating subject and Nobokov's reputation as a writer. They use the excuse of"good literature" to read a lurid book that they otherwise would be too embarassed to pick up. It provides little else but mental masturbation and is nothing more than an arrogant, self indulgent exercise in language manipulation."

Of Fyodor Dostoyevsky's Crime and Punishment:

"There aren't very many books that I can't finish, and I am a bit embarassed to admit that this was one of them. After I got halfway through the book I determined that it was named Crime and Punishment for a reason. The Crime was him writing the book, and the Punishment was my reading it.""Less enjoyable than a bowl of warm mayonaise."

Of one of my personal favorite movies, Hoosiers:

"This film starts out promisingly with some beautiful photography showing Indiana in the fall. It soon bogs down to repetitious basketball footage and cliche characters going about their wretched lives pointlessly. If you like shots of basketballs bouncing off of backboards, this film might be entertaining. To me, it was like being hit in the face continually with a basketball for the better part of two hours. Oh well, it beats watching the NBA."

Of the movie Cool Hand Luke:

"Let's be honest here - if your teenage kid got drunk and ripped out a bunch of parking meters, wouldn't you think it was a really stupid thing to do ? If he let a bigger kid beat him silly, would you think him heroic, or lacking good judgment ? Would you consider your kid praiseworthy for eating 50 eggs ? So why do these absurd actions make Luke (who is supposedly an adult) such a hero in the eyes of this film's fans ?"

Of The Velvet Underground & Nico:

"I've listened to this album repeatedly, and I just don't like it. Why should I settle for a band with very little musical talent? There are so many other bands that have good songwriting AND talent to spare that I don't see the point of dripping praise upon Andy Warhol. I wonder if anybody has ever compared Velvet Underground to Phish. I think this comparison perfectly demonstrates the difference between bands with opposite levels of talent.""This is one of the worst albums I have ever heard in my life; the singing is horrible and the lyrics are insipid..."

I wonder if this is how Christopher Hitchens got started.