If so, is it just me, or do A-J Charron’s columns rub anyone else the wrong way? Don’t get me wrong, I love Guitarnoise; I think David Hodge is an excellent columnist and his writing is very helpful and endearing. But a lot of A-J’s columns seem to have strong shades of rudeness, arrogance, hostility, narcissism, and occasional paranoia.
For one, he writes constantly about his pet bands, which is fine, but it never seems to stop…and he constantly slams bands he deems unworthy. He made a comment in one column that of Melissa Etheridge, Sheryl Crow, and Alanis Morrisette, only the last has any talent whatsoever. That seems an awfully rude and presumptuous thing to say. And his constant attacks on Celine Dion are annoying…I think most people get the picture by now he doesn’t like her. It feels like 90% of his columns are some sort of bitter sermonizing; which would be fine if it was an Op-Ed and not a songwriting column…and of course, we hear in every column how much he hates ‘mini-vans and suburbia’. Great, now how about some songwriting tips? And then there was this ridiculously paranoid spiel in one column about how making dance music consists of a record company hiring people to make the music, and then hiring actors to play the part of the performers. Now, I agree that in a metaphorical sense, some of the lower-quality ‘entertainers’ might as well be actors (or models, really), but I think his little bit was just plain paranoid.
Yikes, I didn’t mean all that to sound so vituperative. I’m not trying to personally attack the guy in a manner he does to some others, I’m just trying to gauge if anyone else gets that same vibe…
