Lyrical Assassin: “For a music critic, being immortalized in song could be the highest compliment…unless the song is a death threat.”
Music critic Michael Azerrad gets the sort of publicity every critic secretly craves. Until it happens (at least in this fashion). (Some interesting mentions in this piece as well of songs I had no idea existed, about Gina Arnold, Ira Robbins, and… Robert Hilburn?)
RockCritics.com 
“Secretly?” I am continuously appalled by our culture’s ability to churn out attention-seekers without notable talent of any sort. It’s not entirely their fault, as talentless people often get really fucking famous for doing basically nothing at all, but it’s particularly amazing from those who profess to make their living from talking about the legitimately creative endeavors of others. Michael Azerrad is a pretty good writer, but not an especially good one. He wrote a good book about a lot of our favorite bands, but has spent the time since… doing what exactly of note?
I’m not naive enough to say that all music is good music, or that there’s no creativity involved in “criticism,” but the endless need to celebrate ourselves for the banal has just pushed me too far. Who fucking cares? Go read a book that’s not about Dylan. Cook a really nice meal without a Miles Davis record you don’t actually understand playing in the background. Watch football. Just knock off this solipsism masquerading intellectual self-reflexivity.
FYI – You can hear the Tubelord song, “I Am Azerrad” at their MySpace page: http://www.myspace.com/tubelord
I didn’t read that piece as attention-seeking — something weird happened to the guy and he wrote an entertaining piece about it. I don’t see any deeper, ulterior motive to it. Besides being droll, the piece actually makes an interesting point about the nature of celebrity in the digital age. And he’s not celebrating himself for something “banal” — since when is it banal to have a rock band putting out a single with your name on it? If you ask me, that’s a pretty weird thing to happen and I’m interested in hearing what it’s like, especially when they say they want to kill you. As far as what Azerrad has done since the essential Our Band Could Be Your Life, that’s simply not relevant to a discussion of the quality of the piece he wrote. Besides, the fact that a band wrote a song about him surely indicates some sort of enduring worth to his work and career.