If douchebaggery were a good enough reason to ignore someone’s work, then we’d be missing out on an awful lot of music, art, and film, and nobody would be reading Mike Usinger’s columns [“Weiland is truly worthless”, March 27–April 3].

Now we have Usinger’s latest bad-tempered rant, against Scott Weiland—a man who has spent his entire career wearing a “kick me” sign on his ass. It may be true that he is a douchebag. He certainly hasn’t done anything to disprove that on the two occasions I’ve seen him on-stage. But he put on an excellent, entertaining show both times, so in the end, I don’t much care.

I do care, however, that the music press is still churning out the same tired old crap about how bad Stone Temple Pilots were, apparently because nobody in the band actually went and committed suicide like any self-respecting grungehead was supposed to.

As a result, few people have allowed themselves to realize that 1994’s Purple was a finely crafted masterpiece of pop rock that’s still a joy to listen to from start to finish, while 1996’s Tiny Music showed the potential for the band to achieve something truly unique and interesting, which their final two albums never quite lived up to. But even at their worst, STP were good. At their best, they were fantastic—a fact that few in the music press have ever had the honest guts to admit.

> Andrzej Jeziorski / Vancouver