You piss on the poor music section, and we reward you with a Payback Time T-shirt, two recently released major-label CDs, and two tickets to a Live Nation club show taking place in Vancouver within the next four weeks. Here’s this week’s winning whinge.

Dear Payback Time: What is with the piss-poor quality of writing that seems to dominate the music section of the Straight? First you have the ridiculous thesaurus abuse of Martin Turenne, who in his recent review of the Erykah Badu concert actually uses the phrases “constellation of lustrous tones”, “creeping formlessness”, and “churning conflation”. Then there’s Tara Henley, who refers to records as “wax” in not one but two separate articles in the same issue. It’s time for the Straight to dump these stuck-up, wannabe-hipster hacks and find some real writers who know how to speak intelligently and engagingly about contemporary music.

> Robyn Ludwig

Martin Turenne replies: Dearest Robyn—It’s always nice to hear what frustrated bloggers think of the writing in the Straight, and nicer still to be singled out for special criticism. You can’t imagine the ego boost a critic gets from having his writing—and not just his opinions—scrutinized in public. This must be what it feels like to be Tom Clancy or something. Where have you been all my life, Robyn? Alas, the sad truth is that when I’m writing any article, including the Badu piece, I simply copy someone else’s review of the same artist, paste it into www.pretentiousthesaurus.com/, and publish whatever comes out. So “twinkly sounds” become “a constellation of lustrous tones” and “mishmash” turns into “churning conflation”. Questions of “intelligence” and “engagement” hardly come into play when you’re scrambling to file a review overnight. I need my beauty sleep! But in the clear light of day, it seems to me that the supposedly highfalutin terms I’ve been tossing around so indiscriminately aren’t all that fancy or difficult to understand. I figure that people who pick up the Straight are accustomed to reading far denser and wittier turns of phrase than mine. But if you wish to be “engaged” like a kindergartner, so be it! That’s what our city’s daily newspapers are for.

Robyn Ludwig continues the classically ignorant tradition of refusing to let us know what swag she’d like. You can voice your impotent rage by snail mail or by sending an e-mail to payback@straight.com.