Twitter Record Reviews

Christopher Weingarten is a music critic who has worked for some of the heavy hitters of music journalism like Rolling Stone, The Village Voice, and Revolver just to name a few.  In 2009, in a speech at the 140 Characters Conference (a gathering to "provide a platform for the worldwide twitter community to: listen, connect, share and engage with each other, while collectively exploring the effects of the emerging real-time internet on business") Weingarten discussed his new project.

For all of 2009, he would review 1,000 albums as twitter posts, i.e. in 140 characters or less which everyone can follow @1000TimesYes.  He then went on to bemoan the state of music criticism in this age of the internet and bloggers and leaked albums and lots of other things in a expletive laced rant which I don't really agree with as a whole, but he makes some good points.

The interesting part for me was the idea to say something meaningful, insightful and essential about a full album of music in just 140 characters (that includes punctuation, spaces, etc. and you've gotta get the band name and album in there).

So inspired by his example, and giving credit to his idea, I'm gonna try a few of these out which will be posted and tweeted shortly.  I'm going to call them 140 Character Record Reviews so look out for that title.  Try out one of your own on a record you know well and see how satisfied you are with the results.

Check out Weingarten's full speech below.