Magnet's Over/Under: The Over/Under

Just about weekly, Magnet Magazine considers the seminal artists of alternative/underground music and picks five of their more well-known tunes to call Overrated, and five others to call Underrated, in a feature they call the Over/Under (due to the well-known connection between music and gambling). These picks are usually thought-out and well-argued, with what should be more than enough self-directed irony to make the medicine go down, and the invariable effect on the magazine's readership is analogous with pissing in their faces and telling them its raining. Below, the Over/Under on the whole enterprise.

::The Most Overrated Part of the Over/Under Feature
1. The Overrated Songs (Whatever Year This Started)
The essential argument goes like this: the most popular songs of hip artists are rather more liked than they should be, because they obscure other songs through the insidious practice of  -- stay with me now -- being more popular. That such can only be underlied by one of two premises: 1) music fans, a.k.a "sheeple," know fuck-all about what is good; or 2) music critics are confused by the meaning of the word "popular"; is lost on the writers, and they must go to greater and greater apologetics every time they slag a beloved track. The poor fellow who penned the  Nirvana Over/Under, bowed under with the obviousness of putting "Smells Like Teen Spirit" at the top of the Overrated list actually utters the words "What am I supposed to do here?" (I don't know, write something you don't desire mercy for?) Way too much agita derives from these selections, which, as the editors point out, are inherent to the nature of the feature. I mean, it's not like some obscure song that failed to grasp popular imagination but was relentlessly hipped by the music literati could ever be considered overrated.

::The Most Underrated Part of the Over/Under Feature

 1. The Underrated Songs (Yadda, Yadda)
About half of the objections to Over/Unders in the comment section are vengeance upon the writers taking the form of telling them that the songs they offer as better are in fact crap.  A typical example, from the aforementioned Nirvana Over/Under:

And seriously, Marigold? Give me a break. That song was terrible. Why not pick some other totally obscure song that no one ever heard unless you were me at age 16 buying bootlegs for $49.00 from) the local head shop.

This attitude strikes me as wrong for a couple of reasons. For one, obscure and neglected songs are the reason we have music critics. It's the same reason you flip through your friend's record collection. If I didn't occasionally let my one housemate try to turn me on to the Dandy Warhols back in 1999, I never would have rented Dig!, never heard of the Brian Jonestown Massacre, and never would have bought My Bloody Underground upon Filter's recommendation, and would thus not have what has become one of my favorite albums. Turning away knowledge, any knowledge, is inherently stupid and self-defeating. And while nothing is easier for a critic to write than "Hey, check out this deep track!" (except, of course, "your favorite songs suck"), there's also nothing as potentially rewarding to heed.

"King Rat" better than "Dance Hall"? Poser!