ABSTRACT
For decades music magazines from Down Beat to Melody Maker have taken the “celebrity record review” as an opportunity to offer its readership a more personal glimpse into the worlds of their favorite artists. Cast as critics, musicians can reinforce the taste hierarchies of the genre(s) to which they most closely belong, or they can use the review platform to reveal an unexpected depth and breadth in their listening habits. Invited by the heavy metal/hard rock magazine Hit Parader in the summer of 1983 to review the latest batch of 7-inch vinyl singles (45s), vocalist Danny Joe Brown (1951-2005) and lead guitarist Dave Hlubek (born 1951) of the southern rock band Molly Hatchet accomplish a little of both. As their brutally blunt comments make clear (it is difficult to imagine such a review being published today), a genre like southern rock or heavy metal is defined as much by exclusion as it is by inclusion. Taken as a whole, the range of music they encounter serves as a reminder that at any given moment rock can consist of an astonishingly diverse array of styles.
