It’s the greatest rock music review ever written. It was put on paper in 1985 by J.D. Considine, a well-known music critic in America. It’s not Considine’s pan of GTR, the self-titled 1986 album from the supergroup led by members of Yes and Genesis. That review, which appeared in the August 1986 issue of Musician, was only three letters. GTR, announced Considine, was “SHT.” The GTR review is, as Ryan Reed put it, “still funnier and more fully realized than most essay-length critiques.”
Still, SHT is not Considine’s masterpiece. That came in 1985 and his two-sentence assessment of Motley Crue’s cover of “Smokin’ in the Boys Room.” Ready?
“They weren’t smokin’ in that boys room. They just went in to take a quick dump.”
More than 40 years later, it still leaves me on the floor. I continue to marvel at its precision. I remember where I was when I first read it in 1985—the bookstore at Catholic University in D.C., where I was perusing a copy of Musician, where it first appeared. The bookstore, the campus, my life receded into the background.
Considine’s masterpiece became a shorthand between my brother and me. We used it as a reference point for years. Whenever we came across a particular cheesy or awful piece of art, lousy TV show, or terrible band, one of us would turn to the other and say it: “They weren’t smokin’ in that boys room.”
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