bear. Let's be blunt. It is a pretentious magazine." In 1999, The Wire was mocked in "The Rock Critical List", an anonymous zine distributed to newspapers and magazines that ridiculed a number of music journalists, critics and editors. The writer of "The Rock Critical List" had this to say about The Wire: Others within the avant-garde music scene have also criticised The Wire. For example Ben Watson, who has contributed to The Wire himself, critiqued the magazine's editorial approach to covering noise music. In Watson's view, the magazine has had a tendency to treat noise musicians' work as "so worthy, alternative and dis-corporate" that virtually all of it must be inherently meritorious. This tendency results in an institutional reluctance to distinguish between good noise music and mere noise, along with an excess of positive, yet shallow, reviews. Rather than delving deeper into the genre's radical political dimensions, Watson argued, The Wire has instead curated its noise coverage based on superficial trends of underground fashionability; he suggested that the writing may sometimes provide "a clue as to how some new crew of hopeless hairy Stateside noisemaker muffins have been selected: 'Thurston says they're okay...'." The magazine's writing on noise came to rely on a style of "descriptive objectivity" that studiously avoids any actual evaluation of quality; as Watson wrote, Watson also recalled bristling at Herrington's suggestion to "think niche" when writing for the magazine, which he took as an anti-universalist and commercially motivated attitude. In a 2007 interview, Herrington addressed the magazine's reputation for pondering music that he joked might "sound like a steamroller running over a broken fax machine", saying: "Most people would take the mickey out of some bloke making music by bowing away at the femur of a mountain goat, but we'll give them the benefit of the doubt." Live events Books There are multiple books based on material first published in The Wire. Invisible Jukebox(1998), published by Quartet Books, collected entries from the recurring feature of the same name. For these features, an interviewer plays several pieces of music for a musician without identifying them, usually selecting tracks that the musician would be expected to know. The musician is challenged to guess the artist and title, as well as to comment on the music. Undercurrents: The Hidden Wiring of Modern Music(2002) was published by Continuum as part of the magazine's 20th anniversary; it collected a mix of