5 Times We Were Wrong
When a hungry young freelancer listens to an album a few times or watches a movie once and churns out a review to meet a tight deadline the result is almost always a definitive masterpiece that will stand the test of time.
That’s true of pretty much every piece that has ever run here at Nathan Rabin’s Happy Place, even the ones filled with grammatical and factual errors. We almost always achieve timeless perfection but in the spirit of honesty and accountability we must confess that over the course of this site’s five years of existence we have been wrong exactly five times.
Think of Nathan Rabin’s Happy Place as a penthouse in Manhattan made entirely of glistening diamonds corrupted only by the overpowering stench of five giant piles of steaming horse feces.
The time has come for us to publicly shame the monsters responsible for the five incorrect articles that have brought humiliation upon this website. And by “monsters” we mean “poorly paid freelancers who have done nothing to deserve being treated so shabbily by their ostensible coworkers, colleagues and bosses.”
We must now ask ourselves why these errors were committed. Is it because the writers involved were drunk and/or high when they wrote their pieces? Probably. Or was it more a matter of them being both a bad writer and a bad person? That also is undoubtedly true. Or were they bribed by our enemies and competitors to deliberately sabotage the site with incorrect takes and inaccurate opinions? The answer to that is also yes.
Could it also be a matter that the writers of the incorrect articles were just too damn horny thinking about boobs and butts and french kissing to do their job correctly? That’s probably the case as well.
Pity the wretched souls who wrote these pieces but do not hate them because in some ways they are as human, and consequently as worthy of love and understanding, as you and I are. They just did something horrible and unforgivable and must now face the consequences for their actions.
If you see any of the writers mentioned in this piece on the street, feel free to punch them hard. It’s what they deserve.
With that in mind, here are the five times in five years that we’ve been wrong.
5. Repeatedly implying that Harry Styles is D.B. Cooper
Erratic contributor Nathan Rabin was a big fan of all three of the solo albums Styles released following the dissolution of One Direction. But his overwrought, frequently misspelt words of praise didn’t make anywhere near as much of an impression as his stubborn insistence that the gender-bending pop star and actor is secretly notorious sky-jacker D.B. Cooper.
We would like to formally apologize for sentences like, “Styles takes a lot of creative leaps on Harry’s House, just like he did when he leaped out of an airplane with a suitcase somewhere over Southwestern Washington with only a parachute and a bag containing two hundred thousand dollars in unmarked bills” and “Styles has caught a lot of breaks as an artist and a man, like when he successful sky-jacked a Northwest Orient Airlines airplane and parachuted to freedom, never to be identified or apprehended.”
Styles wasn’t even born until 1994, roughly twenty three years after the D.B. Cooper incident. It would literally be impossible for him to be Cooper so we would like to once again say we’re sorry to Styles and his fans, and, for good measure, D.B. Cooper as well.
4. Calling Kevin Federline the greatest rapper of all time.
When Nathan Rabin pitched an article positing Kevin Federline as the greatest rapper of all time we thought he was doing one of his weird little conceptual comedy pieces that sometimes do okay.
We had no idea that he would turn in a feverish, 70 page, disturbingly sincere essay with a lengthy section in which respected rappers soils themselves rather than risk being destroyed in a rap battle by Britney Spears’ ex-husband.
Not as good as K-Fed in at least one lunatic’s mind!
To be perfectly honest, the section on Jay-Z shitting himself with fear at the mere idea of going toe to toe with Federline was so long, detailed and just plain weird that we started to think that he has some bizarre kink involving rappers and bodily fluids.
He confirmed that this was true and showed us some images on his phone that we’re going to have a hard time purging from our memory. We would part ways with Rabin but he is, sadly, our only writer. Nathan Rabin’s Happy Place would truly be a Happy Place if only it weren’t for Nathan Rabin but we’re kind of stuck with him at this point.
3. Giving Joker a bad review just because it’s terrible
Nathan Rabin gave Joker a very negative review because he hated it with every fiber of his being and found it not just bad but repulsive on multiple levels.
It made over a billion dollars, got largely glowing reviews and won star Joaquin Phoenix an Academy Award for Best Actor, however, so clearly Rabin was wrong and should be shunned by society and made a pariah for the way he did Joker dirty.
2. Thinking Cats was a documentary
This one is honestly a little inexplicable. In his rave review of the infamous 2019 flop Cats a clearly intoxicated Rabin refers to the musical as a “wake up call to the world” about the plight of street cats in England as well as a “powerful shot of truth” and “the most powerful and important documentary since Waiting for Superman.”
Cats was marketed as a fiction film. It has elaborate sets and costumes. Cats sing in it for the love of God. There are no people in it. Yet the extremely fallible Rabin nevertheless thought it was a documentary. What can we say? The man has problems.
1. Pretty much any time our review deviated greatly from the critical or popular consensus on a major album or movie
What we’d like to do to that Nathan Rabin asshole for ruining Nathan Rabin’s Happy Place with his incorrect opinions and wrong takes.
Sometimes we’ve given middling or even negative reviews to albums that are widely acclaimed in the moment or widely heralded as masterpieces over time. And sometimes we’ve given glowing reviews to albums or movies that are widely mocked and derided. Why? Because our writers are bad and wrong and there’s something screwy going on inside their heads. Look, we apologized. It’ll never happen again, okay?
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