There may be somebody reading this who doesn’t know what a one-sheet is. I don’t imagine it’d make one bit of difference in the grand scheme of things if a person went from cradle to grave without knowing about one-sheets, but in case anybody’s curious, they’re introductory essays that come in the mail along with the promotional copis of albums sent to music critics for review and to radio stations for airplay. I don’t read one-sheets, or I try not to, anyhow. They are generally very poorly written, and you can’t trust anything they say, since their whole raison d’etre is to “help” the people who read them to know what to think about the records the one-sheet is promoting. While they sometimes have some useful information (where a band’s from, how long they’ve been around, the names of the musicians, maybe a discography), the bulk of their content usually consists of florid pronouncements on the “importance” of the record that “you now hold in your hands.” Scientific studies have shown that seventy-five percent of all one-sheets contain the phrase “the album you now hold in your hands,” and within that seventy-five percent, fully fifty percent complete that sentence by claiming that “the record you now hold in your hands” is ”like no other record you’ll hear this year” or some variant thereof. It should be obvious from this alone why Last Plane to Jakarta’s manual states in no uncertain terms, right there on the front page of the policies-and-procedures section in bold letters eighteen points high: “First, throw away the one-sheet.”

    
         


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