What does Sup Forums think of Jethro Tull?

What does Sup Forums think of Jethro Tull?

>Not animal collect
total pleb garbage

Good early album's every thing after tatb is meh.

Jethro Tull is coming to Pori Jazz festival next summer and im pretty hyped to see them.

Good luck. Ian's voice has been shot since the early 80s.

...

>biggest hit was a song about a homeless dude checking out little girls in the park

This Was [Reprise, 1969]

Ringmaster Ian Anderson has come up with a unique concept that combines the worst of Arthur Brown, Roland Kirk, and your nearest G.O. blues band. I find his success very depressing. C-

Stand Up [Reprise, 1969]

Fans of the group claim it's a great album. I am not a fan of the group. I think it is an adequate album. B-

Benefit [Reprise, 1970]

Ian Anderson does admittedly have one great gift--he knows how to deploy riffs. Nearly every track on this album is constructed around a good one, sometimes two, and after a couple of listens, you'll have practically the entire thing memorized. But I defy you to recall any lyrics. For all his careful en-un-ci-ation and attention to wordcraft, Anderson creates the impression that he can't or won't care about his theme, which I take to be love/peace/friendship or something of that nature. The verbiage isn't especially obscure, but it does make it very hard to concentrate. I'm sure I hear at least one satirical exegesis on the generation gap, though. B-

Aqualung [Reprise, 1971]

Ian Anderson is like the town free thinker. As long as you're stuck in the same town yourself, his inchoate cultural interests and skeptical views on religion and human behavior are refreshing, but meet up with him in the city and he can turn out to be a real bore. Of course, he can also turn out to be Bob Dylan--it all depends on whether he rejected provincial values out of a thirst for more or out of a reflexive (maybe even somatic) negativism. And on whether he was pretentious only because he didn't know any better. C+

Thick as a Brick [Reprise, 1972]

Ian Anderson is the type of guy who'll tell you on one album that a whole side is one theme and then tell you on the next that the whole album is one song. The usual shit--rock (getting heavier), folk (getting feyer), classical (getting schlockier), flute (getting better because it has no choice), words. C-

Everything Rocks and Nothing Ever Dies [1990s]

Sup Forums hates prog aside from King Crimson. There was a prog thread a while ago and it was the most pathetic thing I've ever seen.

They hate because Christgau told them to hate. :^)

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early shit is gooooooood shit

Tull fan here, they're pretty hit and miss at times, but usually worth it if you're listening to the main albums

I luv aqualung, seem to remember liking TAAB but need to give it more listens

They had a billion albums and were relevant well into the 80s, but obviously the early 70s was their artistic heyday.

Anyone else glad we live in 2017 and not the 1970s where the only source of info on an album was Christgau's proto-shitposting blogs?

why did he hate prog rock so much?

All critics hated prog.

Christgau also wrote a lengthy column about how he attended a Jethro Tull concert and it was extremely depressing to hear a guy whine about society and organized religion for three hours, and he'd rather see the Rolling Stones who at least know how to have fun.

I love everything they put out after This Was up to Stormwatch. Folk rock was never better IMO.

Wait, doesn't his pwecious punk rock do that all the time? Or does he only like the non-political pop punk stuff like Ramones and New York Dolls.

Ian Anderson was a huge admirer of Frank Zappa and apparently decided to be the British version of him.

It's not socialist and anti-establishment enough. "Rock and roll" was to the fifties as punk was to the eighties, and a lot of those, especially Americans, who loved that rebelliousness hated to see it become an "establishment" genre.

Personally, I think there was also a deeper reason for music critics' distrust of Prog, and we see it nowadays as well: technical music written by competent musicians cannot be over-praised, because if the music-buying public ever developed a taste for it, it would require music critics who actually knew what they were talking about, as neo-classical and jazz critics do. The likes of Christgau never thought it relevant to learning anything about music theory, they just like to talk about "vitality" and "immediacy" and "energy" and other completely meaningless buzzwords. He even criticised ELP's Pictures at an Exhibition for being undanceable, for Christ(gau)'s sake. This is the milieu of the postwar music critic: uncomplicated music that does not expose the fact that they are complete know-nothing charlatans, who know no more about music than the must uneducated listener.

Thick as a Brick is a good album

Didn't help that Rush were fans of Ayn Rand.

FWIW Christgau does like jazz, but he said he's never written much about it because he doesn't know enough about music theory or composition to be able to say anything intelligent about the stuff.

I think the problem with prog is that it kind of tried to take over the demographic niche occupied by jazz in the 50s-60s, but it was too cheesy and cartoony for anyone to take the stuff seriously. Miles Davis et al considered their music abstract art, they didn't have tons of campy wizards and elves crap in it.

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>I think the problem with prog is that it kind of tried to take over the demographic niche occupied by jazz in the 50s-60s, but it was too cheesy and cartoony for anyone to take the stuff seriously. Miles Davis et al considered their music abstract art, they didn't have tons of campy wizards and elves crap in it.

This is a popular opinion, but I'm not sure I subscribe to it. Firstly, a lot of people *did* take prog seriously, especially from about 1969-74 (the years before Fripp broke up KC, basically). The elves and wizards stuff is a bit exaggerated by eighties folklore, in my view, as it was only really a small subset of prog-groups that ever did that stuff, and even then mostly as a parody, as music to get stoned to, or just generally as a low-effort, me-too attempt to cash in on prog. The likes of Yes, Genesis and ELP may have had abstract lyrics, but they always had something to say about feelings, beliefs or ideas, they weren't just noodling on about Tolkien-like fantasy (although I concede that there are exceptions to this, probably most notably Camel's Mirage and Caravan's In The Land of Grey and Pink.) Then you have the more vicious groups like King Crimson and Van der Graaf Generator, who conceptually occupied a very similar space to period Miles Davis (Bitches Brew) and jazz-fusion like the Mahavishnu Orchestra (Birds of Fire). If I compare the two albums I just mentioned to Larks' Tongues in Aspic or Pawn Hearts, I don't accept the argument that the prog works are musically or conceptually inferior. I accept that there are those of that opinion, however.

In my view, prog wasn't killed by punk per se, but by a slowing in the development of new musical instruments and production techniques (mellotron, vibraphone, moog, etc), as well as a growing personal animosity and running out of ideas from prog's protagonists, who after all had in some cases developed several innovative albums and didn't have the creativity to keep doing so.

Prog died out because it was expensive and record labels wanted to cut costs.

A much under-appreciated point.

By contrast, punk can be made with almost no capital investment at all, apart from in marketing.

Yes. When punk started happening, record labels quickly jumped on that shit because it was fresh and marketable, and it was also cheap. During 1977 (the so-called Summer of Punk), they were rushing to sign as many punk bands as they could.

This was more of a thing in the UK than the US I should add because Britain's smaller economy had less money to go around and the country was in a financial mess in the late 70s, so record labels were eager to dump all those costly prog bands. Most of the US music scene continued to be dominated by stadium rock.

Good opinions m8, couldn't have said it better myself.

ok

My fav prog band.
Their best album is A Passion Play, prove me wrong, plebs.