Is he right that metal is self-indulgent, escapist trash for edgy teens?

Is he right that metal is self-indulgent, escapist trash for edgy teens?

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Also neckbearded adults

a lot of it is, but you could replace "edgy" with another word and get an accurate statement about any genre you wanted

What's actually wrong with escapism?

That's not what he said about metal at all.

And his pwecious punk rock isn't?

So cute, I love this cat. Thank you

>music about social justice and other current, important real world issues
yeah no

self-indulgent, escapist trash

is this somehow unique to metal?

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metal is the least form of that, I mean, it's the most noisy, it breaks immersion alot. it's raw sounding, it's sound stems from analog recording practices.

Reminder that Christgau rates artists based on what he thinks their sex life is like.

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>social justice
>important real world issue
Good one.

yes

at this point, death metal is the only genre of music that hasn't sold out

modern death metal is basically hair metal.

it sucks

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He did write a column I found kind of interesting where he talks about metal's origins and that it came out of 60s psych rock with its emphasis on fantasy imagery and lengthy instrumental passages.

One gets the impression that Christgau never entirely accepted the transition of rock in the late 60s from the singles format to AOR. He said once that he'd rather have more Little Richards and less Jefferson Airplanes.

Yeah and he also has a disliking of European rock unless it's an Americaboo band like the Rolling Stones.

I think prog is probably more self indulgent, but he can't get enough of that noise

Christgau did kind of respect Pink Floyd, I agree that some prog bands like ELP pretty much contained everything about the genre he couldn't stand.

Roger Waters is by far the most self indulgent man to walk the planet

ELP are bad though. I saw some concert footage of them from the 70s and it was just everyone in the band trying to play the most complicated stuff they could all at the same time. There was no music in there at all, just incoherent noise.

Their albums are almost mostly just a masturbatory exercise in showing off how many time signatures and whatnot they can fit into one track. I may not always agree with Christgau, but he sure nailed it with ELP.

>self indulgent
Critic tongue for "ambitious and impressive so it intimidates me - a failed musician who hates good musicians".

>escapist
A complaint lodged at art that reflects a world different from the one the complainant believes himself to inhabit. Therefore - the complaint of the narrow minded. And, if a work of art is indeed removed from "the world" whatever it actually is, what's wrong with that?

>trash
Some of every genre is trash. Some is not.

>Critic tongue for "ambitious and impressive so it intimidates me - a failed musician who hates good musicians".
Yeah you do have to realize that critics don't like musicians who are smarter than themselves.

Escapism meaning the fantasy imagery of metal and prog. Critics think this is fluff to distract the listener from social realities. It's why Bruce Springsteen met their approval but Iron Maiden didn't.

He was also right about 70s buttrock trash like Foreigner and Doobie Brothers.

Those bands sold infinitely more albums than whatever punk rock he worships.

>quantity=quality
How cute. Those bands aren't respected by anyone with any serious interest in music, they were just there for white trash teens to have sex to in the late 70s. But oh well, county fairs wouldn't be the same without them.

>Critics think this is fluff to distract the listener from social realities
I know that's the critique they make. It's stupid. Firstly, most fantasy and mystical content in metal is very direct metaphor addressing the broad theme of human evil - the central fact underlying the "social realities" these university milquetoasts are so obsessed with. Fantasy in general, in music, literature, and other media, is almost always (I say "almost" because surely there are counter-examples, though I can't think of any) an allegorical, metaphorical, or otherwise symbolically laden lens through which to view the realities of human existence. We are human after all - how could it be anything else?

Secondly, why should music have to address "social realities" in the first place? Why is this one theme so important that there being any music that doesn't directly address this theme is somehow a problem? It's an emotionally and spiritually impoverished, Marxist, totalitarian view of art - that the deepest level of analysis is social structure and that therefore good art must be about social structure. A view that, once again, stems from the fact that critics are largely bitter, University English department failures.

>Secondly, why should music have to address "social realities" in the first place? Why is this one theme so important that there being any music that doesn't directly address this theme is somehow a problem? It's an emotionally and spiritually impoverished, Marxist, totalitarian view of art - that the deepest level of analysis is social structure and that therefore good art must be about social structure. A view that, once again, stems from the fact that critics are largely bitter, University English department failures.
You mean the Maoist "art and literature must serve politics" belief.

>Critic tongue for "ambitious and impressive so it intimidates me - a failed musician who hates good musicians".
christgay like henry cow, tho. he just considers most metal and prog to be pseudo virtuosic, regressive (from the songwriting perspective) trash.

>christgay like henry cow, tho. he just considers most metal and prog to be pseudo virtuosic, regressive (from the songwriting perspective) trash.

Metal relies heavily on instruments to get the message of the song across. Unfortunately you can't write about sounds that well, so critics can't handle music that's not primarily lyrics-driven.

Metal never got any respect. You see niggers whining about not getting a grammy because muh racism for their shitty rap garbage.


Have you ever seen metal be taken seriously by normie cucks?

Everything about metal is a giant fuck you and spit in the face to normal fags and their garbage pop music.

Metal is like some sort of hidden cult that survives on the outskirts of the music industry and has escaped assimilation into pop music many times.

I hate Christgau because even if he's talking about an album I hate I feel like he never properly explains why it's bad and instead tries obfuscate his substanceless opinion with fancy prose and punchy remarks. I never feel like I gained any understanding of an album by reading his opinion of it

>Critics think this is fluff to distract the listener from social realities

do you even thrash metal son?

Metallica literally made a music video about the futility of war about a guy who gets all his limbs blown off

youtube.com/watch?v=WM8bTdBs-cw

Merriweather Post Pavilion [Domino, 2009]
Sunny down snuff they're all right with the heroes and villains ("My Girls," "Brother Sport"). *

What did he mean by this?

Metal is a genre that's strongly rooted in romanticism, but the types of music that critics tend to like are things like New Wave that have snarky, post-modernist, self-aware lyrics. And to be honest, I've never especially liked bands like Devo because they come across to me like a 12 year old who thinks he's a riot because he says a four letter word.

i literally said that he likes henry cow, that includes Unrest too.

I think Christgau just can't overcome his tired 1960s belief that music has no artistic validity unless it accompanies some kind of political activism.

Homogenic [Elektra, 1997]
she organizes freedom--how Scandinavian of her ("Joga," "Bachelorette") **

What did he mean by THIS

Queen II [Elektra, 1974]
Wimpoid royaloid heavoid android void. C-

WHAT DOES IT MEAN

i read a review once describing animal collective as the beach boys after the earths been destroyed by global warming

anco are beach boys ripoffs basically

ydr christgau at least praised The Mighty Fall only for that i respect him

WHy would you ever respect a music critic, even if his views are correct? Unkle Adam's critique of Fantano was correct and applies to all critics - they're bottom feeders. They're bitter little cretins fighting over the scraps left by someone else's genuine act of creation.

christgau, scaruffi, everett true, simon reynolds i guess are good critics and far better then fantano and shitfork imho. they have a good writting, i don't agree with them in all obviously but at least i apreciate when they praise groups that i like

I know this isn't going to be hugely popular here but come on, Fantano is better than Christgau
He's more open-minded, and at the very least he can describe what music sounds like instead of publishing buzzword haikus as "reviews"

Critics are parasites who contribute nothing. The greatest possible achievement of a music critic is liking something that's actually good or disliking something that's actually bad, a feat achieved many times over by every single music listener in history.

fuck id already forgotten about unk

His metal reviews are generally pretty on point when he bothers doing them instead of this constant hip-hop tirade he seems intent on.

>Fantano is better than Christgau
kek, christgau have a wider musical spectre. fantano is a joke, the guy is into flavor of the month releases. i'm not a christgau fag but i can see that

Thisx100
>nigger:racism is bad
>normies:woah this is art

He's a critic. One of the most socially corrupt, self perpetuating, pointless things in existence (next to hairdressers), who cares what he thinks. He probably got called "4 eyes faggot" too much in highschool and now he bitches professionally for a living.

this but unironically also stealing your opinion and repeating it in real life to seem witty

>Everything about metal is a giant fuck you and spit in the face to normal fags and their garbage pop music.
lmao

>Metal is like some sort of hidden cult that survives on the outskirts of the music industry and has escaped assimilation into pop music many times.

l m a o

Self indulgence, escapism and edginess. Three of the reasons I love metal so much.

>pretending any of this is bad

You have to be delusional if you think that metal is still outsider and rebelious. There are plenty of metal fans all around the world and many festivals have lineups of exclusively metal artists. Albeit it's not as popular as hip hop or pop/rock it still has an inmense following.

This was a bait post right? I don't believe anyone to be this delusional.

Because the Ramones and the New York Dolls talked about some real hard hitting topics right?

Got some quotes? Christgau's pretty entertaining.

>all music genres and styles that I don't like have SOLD OUT
You're a teenager, aren't you? And of course death metal can't sell out, it doesn't stand for anything, how the fuck is it going to sell out what it stands for? Punk can sell out, because it was founded on criticizing aspects of culture, and "sells out" if it stops doing that for the sake of success.

You can sell out by simplifying your music you utter cretin

No, that's something completely different.

>self-indulgent

What's the antonym for "indulgent" anyway...

>inconsiderate
>intolerant
>mean
>abstaining
>moderate
>strict
>tempering

Half bigot, half puritan.
or maybe...
Not (((challenging))) enough?

These faggots peddle literal memes.
IT DOESN'T MEAN SHIT

Well death,doom and grindcore

Self-Indulgence in music comes from playing repetitive music that doesn't really say anything that's also often put into a guise of being complex. Something not self-indulgent would be the ridiculously complex harmonic progressions of a group like Steely Dan or the rhythms of an album like Trout Mask Replica. Self-indulgence in music is metal spending way too long on each track to develop riffs for absolutely no communicative reason or prog doing the same thing also for no communicative reason other than to look cool (no, your shitty concept album's story isn't moved forward by filler noodling.) A lot of that waste of time is justified by musicians of these genres as applying classical music structures, but their music has none of the depth of classical music to even justify using such structures.

I think the easiest evidence for the genre being escapist trash is when you go to practically any place on the internet that discusses metal in some way. The sheer amount of LARPing on display is embarrassing. At this point it's not even about muh fantasy lyrics or the lack of real life evocation from the music; but it's the listeners themselves that also tend to be divorced from reality.

I disagree that it's for edgy teenagers, because it's for edgy manchildren as well. Hell, technically edgy is not even the right word for it, that describes groups like The Velvet Underground or Whitehouse, tryhard is more like it. This can manifest in very many ways, too from embarrassing outdated fashion to spamming soy memes on a Mongolian basket weaving forum.

Christgau can often miss the mark. I dont even think that he thinks Crank Dat Soulja Boy is that good now. But when it comes to metal he hits the mark perfectly.

Is this a joke? Do you not hear the overproduced shit that gets peddled on the likes of Nuclear Blast or Earache?

Because album oriented music isn't actually that good, although idk if that's what Christgau was going for. Most artists, including even the greats like Beatles, wrote top tier songs in between a sea of mediocre shit. But we would call those albums classics because albums were the main format of selling music and the only way to listen to those brilliant songs. That problem doesn't exist anymore and album worship needs to die cuz of it.

That's one of the reasons why Metallica got decent amount of love from critics relative to other metal bands.

m.youtube.com/watch?v=3lDUQo8Rns0

Being relatively to physically play doesn't necessitate complexity nor depth. Which is the point I was trying to make; this is very much self-indulgence. The frontman had a hard life though and I can respect that but that's as far as I go.

>escapism in music
>bad

is this that dumb nigga that rates shit with emojis?

>(((Steely Schlong)))

4deep4UsGoyimses

laweekly.com/music/steely-dan-fans-are-assholes-2404599

>Let us tell you: Listening to the Dan is akin to reading novel. You need a liberal arts degree to get it. Trust me, kids, it's not that you don't like Steely Dan, it's that you don't get it. It requires some formal humanities training to truly grasp the brilliance of a mellotron solo in the middle of a song about nuclear genocide. The lyrical nuances of a song like "Everyone's Gone To The Movies" are easily lost when you haven't spent four years critically analyzing texts. Yep, Katy Lied is a lot closer to Ulysses than Exile On Main Street.

>There I go again. Oh, and in case you didn't get it from the title of this post, Danfans are, by and large, insufferable pricks. But it shouldn't be surprising that Steely Dan have the world's most arrogant, elitist assholes for a fan base. New York beatniks who moved to Los Angeles, the Dan hated hippies and loved cocaine, dark sarcasm and subtle wordplay.

>So yes, despite protests to the contrary, Danfans are following in the footsteps of their rock heroes. It's just that the essence of the Dan isn't a ripped t-shirt or a haircut, it's self-conscious, middle-class hipsterism of the pre-emo type. It's an alcoholic saxophone player sleeping off a coke hangover in the trunk of his Cadillac, dreaming about what it would be like if he'd made it.

Sure, but that only really puts escapist music on the level of other escapist stuff like trash TV/reality TV or a book like Twilight or a film like Transformers. Fun in some ways but ultimate insignificant.

what about this my man
youtube.com/watch?v=kvXR9ZRJuq0

Literally all music is escapist though

>being this triggered he can't into harmony so he targets the fans
Lmao imagine being this bitter of a loser through your life.

You're describing industrial not metal

Look up what the word "escapism" means.

"escapist" could only really be applied to power metal though

>Fantasy in general, in music, literature, and other media, is almost always ... an allegorical, metaphorical, or otherwise symbolically laden lens through which to view the realities of human existence
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>I cordially dislike allegory in all its manifestations, and always have done so since I grew old and wary enough to detect its presence. I much prefer history, true or feigned, with its varied applicability to the thought and experience of readers. I think that many confuse 'applicability' with 'allegory'; but the one resides in the freedom of the reader, and the other in the purposed domination of the author.
>J. R. R. Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings, Foreword to the Second Edition (October 1966)

The piano bit was rather pointless I am not sure what they were trying to achieve, it certainly wasn't brilliant piano playing. Admittedly that initial part when the intstruments all first come through is promising, only for most of the rest of the track to go back to typical boring metal riffing within a similar structure that doesn't really help evoke anything. Gorguts have done some very interesting things, but they are severely limited by having the pressure to have to still be a metal band.

the idea that anything is "for" any particular group is antithetical to art

metal is edgy and self-indulgent and that's what makes it good

Even if power metal is a lot of the time set in a fantasy setting, it's almost always loaded with metaphors pertaining to reality. Most common theme of the genre is a man finding his inner strength and defeating his inner demons.

The riffs in that track hit hard af though m8 what u mean? Mosh-inducing af

youtube.com/watch?v=OffF0e2h4TU

>metal is edgy and self-indulgent and that's what makes it good
But that desire to be edgy because it's cool and admire that self-indulgence because the listener puts themselves into the spot of the musician is ultimately something signifying immaturity as younger people are likely to not only be edgy cuz it's cool but also not feel comfortable with being themselves so they put themselves into the musician's space (thus LARPing.) This along with metal being so ubiquitous that it's "develop heavy distortion guitar riff" regardless of genre doesn't really do the genre favors from any particular perspective.
This would be great if the genre's approach to it all didn't feel utterly divorced from reality where it's got an almost uncanny valley fake levels of positivity like the Ellen Degeneres show levels of it.
I have been to enough shows in my life to be able to comfortably say that it's rarely the fast bits that are mosh inducing, but the slower heavier parts.

mfw 10:34

To be fair, New wave was great.

>steely dan
OH NO NO NO NO NO NO

AHAHHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHHAHAHAH