While the Beatles were singing "la-la yeah-yeah"...

>While the Beatles were singing "la-la yeah-yeah", the Monks (self-proclaimed "anti-Beatles") scared crowds of well-behaved kids with Drunken Maria, I Hate You, Shut Up, Complication.

LA LA YEAH YEAH
YEAH YEAH YEEEAAAH

I don't know if Scaruffi actually said this(which wouldn't surprise me, given how much shit he spills), but The Monks never claimed to be "anti-Beatles", they were just designed that way, with the haircuts and the clothes and all.

The fact that so many books still name the Beatles as "the greatest or most significant or most influential" rock band ever only tells you how far rock music still is from becoming a serious art. Jazz critics have long recognized that the greatest jazz musicians of all times are Duke Ellington and John Coltrane, who were not the most famous or richest or best sellers of their times, let alone of all times. Classical critics rank the highly controversial Beethoven over classical musicians who were highly popular in courts around Europe. Rock critics are still blinded by commercial success. The Beatles sold more than anyone else (not true, by the way), therefore they must have been the greatest. Jazz critics grow up listening to a lot of jazz music of the past, classical critics grow up listening to a lot of classical music of the past. Rock critics are often totally ignorant of the rock music of the past, they barely know the best sellers. No wonder they will think that the Beatles did anything worthy of being saved.

the monkees don't write their own songs

Good thing this is a thread for the Monks

reeling em in

Best meme of all time.

They have turned me into some kind of Internet celebrity not because of the 6,000 bios that i have written, not because of the 800-page book that i published, not because of the 30 years of cultural events that i organized, but simply because i downplayed the artistic merits of the Beatles, an action that they consider as disgraceful as the 2001 terrorist attacks.

aren't they the same thing?

yes

Yeah but The Beatles were playing fast paced raucous, preludin fueled rock and roll all night long in sleazy German clubs years before The Monks were even a thing.

Scarruffi is so full of shit.

>Scarruffi is so full of shit.
Exactly

Scaruffi turned plebeian taste into the essence of his reviews. All great phenomena of popular music criticism, from Hector Berlioz, to Anthony Fandango, had been, first and foremost, objectively wrong phenomena (just like Christgau before them); however, Scaruffi turned that into an art of its own. With Scaruffi the science of having a shit taste in music becomes art; art and complete rancid opinions on music become one. There were patricians who had proclaimed this theory in rebellious terms. Scaruffi was, in many ways, the heir, no matter how perverted, of Roger Eberts's hot opinions and of the shitty music of the 1960s. He adopted some of the most sensible forms of music criticism and turned them upside down to make them precisely what they had been designed to fight: An embarassing shitshow from one end to another.

Scaruffi was a protagonist of his times, although a poor reviewer: to say that Scaruffi is a music critic is like saying that Rolling Stone is a website for music journalism (a fact that is technically true, but misleading). Scaruffi embodies the quintessence of shit taste, raises futulity to paradigm, focuses on the phenomenon rather than the content, makes irrelevant the relevant, and, thus, is the epitome of everything that went wrong with music criticism.

I wish Burger was my mayor

David Bowie is overrated

You aren't even overrated, you're just ignored. What's worst?

why doesn't Mark Prindle ever get any love, let alone this level of analysis.

Guy has best taste in rock music

y do blank monk time and the white album have such similar album art?

Seriously, not to mention that even the same year Black Monk Time was released The Beatles were scaring teenagers with psychedelic droning about the Tibetan book of the dead.

I just don't get Scaruffi's deal at all. The Monks were a really cool band, especially for their time, but that doesn't mean you have to use them to shit on whatever the popular alternative was, especially when it's barely even founded on anything.

that's just a new orchestration of scaruffi's david bowie overture