Christgau on Metal

>Interviewer: One of the things I've found fun about your music writing is your idiosyncrasies, the peculiarities of your taste. Why don't you like heavy metal, for example?

>Christgau: Because it's symphonic bombast without the intelligence and complexity, although there's a lot of virtuosity. You know, what can I say — I'm 72 years old. This is not the time for me to start liking really loud guitar solos. That music is so masculine in a really retrograde way; I don't like that at all. It seems to me to have a very 19th-century notion of power.

what did he meant by this?

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Who the fuck takes this hack seriously?

Also check these fuckin' dubs

Christgau has shit taste, this is known. Credit to him for naming "pigfuck" though, I love me some pigfuck.

he doesn't like metal and he feels smug about it for dumb reasons

That you're a dipshit and you should make your own taste and form your own opinions about something.

>In other words, it's for children

Shouldn't 72 be when you resign yourself to liking loud guitar solos?

people who are insecure and need their musical taste validated

can't we just don't talk about this moron

hristgau readily admits to having prejudices and generally disliking genres such as heavy metal,[1] art rock, progressive rock, bluegrass, gospel, Irish folk, and jazz fusion.[36]

>irish folk

come on man, really

>Irish folk
sounds like my granpa.

I don't believe I've heard any Irish folk. What separates it from literally every other kind of folk music?

it's irish

good enough

You've never heard of The Dubliners? Damn man you need to check them out!

>What separates it from literally every other kind of folk music?
Unlike Japanese folk, Irish folk musicians don't play koto and unlike Congolese folk, there isn't particularly prominent use of marimba.

>What separates it from literally every other kind of folk music?
That's like asking what separates rock from western medieval music.
Ireland, like most countries has a complex and varied musical tradition that bares some similarities to other nearby cultures like Scotland but you could literally dedicate your whole life to answering a question like that.

its from Ireland

He's been using the same excuse that he's too old to appreciate metal since he was in his 40s (at least). It's a meme of his as old as the hills. Pay it no heed.

dubs dont lie, metalfags

>as if his pwecious punk isn't equally loud and bombastic

Eh, I've never liked extreme metal of the -core sort. I mean, Hatebreed is just a little too much for me. Most of the oldskool 70s-80s stuff still had a pop sensibility to it and that was seemingly lost in the 90s.

I mean, the guy loved Motorhead and as if Motorhead of all things wasn't loud, bombastic, and had that retrograde sexist machismo he dislikes.

No Remorse [Bronze, 1984]

The critics who used to call Motorhead the worst band in the world had a point, which may be why Lemmy's high-speed metal has now turned into the thinking person's headbang. The stuff is so pure it's almost rarefied: no operatic declamations, no schlocky guitaristics, no satanism or medievalism or sci-fi or sexist s&m. Just aggression, violence, noise. Lemmy doesn't even bellow--his voice is more a hoarse, loud, one-note roar. This tasteful two-disc best-of-plus-four (new and definitive: "Killed By Death") is the first Motorhead product praised by Headheads since No Sleep 'Til Hammersmith, eight of whose eleven songs it includes (the eight best, too). Unless you've got an extra Y chromosone or beat your meat till it bleeds, you likely don't need it on a regular basis. But it'll sure come in handy at those precious moments when you want nothing so much as to smash somebody's face. A-

Orgasmatron [GWR/Profile, 1986]

I admire metal's integrity, brutality, and obsessiveness, but I can't stand its delusions of grandeur--the way it apes and misapprehends reactionary notions of nobility. One thing I like about Lemmy is that he's proud to be a clod, common as muck and dogged in his will to make himself felt as just that. Add that rarest of metal virtues, a sense of humor, which definitely extends to the music's own conventions, as on the lead cut of his first album in three litigation-packed years: yclept "Deaf Forever," a good enough joke right there (especially for Sabbaf fans), it turns out to be a battlefield anthem--about a corpse. And then add Bill Laswell, who was born to make megalomania signify: where most metal production gravitates toward a dull thud that highlights the shriek of the singer and the comforting reverberation of the signature guitar, Laswell's fierce clarity cracks like a whip, inspiring Lemmy, never a slowpoke in this league, to bellow one called "Built for Speed." Result: work of art. A-

I've always seemed to get the idea that Christgau likes anything that has a fast, flowing tempo and what he really dislikes is stuff with a herky-jerky pace such as a lot of Motley Crue tunes.

Solos are almost extinct from metal anyway since the late 90s.

Punk isn't bombastic, though.

What he's saying is that Lemmy never pretended to be anything more than a drinking, smoking, lowlife rock-and-roller and not Conan the Barbarian/Lucifer/invading space aliens/whatever is it that most metal bands do.

youtube.com/watch?v=2fwZQJ_RAv0

My sister was at this gig. She's glad she saw them before Lemmy kicked it, even if the poor guy did look a little bit taxidermied here.

weird because Xgau didn't like Pantera at all and they had completely grounded lyrics with no sci-fi or Tolkien crap

is your sister hot?

Well, I agree him. Symphonic "complexity" is just really fucking cheesy in metal, he's exactly right about there being lots of virtuosity but no where near as much emotional content or even a purposefulness as in classical music.

Sup Forums thinks he only likes "simple" music but that's not really his criticism, it's just in the context of metal there's little to justify the technical skill besides that skill itself.

Imagine being alive to see what Pantera were at during their inception only for their image to conveniently change into what had become popular in metal (again).

Pantera still have that slow, jerky pace in most of their songs and also they don't have much of a sense of humor--Christgau is the type of guy who appreciates musicians who can laugh at themselves a bit, which Lemmy was good at. He said in one column that because he grew up on 50s rock-and-roll which was typically silly and good-time-fun, so he's never been able to appreciate bands whose message is basically "I hate the world and I want to destroy it."

He also likes Aerosmith, and they've usually had pretty funny songs as well.

Judas Priest had to Americanize to get popular here--their songs from HBFL onward are funnier and much more rock-and-roll than the early stuff like "Beyond The Realms of Death" which is very operatic and, well, European.

youtube.com/watch?v=y60Mo_Nmydg

And if you listen to that song, it kind of illustrates the point--the acoustic intro is very moving and beautiful, but the moment the electric guitar kicks in, it sounds like corny metal cheese.

>tfw you will never kill christgau with a big dick

Christgau does like hip-hop, but again only if it meets his "criteria" about being humorous and fun-oriented, so he likes Ice-T and Eminem, but not Tupac or DMX.

>That music is so masculine in a really retrograde way; I don't like that at all. It seems to me to have a very 19th-century notion of power.

He's a nu-male.

>Sup Forums thinks he only likes "simple" music but that's not really his criticism, it's just in the context of metal there's little to justify the technical skill besides that skill itself.

See, the thing with Motorhead is they never tried to be technical or take themselves seriously, they just spammed loud, fast chords over funny lyrics about being a degenerate rock star.

Christgau is the best critic because he doesn't take himself seriously. even the "Dean" title he originated in the first 5 years in a self-mocking spirit.

nobody has been doing this sort of thing with the same system for so long. tens of thousands of albums reviewed (he took the vocation aspect seriously at least)

if his reviews piss you off, that means he's successfully given you a reason why a band/album you liked isn't as great as popular reputation or your first experience of it led you to believe. he's a great critic that way

I could easily say most of the things Christgau doesn't like about metal are European innovations and rock-and-roll in the sense that he likes it is inherently American, since after all, we invented the stuff so it follows that we "get" rock in a way Europeans can't.

Oh yeah, there are definitely exceptions. I fucking love Motorhead, if anything they're more like a straight-ahead rock and roll band. I'm more thinking about shit like prog metal, tech death, shit like that.

Also, Christgau like Motorhead as well. A bunch of their records got As

I wouldn't doubt that Rob Halford took the song seriously and as a gay man, the lyrics were probably rather personal to him (being gay is a depressing way of life), but all the same, it does kind of prove how metal comes apart the harder it tries to be "artsy".

Lemmy never even thought of Motorhead as a "metal" band, he just always said "We play rock-and-roll". Although Metallica idolized him, he wasn't nuts about them and in fact thought Motley Crue were better.

All the same, Priest got a mixed reception from Americans in the late 70s, so they had to get more rock-and-roll starting with HBFL, which meant making their songs shorter, simpler, and more fun-oriented. There's a big difference between Beyond the Realms of Death and You Got Another Thing Coming.

He just doesn't "get it" desu

Which is fine but he could be less insufferably smug about it

>"As for metal, that's generational, and there'll be more. Even critics who aren't full-fledged fans, as many are, harbor vestigial hankerings for the stuff if they grew up on '70s AOR. And though maybe us graybeards should educate ourselves, I think it's like Balkan girl groups--internationalist/cross-generational imperative or no, I'd be a doofus to try and like everything. I still believe a fondness for metal is cousin to a fondness for the symphony, a relationship that honors neither, and enjoy it mostly as "hard rock," which wasn't always a metal-aligned category. Thus I prefer the kneejerk sexism of GN'R I to the asshole existentialism of GN'R II and took James Hetfield out of his misery inside of five plays--not only was life too short, I could feel it getting shorter with every song."

I can see why he wouldn't like Metallica S/T--that has almost everything he doesn't like in rock on one album.

>slow
>bumpity-jumpity tempos and flow
>songs aren't funny at all
>everything's about death and dying

Damn, at the end of the day, he's a very good writer.

As I said, Christgau repeatedly likes to say over the years (OP post, his review of MOP, the excerpt in ) that he was born in the wrong
generation to "get" metal, yet he's never had any issue with hip-hop which came much after metal and he was a lot older when the early rappers appeared. So I never bought that excuse.

It's kind of like country. I've never liked the stuff because I find it boring. Either a particular genre of music speaks to you or it doesn't, it's that simple.

yeah but metal's always suffered that stigmata of being for angry, edgy teens and you're not supposed to like it past the age of 15. this isn't because Christgau was born in 1942, people born in the 1980s-90s are told same, that you're a child who can't grow up if you still listen to metal as an adult.

People should be required to read Lolita as a tutorial before they start reading music reviews. I personally think the whole point is to contest them. When you share a different opinion it forces you to kind of acknowledge your own thoughts toward it.

Wasn't Dio the same age as Christgau? dude was one of the founders of metal.

Dio always struck me as pretty odd because he was American yet had a European fondness for Tolkien sword-and-sorcery lyrics.

I think a lot of his basic beef with metal is the macho thing because he's a committed, card-carrying SJW nu male.

He meant that his opinion is shit and you should do the opposite

Dio was the son of Italian immigrants, he grew up in a very "European" household and would have gotten a lot of Old World influence the average WASP American didn't.

>they just spammed loud, fast chords over funny lyrics about being a degenerate rock star.

probably bait, but. actually they made riffs and wrote lyrics about a great many subjects.

>Admittedly, few crits lie down for Thom Yorke's pained critiques of conformist humans and unmanageable machines. The band's brains, they agree, are in its sonics, which achieve what U2 brags about--an electronically textured, augmented, and otherwise fucked-with guitar sound that occasionally even I find gripping, as on "Electioneering," which has the shortest lyric on the album. But in addition to the words I take exception to Yorke, who is a better singer than Stephen Malkmus the way Mariah Carey is a better singer than Mary J. Blige. Good pipes are the refuge of fools, the kind of fools the critics mean to speak for if not be this year--better the broad gestures deployed by high-handed rockers, they've decided, than the straitened circumstances affected by lo-fi snobs. But though I accept the principle, I can't get with the fact, and this is probably generational. The specious notion that punk was '50s rock and roll revisited does contain a kernel--like punk, the music I grew up loving was fast, short, lively, and good for a laugh. The music many critics in their thirties grew up loving, however, wasn't punk, not at first--it was AOR, which was slow, long, turgid, and somber. U2 made their mark on late AOR because they shared its penchant for the grand aural trademark, and to anyone weaned on AOR they and their progeny sound natural in a way they can't to me. Maybe being old ain't so bad after all.

You know what, Chrisgau was an Ivy Leaguer (Dartmouth) and he's from the same generation and shares the same attitude as Pynchon. Modernist, absurd, tongue-in-cheek but also deadly serious.

Ozzy Osborne always praised Lemmy's songwriting skills, saying "He was a really well-read guy, a lot more than me. He had a large shelf of books at home about war and history and things like that. Knew everything about Napoleon and World War I and the Battle of Britain and things like that. Also lyrics came to him really quickly, while I could spend hours trying to write a song before I come up with anything. And the lyrics he came up with were good ones too."

why does everyone love hip hop for the same reason they hate heavy metal?

>Modernist, absurd, tongue-in-cheek but also deadly serious

I see what you mean. He has this perennial butthurt and phobia of rock misogyny (see his reviews of Kiss) but I never took those kinds of songs seriously and found them humorous.

youtube.com/watch?v=2wAo-LAZlkc

Say, Christgau listened to this and thought "Oh dear, this shit demeans women. How awful." *faints* while I just think "Eh, just rock stars being rock stars."

Yeah, I was saying...Christgau claims he was born too early to appreciate metal, but Black Sabbath happened when he was still in his 20s while he was in his 40s by the time rap was a thing, and most people his age, hell, almost everyone born earlier than 1965 dislike rap. I was born in '88, so rap has always existed for as long as I've been alive and seemed normal and natural to me.

Actually there's plenty of misogynistic rock groups he likes, such as the Rolling Stones, Aerosmith, and (of course) Motorhead, but he manages to come up with convenient "excuses" for them. For example, he said (I kid you not) that Mick Jagger has always been pretty androgynous, so blatantly sexist songs like Starfucker and the entirety of Some Girls get a pass because no gender preference is implied on them.

Like, what?

Trips confirm. Lemmy was so well liked and will be remembered precisely because he was a genuine fellow with an original character. Lemmy never tried to be anything, he simply was what he was. I doubt he would have cared or really been very different had neither he nor motorhead ever become famous.

You mean balafon? Somewhere deep within me lies the feeling that nobody in the Congo has ever seen a marimba

He likes rap but as I said, only the more comedic, tongue-in-cheek rappers like Eminem, probably because they tangentially remind him of 50s rock-and-roll. Guys like Tupac who were all pretentious and 2deep4u he didn't like.

hip-hop is cool and sexy, very easy to associate with getting laid. metal mostly conjures up images of obese men with pubey beards, longhair and black band tees. metal does not get you laid.

it really is that simple. it's the same reason indie rock is acceptable to sites like p4k but progressive rock isn't. only one of them gets people laid

I noticed that Christgau didn't review any Bon Scott AC/DC, only the Brian Johnson era stuff, and he says his favorite AC/DC tune is "You Shook Me All Night Long", probably because it's the most radio-friendly pop rock song they ever did, and in general the band under Johnson got more commercial and pop-centered.

"Rock music is dead. Rappers are the new rock stars. They're edgy, they have attitude, they flash around big stacks of money, they ride in a limousine with girls hanging off their arms. I mean, we all love that, right? They make you want to be them. The point is that rock stars aren't supposed to be ordinary people. And then at some point, they became ordinary people. And the music got bland, it got boring, it sucked, and people stopped listening to it."

he's 100% correct you know...

>hip-hop is cool and sexy, very easy to associate with getting laid. metal mostly conjures up images of obese men with pubey beards, longhair and black band tees. metal does not get you laid.

Glam metal?

>like there wasn't a 14 year old girl alive in 1987 who didn't want to throw herself at Blackie Lawless

he's right about rap being what rock used to be
he's not right about rock being dead

But a lot of great rock music wasn't made by stereotypical hedonistic rock superstars with long hair and crazy outfits

Hair metal was barely even metal, it was just pop rock that stole bits and pieces from metal. No real metal fan in the 80s listened to W.A.S.P.

The average Slayer/Metallica/Venom gig back then had very few horny teenage girls, just guys who looked something like this.

Soz, meant Mbria. Brain fart.

Nobody ever accused James Hetfield of having a sense of humor after KEA.

He's right about both actually.

Within the genre the rock ethos is dead, fading into nostalgic Gen Xers attending half-hearted cashgrab reunion shows and soft-cock newcomers trying to bring back the old feeling by rehashing the same old sound. Indie-rock was a nice change of pace and felt new but the last time rock felt like rock was in the 90s during the alternative rock phase

Speaking of which, I also notice Christgau reviewed a fair bunch of hair metal bands back then, like Motley Crue, Def Leppard, Poison, Winger, White Lion (not Ratt or Cinderella though). He reviewed a lot less "real" metal, for example he completely ignored Sabbath after the first few albums, solo Ozzy, Judas Priest, Iron Maiden, Dio, and most of the rest.

So my theory is that even if he didn't like hair metal, he preferred them to Dio strictly from a conceptual standpoint (that Winger's lyrics bore at least a little more resemblance to his "idea" of what rock-and-roll should be).

>You know, what can I say — I'm 72 years old. This is not the time for me to start liking really loud guitar solos

Gotta preserve his aging ears so he can give As to the next shitty Taylor Swift album, amirite?

>No real metal fan
No real Scotsman

It's more like the whole rock ethos is dependent on you being a macho rebel who fucks hot sluts. This doesn't quite "fit" Millenials as well as it did boomers and Gen Xers. For fuck's sake, most Millenials still live in their mom's basement at 30 and only have sex with MLP characters.

I'd say rap has changed a lot as well as Millenials have taken it over. Young rappers out now really don't do the whole DMX/Ice Cube gangsta thing anymore.

You know, there's a difference between listening to Kiss albums in 2016 and 1975. He was after all reviewing the stuff in real time, not with 40 years to look back on it.

Someone today probably finds that music quaint and funny, but in the 70s it was dangerous, edgy stuff.

Rock was alive and healthy into at least the mid-2000s, by the time Obama was president, it disappeared from the radar almost overnight.

I love the recent surge in Christgauposting
keep it up oh you sexy memers

It's true. Ozzy said that unlike the Rolling Stones and Led Zeppelin, they got almost no groupies beyond some really weird, ugly hambeasts.

Coincidence? I think not. Obama has nu male-ized the culture in a way it's never been before. And it's not because he's a Democrat since Bill Clinton was very much an alpha male sex machine.

But this guy...wow. Tumblr personified.

Really? Ozzy was a good-looking fella back in the day.

So you think Trump will bring about a culture shift and we see manly music come back? :^)

>Coincidence?
yes

Maybe. I still can't help but get over how rock was alive and well all through the Bush years only to just...vanish as the 2000s drew to a close and how hip-hop has gotten steadily wimpier as well.

no, it will just be nu-male "indie" bands making shitty anti-trump songs

Carrie Fisher really wasn't that hot anyway IDG why neckbeards think that bikini scene was...

Depends on how permanent you think the damage Niggy did to our culture was.

Duh, they're neckbeards who look like Carrie Fisher was nothing much to look at, but she seemed like an "achievable" woman to them. Cindy Crawford would have been a little out of their league.

Me, I've always just treated metal as another form of pop music/culture and never got where Christgau is seeing symphonic bombast. I can see where he gets that out of prog though. Prog is the definition of pretentious slop.

Probably because metalfaggots continuously tell you how metal is the new classical music and Beethoven would be in a metal band if he were born in the 20th instead of the 18th century. I understand completely why Christgau says he can't stand metal's delusions of grandeur. This isn't a joke if you've hung around enough metalfags. A lot of them honest to goodness believe it.

Metal and prog happened in the 70s when Yuropoors, lacking the cultural connections to the American roots music that spawned rock, instead mishmashed it with their own symphonic tradition. In fact I recall Christgau even said this in one of his columns, that rock isn't native to Europe, they borrowed it from us and missed a lot of the cultural background it came from.

I agree with him about the pop part. As I said earlier, 70s-80s metal, back when it still had hooks and some form of pop sensibility, is a lot funner and more listenable than the brvtal extreme underground metal of more recent times. Like, I could see why Hatebreed may be fun to see live, but I don't really want to sit and listen to this while I'm doing the dishes.

youtube.com/watch?v=mrzdj6KSRXE