How come music critics love punk and hate metal/prog?

How come music critics love punk and hate metal/prog?

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Name 10 music critics

Music and film critics are invariably leftist hipster nerds that hate anything masculine.

Critics are failed journalists.
All they care about is the sociopolitical implications of art.

Fantano
Fantano
Fantano
Fantano
Fantano
Cal Chuchesta
Fantano
Fantano
Fantano
Fantano

There's 10.
I can name more if you want.

Lol /thread

i like girls with penises

That's because punk is very influential in many spectrums of music

Metal and prog is kinda their own thing.

Even then just about all music critics are dishonest yuppie hipster fucks that truly doesn't understand what made punk good.

>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.
Christgau on why he chooses Motorhead over other metal bands.

faggot

>this

Girls don't have penises

>if it gets more technical than 3 power chord riffs it's TOO WANKY

I wonder how he feels about Mozart's Requiem

i said GIRLS didn't i?

girls don't poop either

It's no different with movies. Film critics worshiped On Golden Pond and detested Rambo back in the day. Why?

Easy--heavy metal and action movies appeal to male power fantasies about saving the world from evil and having sex with hot women. Critics are nu males, they can't relate to those things or their working class fanbase.

This..

Everyone should check out Rock and the Pop Narcotic by Joe Carducci for an excellent book on that view.

>comparing metal and prog to Mozart
Don't fall for that meme user

Yes.
see

Christgau likes to claim that the problem with metal is that it's too operatic and grounded in classical music, and rock-and-roll shouldn't be that way. He can't seem to get how operatic vocals and crazy guitar solos can be an expression of pure, raw angst and energy.

there are plenty of more-or-less pure journalist aesthetes, i would even count christgau as basically an aesthete (along with being an apologetic neo-leftist)

Indeed.
>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

>He can't seem to get how operatic vocals and crazy guitar solos can be an expression of pure, raw angst and energy.

No, he can. He just doesn't like it and thinks its "reactionary".

I'm not tho

No sane man would ever compare Mozart to any metal or prog. It's just that Requiem has so many shits going on.

>Master of Puppets [Elektra, 1986]

>I feel a distinct generation gap between myself and this music, not because my weary bones can't take its power and speed, but because I was born far too soon to have had my dendrites rewired by progressived radio. The momentum of this band can be impressive, and as with most fast metal (as well as some sludge metal), they seem to have acceptable political motivations--antiwar, anticonformity, even anticoke. Fine. Problem is, the revolutionary heroes I envision aren't male chauvinists too naive to know better, they're not Arnold Schwarzeneggar as Conan the Barbarian, all flowing hair and huge pecs. That's the image Metallica calls up, and I feel no more obliged to summon their strength of my own free will than I am the 1812 Overture's. B-

See here. He flat-out says he dislikes the whole idea of the heroic macho male coming to slay the forces of darkness.

Basically, he was a fag.

>Even then just about all music critics are dishonest yuppie hipster fucks that truly doesn't understand what made punk good

Correct. Punk rock originated as a voice to disaffected working class kids in the 1970s who felt that the established rock bands weren't speaking to them.

And the the voice of bohemian Art students who had nothing better to do

>I am the 1812 Overture

What the fuck did he mean by this really

And was he implying that classical can't be manly as fuck?

Humans are a patriarchal/hierarchical species, we tend to look to a leader or aspirational figure we want to emulate.

>heavy metal and action movies appeal to male power fantasies about saving the world from evil and having sex with hot women
ok, but we can agree that that's pretty trite, correct? and if anything christgau is a musical populist--look at his springsteen reviews, or his early vaunting of hip hop. i don't think his problem is with masculinity as such but rather the same pomp and excess that leads him to dislike prog

Do you feel like there's a connection between the reasoning behind film critics highly rating exploitation films and music critics highly rating hip-hop, both products that ultimately endorse those same themes they despise in other contexts?

>muh masculinity

That goes back to the Marxist ideologies of professional critics. They dislike the pomp of heavy metal because it implies that you have technical skill as an musician, and it's unfair that Dave Mustaine can play guitar better than some 16 year old in a garage band. Never mind that the kid might look up to his favorite metal guitarist and want to be him someday.

In short, to them having technical skill as a musician implies the existence of a class-based society with haves and have nots and this goes against their leftist vision of a classless world.

xgau hates just about anything with even the trappings of intellectual ambition. i'm pretty sure he's just deeply afraid of ever not being the smartest guy in the room.

It's also why they dislike cockrock, because the message of the music is that "Oh look, I have a lot more sex than you." and in leftist thinking, nobody is allowed to be more successful than their neighbor.

Why do metal fags not understand art?
They jerk off about their technical skill.

These are the types of brainlets that think a realistic painting of a bowl of fruit makes you superior to Goya.

>muh dick

Once again, another brainlet shows their inability to understand art
As they smell of failure and stale fart

Of course soulless wankery like what Malmsteen does =/= a good song. It's all about feels and expression and dynamics.

>psychopathologizing every critic because most metal is dross
it's obviously not about technical skill, because then jazz, post-punk, etc. would be out

Doesn't really explain all the positive reviews he's given to technically gifted musicians and singers.

Because they don't understand theory and don't play instruments on a competent, professional level

>evoking goya, the most metal of all painters, to discredit the genre

When the critics finally got their wish during the 90s-2000s of rock that was just basic power chords with no solos and dudes dressed in street clothes, guess what? Oh right, rock died off because Nickelback and Three Days Grace didn't motivate a whole lot of kids to pick up a guitar the way that Jimmy Page did in his day.

people with actual intellectual ambition make avant-garde music, (which christgau likes, though not as much as scruf) not metal

Low T hipster pussbag detected.

sorry, can you name me some critics that wanted this

Jazz since the '50s is just wankery that appeals to Bohemian hipsters. At one time, it was working class music you could dance to, but that was lost after WWII.

Every music critic and their mother sucked off Nirvana for banishing that icky metal shit and getting back to basic 3-chord garage rock.

was speaking more about prog than metal (both of which scaruffi tends to laud)

your hot opinions aside, jazz musicians are highly skilled technically, and draw none of the mainstream critical ire that metal does

so you think hair metal was preferable to grunge as the dominant force in popular music

i do disagree with xgau's dismissal of prog

Like I said, metal is loud, bombastic, and working class. Music critics are all hipsters that can't connect with metal's white trash fanbase.

it's debatable whether metal really appeals to the working class (after the '80s of course)

>Metal is working class.
Behave.

Hair metal was just a caricature of 70s-80s metal created by record labels to market to women. In the 90s however, metal of any kind became totally uncool unless it was Pantera.

Ever met a Slayer or Pantera fan that took a bath and didn't sport 20 tattoos?

what's some avant-garde music christgau praises?

I am one, and the later is hardly an indicator of class.

I remember when I was 15 in the early 2000s and thinking how boring contemporary rock was. Like, why don't these guys play cool solos like the bands from the 70s did?

And now you realize why Millenials didn't pick up on rock.

ok, but metalheads are a pretty discrete subculture. it may overlap with the "working class," but most blue collar people aren't at all invested in metal

The thing about rock is that critics perceive it as the music of the common man, the proletariat, which it is to an extent. Problem is, since they're elitist pseudo-intellectual leftists with a hugely inflated sense of self-importance, they believe it's up to them to guide the sheeple on the true path of rock-and-roll.

So you be all like, "Man, I don't always want to listen to the New York Dolls or Velvets all the time. Bangs and Christgau need to get off my case."

>ok, but metalheads are a pretty discrete subculture. it may overlap with the "working class," but most blue collar people aren't at all invested in metal

It was certainly true in the 80s, although I'd say nowadays white trash are more into hip-hop.

beefheart
the fugs
the insect trust
post-punk (arguably avant-garde)
eno
prince paul

now i know some of this fringes on pop, but he is not a classical/jazz expert or steeped in theory--he is after all a critic of popular music. the point is that he has no problem with artists who are formally innovative.

Christgau admitted he doesn't like masculine music because it reminds him of his old antagonists from high school.

You do realize there's actual symbolic purpose behind Goya based on his life, right? The closest thing in music to Goya is Swans.
This is why metal fags can't tell the difference between brutal art like Goya and some edgy tryhard making an album cover of a fetus.
>muh masculinity
>muh """working class"""

Prog is mostly garbage aside from maybe Pink Floyd. Punk was far and away the better movement.

>You do realize there's actual symbolic purpose behind Goya based on his life, right?
no way the morbidity of metal could ever represent the actual feelings and/or experiences of metal musicians, right?

>The closest thing in music to Goya is Swans.
that's a fair enough comparison but if you can't see shades of goya's apocalypticism in groups like, say, neurosis, you're dumb. why do people feel qualified to comment on styles they clearly know little about?

Q: I'm curious as to how you arrive at certain conclusions about certain genres of music. For example, you openly dislike heavy metal. Why is that?
A: Because it's symphonic bombast without the technical complexity of classical music, although there is a lot of virtuosity. I can say this--I'm 72. Now is not the time for me to start liking loud guitar solos. That music is so masculine in a retrograde way. I don't like it--it's a very 19th century idea of power.

Both genres entail progression within their song structures. And not even straightforward progression either. Even goddamn Captain Beefheart had pretty simple structures on TMR for comparison. But prog/metal bands? After initially seemingly following the usual verse, chorus, verse, the music just veers into a different direction from that kind of repetition. 21st Century Schizoid Man by King Crimson has that crazy instrumental bit, Into The Void by Black Sabbath has that fast part, etc. Combine this idea with the fact that metal's melding of melody and harmony into one while prog's assaulting with disparate sections at once are both still concepts that STILL to this day confuse non-fans of those genres, and I am pretty sure at these genres' inceptions the critics must have been all confused.

source?

Sabbath's dark music and lyrics about Satan would have been _very_ jarring in 1970, since nobody had done anything like that before, and it came as a shock to a generation who believed in sunshine-and-rainbows hippie idealism.

robertchristgau.com/xg/bk-aow/presley.php

>no way the morbidity of metal could ever represent the actual feelings and/or experiences of metal musicians, right?
Yes, there are obviously a decent amount metal musicians who have been through some serious shit, but rarely is the music intentionally trying to evoke those experiences. I'm trying to describe the difference between making intense music unrelated to you're plight and making intense music derived from it. It's why 90s punk and post-punk generally feels plastic compared to the no wave scene.

>robertchristgau.com/xg/bk-aow/presley.php
so he's talking about elvis here (greaseball persona), and immediately goes on to talk about how he developed an appreciation for him

>Yes, there are obviously a decent amount metal musicians who have been through some serious shit, but rarely is the music intentionally trying to evoke those experiences

Rob Halford and James Hetfield's music was heavily inspired by personal agonies of theirs.

there gay

Underrated post

since when did metal become something you're supposed to associate with doing somethinf good and heroic? It's usually about Satan, mental illness, torture, depression, or some stupid lore that sounds cool.

Critics by and large have a lofty sense of self importance and they love irony--they have a hard time with music that takes itself seriously. Everything has be snarky or have some kind of inside joke for them.

to be honest i could never care about intentionality as long as the end product is worthwhile.

and if you're gonna sit there and tell me that the hazy morbidity of goya's black paintings aren't mirrored in the sinister psychedelia of black sabbath, or that his eschatological visions don't have a companion in slayer's (especially on an album like seasons), or that his brutal surreality (yes i know surrealism hadn't codified as a style when he was painting but you get what i'm saying) isn't echoed in dax riggs' acid bath lyrics, i don't know what to tell you. the goya-metal comparisons are totally fucking valid.

Depends on the kind of metal. Power metal especially is fond of Conan the Barbarian kinds of imagery.

>but rarely is the music intentionally trying to evoke those experiences
This is true depending on the metal being talked about. There's A LOT of death metal that has imagery related to gross shit, but I always found that to be secondary to the music, which always felt like a tool of empowerment with both how visceral and driven it is. That's the difference between that and something like Swans or Giles Corey which evoke more depressive atmospheres because they aren't that driven.

BUT, there's definitely genres of metal like DSBM which VERY obviously are evoking the sense of misanthropy these guys have, or the feedback driven heaviness of sludge evoking the heroin addictions those guys were surrounded by.

It's not a blanket statement that only goes one way or the next. A cool non-metal example of this is MF DOOM, a rapper who gets accused of not "being hood", although he has definitely lived a tough life being homeless for years sleeping on benches. It's just that he doesn't represent that directly in his music. Similarly guys like the ones in Judas Priest or Metallica use overthetop imagery and don't directly evoke their personal problems. But they certainly try to make music that would empower one to get out of those situations.

Metal's very nature musically leads to empowerment. For the most of it, the genre's got music that's very progressively driven and visceral at the same time. Certain black metal, doom metal, and sludge metal bands are the exception not the rule. Same with the occasional sad song in the other subgenres.

good post overall but i definitely disagree with the assertion that metallica don't directly evoke their personal problems. they've been dealing with issues of addiction since at least master of puppets, and it's tough to read ...and justice for all's rails against the injustices of the world as anything but a response to burton's death. controversial opinion, but i actually loved st. anger for sounding like such an honest expression of middle-aged alcoholic rage. even ulrich's snare seems to reinforce the ugly anger of the album.

>ulrich's snare seems to reinforce the ugly anger of the album
reading way too far into it breh. these fucking guys are professionals doing a job and all the flowery stuff they say is maybe half true

>Similarly guys like the ones in Judas Priest

Actually Judas Priest pretty much invented the entire idea of the heroic metal avengers coming to slay the forces of darkness. The early metal groups like Black Sabbath didn't really do that. Their message was more like "This world sucks and it's full of decay and misery, let's escape and find a better world somewhere." because they were all hippies and the entire hippie mentality was kind of about escaping from a hopelessly corrupt society.

Ironically enough, Born To Run says essentially the same thing, but in a more direct fashion.

This. Music critics are invariably pinkos.

>reading way too far into it
it's called interpretation, friend. i don't care if it was intended as such; it evokes those feelings and that's all i'm concerned with.

This is one of the most baffling things I have ever read. Critics are mad because of their secret Marxist ideologies that make them wish that metal guitarists would be less talented because every single person needs to be on the same level of talent..? Do you think Marxists actually think shit like that? That no one can be more skilled at something than another? He's also reviewed flashy guitarists well in the past.

That's probably why Christgau didn't like Sabbath or prog bands, he think they encourage escapist fantasy instead of confronting the world's problems. He's also said he didn't like hippies for the same reason, they wanted to run from the world and live in exclusionist communes rather than fix society.

They don't evoke it musically that much though. AFJA and One are exceptions like I said. Most of it is lyrically evoked. As for St. Anger, if the whole thing went full out on the primitive end, the concept would've been pulled off far better.

Yup, and that's why Sabbath did go towards the doomy end after all compared to Priest that went onto the more uplifting end.

That's not even related to the music though what kind of criticism is that of MUSIC? Culture I understand.

Some Kind of Monster was supposedly about the band itself being an uncontrollable monster that stomps on James and he can't escape its clutches.

>Yup, and that's why Sabbath did go towards the doomy end after all compared to Priest that went onto the more uplifting end.

IDK, the early Priest albums were pretty dark. They didn't start doing the cheesy metal cliches until Hell Bent For Leather.

music critics are inherently retarded and i am in no way indorsing them but punk is the rawest form of music besides maybe blues and no wave but because they're such simple songs you just kind of get it. metal fags go on and on about solos and shit but no cares, all anyone really wants is people yelling and playing something to go along with it

>They don't evoke it musically that much though
fair enough, but i maintain that st. anger, especially with that snare, does indeed evoke the personal musically, though we're likely to disagree on how successfully it was pulled off.

punk was literally the genre of white working class males

If you mean Sad Wings of Destiny, but they discovered the whole heroic metal avengers schtick on Sin After Sin and ran with it.

Sad Wings is mostly a bunch of songs about the forces of darkness oppressing the world and their subsequent albums are kind of like "The heroic metal heroes are coming to save mankind from oppression."

like it or not punk always had the rich artfag element. i like it personally.

this, i would add that writing in general tends to be left wing/promote miscegenation. avoid the printed jew at all costs--listen to talk radio.

...

If you're talking their very first album, yeah that does sound a bit Sabbathy. But even on their next record Victim Of Changes, despite keeping the darker lyrical content on a track like say...Tyrant, they started getting up beat.