To a lot of people, heavy metal is today's real rock-and-roll--the music of the people. It's basic, it's rude...

To a lot of people, heavy metal is today's real rock-and-roll--the music of the people. It's basic, it's rude, kids love it, parents hate it. But a closer look reveals how stupid and delusory it is. Metal is not basic--it cultivates a pseudo-virtuosity that negates content. The values it promulgates are false and often destructive. Eighty percent of the "people" who like it are male and 98 percent of them are white.

i mean, he's not wrong.

I consider myself a metal fan but hes kind of right.

>Pseudovirtuosity that negates content
What did he mean by this? honestly
His point after that is retarded so this has got to mean something

Yeah music is all fake and musical artists don't have smart viewpoints. He's limiting this general criticism to metal because metal is whiter than many genres and he is anti-white.

yeah it's weird as fuck, i don't get it either, it would make more sense if he said pseudo-intelligence because virtuosity denotes skill or technique instead of "content" or "values". Or maybe what he means become clearer once you read the rest of this article that I assume this quote is from.

He's saying metalheads value guitar pyrotechnics over meaningful lyrics.

Shredding fast and knowing a bunch of ridiculous scales =/= making good music

>caring about lyrics in a genre whan you can't understand them half the time

oh that makes sense, the wording threw me off

>Metal is not basic--it cultivates a pseudo-virtuosity that negates content. The values it promulgates are false and often destructive.
What insightful claims, I'd love to see how he backs them up with his musical background or even with rhetoric.Oh look he doesn't. Wow, shocker.

You may not get that, but you got quints

>The values it promulgates are false and often destructive
Yeah exactly. I prefer the value systems inherit to trip-hop, shoegaze, and krautrock.
What a fucking twat.

How much metal is based on cheesy cliches other than maybe Judas Priest?

no more 'destructive' than any other rhythm based music...

You have to understand that as a music critic, you can really only write about lyrics, since it's kind of hard to describe sounds and metal is a genre that heavily relies on the instruments to tell the story of a song. That can go a long way to explaining the critical disdain of metal.

noice

that's an interesting line of tought

He is wrong. I have a lot of metalhead friends and have went to some metal clubs and 80 percent were women, not men.

but south american hispanics are huge into metal

and japs

The thing is, he wrote that in 1988 but even in those days you'd go to a Motley Crue show and the girls were throwing themselves at Vince Neil. Also metal had a huge following in South America and Japan 30 years ago as well, it's not recent. The Japanese have always loved Judas Priest.

Didn't you know how Lady Gaga is a huge metal enthusiast and used to be a dancer in metal clubs?

Eh, it depends on the band. I'm fairly certain no female has ever listened to Pantera unless they were a dyke lesbian.

>Eighty percent of the "people" who like it are male and 98 percent of them are white.

women find phil anselmo attractive, believe it or not.

All that proves is that women don't actually care about metal unless they think the lead singer is hot.

And actually, Ozzy said that back in the day, Sabbath never got any groupies except the weirdest, grossest chicks while Mick Jagger was having sex with supermodels.

except women do like female led metal bands

Not only in lyrics but also in texture, conceptuality and variety in sound. Heavy metal and death are completely retarded,

>The values it promulgates are false and often destructive.
And the awful hip hop and pop rap he praises doesn't?
>Eighty percent of the "people" who like it are male and 98 percent of them are white.
cringe

Metal has always been a working class, white trash, blue collar kind of music. That's first and foremost. Music critics are invariably leftist hipsters, so they naturally prefer genres like punk and alternative that attract those kinds of fans. They consider metalheads to be toothless tobacco-spitting cavemen.

You can look at any band that's a critical darling going back to the 1960s and it's always been groups like the Rolling Stones or Velvet Underground or Sonic Youth that had a boho image.

You know it's true you fucking 14year old metalhead. Just because you have a tatoo and a black jacket and the hability to shred doesn't make you a good musician.
You can see the proof and the rethoric of it by hearing almost 95% of heavy metal bands.

Metal is for kids with no personality or hobby people that collects guitars.

i think he's talking about stuff like skilled guitar solos not actually being a demonstration of good musicality - john coltrane wasn't considered good at sax because he could play super fast lol
not really
only surface level music critics talk about lyrics. you think critics praised loveless so much for its deep and insightful lyrics?
i couldn't quote a single line from that album

I mentioned this the other day, that I looked at Christgau's top 30 albums for 1988 (on account of it being my birth year) and half of the shit was autistic anti-apartheid records made by banned South African musicians. The pretentiousness of that list was almost gagging.

I have a bunch of old Britannica year books from the 70s-80s. In the music section, they go on and on about the Rolling Stones and Bowie and New Romantic artists and punk rock and Springsteen and U2. Metal is rarely mentioned other than a paragraph or so, even though during the 80s it was huge and metal bands were selling millions of records.

So music critics can only be critical of lyrics because its hard to describe sounds?

What the fuck did I just read

This gets posted every time and people get triggered every time. Just let it go

>This gets posted every time and people get triggered every time.
so why would we ever let it go then

Wow, instant cancer, congratz

>"The values it promulgates are false and often destructive."
>implying that there is one single group of values for a whole genre
>implying that these values are fundamentally different from punk and rock & roll ones

Christgau is, in my opinion, a shinny fagget

/thread

I remember him also complaining like the skinny fat weak balding bitch that he is, that Hetfield or someone like was too ripped or his hair was too long kek. One of my joys in life is that he'll die very soon

Mick Jagger is kind of ugly though

>Eighty percent of the "people" who like it are male and 98 percent of them are white.

god, there's so much wrong with this. is a music critic seriously putting people in quotes? he calls metal "rude" and then proceeds to basically call its fan subhumans. this isn't really how a critic should conduct himself. furthermore, a genre is bad because it has a specific demographic? go fuck yourself, you're a fucking white male too.