Why do critics have a hateboner for metal and prog?

Why do critics have a hateboner for metal and prog?

Because prog and metal are easy to make fun of. They're middlebrow music. They're too smart for the masses but too dumb for anybody with self-respect.

Rock critics fetishize unpretentiousness to pretentious levels.

Most critics are idiots, although I'll admit most metal and prog is pretty bad

This is really only true for Christgau

I'm looking at u Christgau. Fucktard.

Christgau here. Ask Me Anything...

Music comes in minimalist and maximalist forms. Basically, maximalist music is stuff that's meant to be as excessive, loud, and in your face as possible. It includes prog and metal among other genres. Minimalist music includes indie, alternative, and punk. Critics tend to naturally be the kind of people that gravitate to minimalist music.

Critics are generally little beta faggots who hate any music that reminds them of their old tormentors from high school.

>critics
a legitimate music critic must be at least as smart as Adorno, otherwise it's just a pop culture schlockmeister

Are you implying prog/metal fans are in anyway intimidating and not the neckbeards of the music scene

Both thing guitar scales played fast is deep composition.

^This.

>metal
>too smart for the masses

In Chistgaus perspective, he sees it as pretentious; but apparently the New York Dolls aren't.

How is metal pretentious

Some of it is. Not all. I said from his perspective he thinks it's all pretentious.

Right...Christgau had said he didn't like Elvis as a kid because too macho and bombastic, he much preferred Chuck Berry who was subtle and subversive. So in other words, he was that kind of personality from the get-go and if he'd grown up in the 80s rather than the 50s, he would have been down with the Pixies/Depeche Mode crowd while complaining about the jock AC/DC fans that shoved him into a locker.

Same reason art critics don't like black velvet paintings of Elvis.

No man, that's poptimism, essentially.

This.

because both those genres can be boiled down to

>dude muh guitar solos

any genre that puts such a huge spotlight on one of the shittest musical cliches in human history is bound to be tore to pieces be people who actually put the time in to understand why music is good on more than a surface level

Metal bands literally name themselves after long words they like the sound of without bothering about what they mean - that's pretension in a nutshell: unearned grandeur without real intellectual work. Metal fans also tend to admire themselves for how much other people aren't into the shit they like, rather than just liking it. They also happen to like something that's so stagnant that even very slight customizations of the sound get a band labelled as a new sub-genre.

>implying most professional music critics know anything about music composition/theory
>implying most of them aren't failed English majors who've never written a song or played an instrument

if they know enough to know metal and prog rock are the absolute lowest of low dog shit of music than they know more than you it seems kid

bombastic trash. bloated, meandering, self-indulgent, tired trash. not to mention metal lyrics sound like edgy 10 year old poetry.