For a lot of people, heavy metal is today's real rock and roll music. It's basic, it's rude, kids love it...

For a lot of people, heavy metal is today's real rock and roll music. 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 exhibits a pseudo-virtuosity that negates content. The values it promulgates are foolish and often destructive. Eighty percent of the "people" who like it are male and 98% of them are white.

dont take writing at face value without understanding its perspective well

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.

Oh, but we understand his perspective quite well--dude has massive insecurity issues from jocks kicking his ass in high school and projects them onto metal fans.

I'd say christgau's twisted word style has obvious holes meant to give away his subjective taste
>pseudo-virtuosity that negates content
nigger right there is a problem
>Eighty percent of the "people"
does he really doubt theyre people? dont think so

Critics have never been able to figure out metal and prog for the most part because they're genres of music that rely on sounds rather than lyrics to get the message across. You can't really write about sounds, so all you have left are the lyrics.

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

See how easy it is? :^)

He said this in 1986. Consider the context.

'88 and metal had a global following even back then.

I'm pretty sure critics hate virtuosic music because, being failed musicians, they hate music that makes them feel like they couldn't make it. That's also why they celebrate low skill music disproportionately - they are secretly thinking to themselves "yeah... this is good... this is what i could make.. yknow.. if i tried..pshh.."

>christgay

Reminder that even the lowliest metal band has more worth than any music critic, one of the most worthless professions in existence. I can try any music I want to at the click of a button. Why do I need your shitty opinion about it?

He never did figure out Black Sabbath back in the day. Even Lester Bangs eventually came to appreciate them.

>I can try any music I want to at the click of a button. Why do I need your shitty opinion about it?
Now you can do that, but imagine in the 1970s when you had to rely on a capsule review in a magazine to know if an album was any good or not.

In that case music critics had slightly more value but still less than your buddy who knows a lot of music and whose taste you like.

Or, you know, they hate musicians who get more pussy than themselves. It makes them feel insecure and threatened.

I was on a funk binge lately and I was contemplating how Christgau really loved Prince but was kind of ambivalent on Rick James, and I figured it was because Prince (despite doing tons of sex songs) was kind of cute and androgynous, so Christgau didn't feel sexually threatened by him the way he did with Rick James.

That doesn't explain his hatred of bands like Yes though... those were some goofy dudes.

Explained here.

AFAIK critics disliked prog because they thought it removed the edge and danger from rock music and turned it into a carnival show with wizards and dragons.

I like reading music journalism. I don't "need" it. Hell, I don't "need" to read anything ever, except maybe package leaflets. Saying that you don't need music critics or that it is a pointless profession as if you were some kind of edgy renegade is fucking stupid.

/thread

The entire purpose of a critic is to be smug as fuck and show off how smart they are and how they have such excellent tastes. Oh, and promoting artists they like while shitting on those they dislike.

>I've tried to review every rock album worth owning. If it's not listed in Consumer Guide, I advise you to forget about it. I've sometimes skipped mid-career albums from a mediocre artist, and I haven't always reviewed late-career albums, when the rock star, being the original romantic, experiences an early peak and a long, slow decline. The Subjects For Further Research column denotes artists whom I respect, but haven't had the time or motivation to explore their catalog in depth, while artists I don't respect go in the Distinctions Not Cost Effective and Meltdown columns.

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

>he felt it necessary to bring this up to bolster his argument
completely disregarded.

Of course this could just as easily be applied to his precious punk rock.

Except most metalheads were 89IQ during that era. Beavis and Butthead didn't come from nothing, brah.

The intelligent metalheads became far more commonplace during the last decade.

>all metal fans were Motley Crue fans

More so, actually. Punk is literally the whitest subculture in existence. Fans of Bad Brains are mostly white, and black kids into Punk are few enough to contain in one documentary.

Why? Because white people love left-wing ideology more than anyone else.

It's common knowledge heshers were dumb as shit.

Then again, all of those black punk performance poets like Gil Scott-Heron...

he’s.... right

My cousin was in high school back then and he said metalheads were usually loud and overbearing as fuck while the alternative/punk kids were these subtle, ironic, snarky edgelord types.

^This. Black culture is very jock/bro/normalfag and doesn't have a well-developed autism strain which is why they're generally not into metal and things like that.

Its most autistic strain is towards fighting games - just vidya in general, now that I think of it - and anime (as well as martial arts movies), actually. It's also kind of odd in that it leaks backwards, which is why rap, even back in Biggie's time a normal, popular rapper could drop a line about vidya and no one would give a shit - and that doesn't happen in rock, for example, and when it does it becomes a meme ("Xbox is a God to me").

It's also specific to anime and vidya and noticeable due to card games. Pokémon TCG and Yu-Gi-Oh events are often very mixed with high numbers of blacks, latinos, asians and white; but Magic the Gathering's events are predominantly white and asian with smattering of latinos and maybe one black guy.

That last line is funny because aren't most metal fans in the U.S. Hispanics nowadays?

All the white boys are into rap.

Hispanics have always been a weird demographic, honestly. The 80's hardcore scene in Louisville had a bunch of Hispanics and that was in buttfuck nowhere, Kentucky.

I don't think anyone ever associated AC/DC or Kiss fans with intelligence.

reminder hispanic isn't a race. lot's of "hispanics" are white.

I know, I fall into Hispanic and also white, but it's a lot more cohesive even amongst the darker skinned ones.

Reminder that christgau has openly admitted to disliking anything masculine and aggressive because it reminds him of his high school bullies.

I get that, it's just irritating seeing white hispanics thinking they aren't white and bitching about white people.

Rock is cringe and for edgelords. Modern people who aren't lame listen to a varient of edm.

Yes. Like I said, that's why he liked Prince (cutesy, androgynous, nonthreatening) but not so much Rick James (macho cock-funk).

Oh yeah, that's bollocks, especially given that the race distinction never happened like it did in the US, so the race culture is bullshit 90% of the time. But similarly dark-skinned Hispanics see themselves closer to white-skinned Hispanics than those do to other whites, so it may be a bit off-putting when that distinction is applied on a group where that isn't common.

...

christgau is such a fucking loser

Really.

>be scrawny awkward nerd in high school
>get slapped around and called names by football jocks
>instead of getting over it like a normal person would, spend the rest of your life taking it out on any music that you imagine would be listened to by macho jocks similar to your old tormentors from the 10th grade

Smart enough to get into Dartmouth at 17, still has the emotional intelligence of a child.

What clued you in? The fact that he wasted those smarts on writing snarky three sentence reviews of children's music for a living?

Another classic.

>Pump [Geffen, 1989]
>If fried brains is your idea of a rock dream, the first side will do the job at least as good as whatever raging slab is also your idea of a rock dream. For five songs, everything loud and acrid about them just keeps on coming--not even tune doctors can stave off the juggernaut. Of course, this band's idea of a rock dream is also the traditional "Young Lust" and "Love in an Elevator"--OK as far as it goes, but I could do with more "Janie's Got a Gun," in which an abused teenager offs her dad. B+

Note the projection he's doing here.

>Janie=himself
>Janie's dad=his high school bullies

lal

Except punk doesn't have pseudo-virtuosity, if anything it's anti-virtuosity

The proof that Christgau is a professional shitposter who was decades ahead of the game, is the fact that he actually wrote “people.”

Yeh if he'd been born in the 1980s he'd just have some shitty page on RYM.

What's wrong with a community being 98% White?

Truly a trailblazer for this board. Only after the singularity will he recieve his deserved respect.

Prince was 'cutesy' and 'nonthreatening'? The album that Christgau praises the most ('Jagger should fold up his cock and go home') is about aggressive fucking and the image Prince maintained in 1980 was of a sex offender. He was infamous and Rick James himself threatened to kill him for pushing the envelope too far

I respect Christgau's opinions on metal more than other critics of his kind who pretended they didn't shit talk Black Sabbath for all of the seventies in favour of Jackson Browne and Carly Simon, only to 'critically reappraise' them because they hated disco or the eighties mainstream

Christgau's Jewish

Actually no, he's of German extraction and his parents were huge Christfags, in fact his brother became a minister. He claims to be a fedora, but you can still clearly tell his upbringing affected his mentality in a lot of ways like how he's constantly acting like a hand-wringing church secretary over macho cockrock bands.

Then again, Christgau never liked Jackson Browne or Carly Simon to begin with (he didn't hate them, he just thought they were meh).

I'm aware Prince and RJ didn't like each other, then again Rick might have just been jealous that Prince blew up at such a young age while he didn't "make it" until he was in his 30s.

Christgau shit on Styx and Journey. That at least counts for something, right?

Wow, he beat up on Journey. That took some real courage.

Shitting on Journey is like punching out congenitally deformed midget and bragging about it afterward.

It's funny though because Rick James got into trouble with Motown due to his coke-fueled degenerate rock star lifestyle going against their family-friendly image.

He didn't jump on the disco sucks bandwagon. I'll give him that much.

>The intelligent metalheads became far more commonplace during the last decade.
Then why aren't they listening to better music?

Still better than Rolling Stone Magazine anyway. At least he didn't ball-polish the amazingly boring Crosby, Stills, and Nash like they did.

BTW, most metal isn't "dumb". The wizards and Satan stuff is usually a metaphor for social commentary of various kinds.

^This.

lmao

I'd imagine Christgau is the most likely critic to be accused of being a sexual predator. His bleating, omega male act doesn't seem very credible to me.

Oh please, he's about as intimidating as a Jello cup. He probably lets his wife peg him during sex.

That's what I mean. It's the person least likely that usually turns out to be the bad guy. Until a few weeks ago, most of us still thought Kevin Spacey was a decent guy.

Also Donald Trump. He comes across as a nice, humble, respectful kind of guy, so who would've thought he'd engage in behavior more associated with raging assholes? It just doesn't figure.

That guy looks like an old boss of mine

A Farewell To Kings [Mercury, 1977]

The most obnoxious band currently making a killing on the zonked teen circuit--not to be confused with Mahogany Rush who at least spare us the reactionary gentility. Imagine a power trio Kansas or Uriah Heep with the vocals cranked up an octave. Or two. D+