But rather than appeal to kids' innate curiosity and idealism...

But rather than appeal to kids' innate curiosity and idealism, the industry instead decided to cater to all that was cowardly, stupid, and brutal in the rock audience. Heavy metal for all its symphonic bombast is a real rock and roll style, but with very few exceptions, its content is egotistic at best and nihilistic at worst. Meanwhile, nostalgia-mongers and schlock merchants of all kinds turned AM radio into the refuge from intelligence that cynics always believed it to be.

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Other urls found in this thread:

davidliebman.com/home/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/meditations.pdf
rbt.asia/mu/thread/78167929/#78172255
youtube.com/watch?v=OTCZq_n-5qA
youtu.be/OTCZq_n-5qA?t=5m17s
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>But rather than appeal to kids' innate curiosity and idealism, the industry instead decided to cater to all that was cowardly, stupid, and brutal in the rock audience

So what he's saying is "Rock should have a political message I agree with rather than just being about having fun/getting wasted/fucking hot women."

Christgau is honestly the pinnacle of soy

> be weasley scrawny nerd in high school
> get pushed into lockers too many times by rock-listening chads
> dedicate the rest of your life to panning music with any hint of testosterone

pathetic desu

0% chance christagu wasnt bullied in high school

Do you know what they say about him? He's the master of elegantly (eloquently) saying absolutely nothing at all.

He loves the Rolling Stones and they have plenty of testosterone songs about getting laid.

Yeh but Mick Jagger has always been kind of andro/sexually ambiguous. I don't think he comes off as sexually threatening to Cuckgau as AC/DC.

you forget to mention that he stayed married to his wife after she cuckolded him

I admire your dedication to shitposting

He does seem to really have no sense of nuance which is probably why he likes punk so much.

I get the impression that Black Sabbath were a little too much for him. Not in terms of their music or arrangements, but the songwriting. Something like Electric Funeral is a bit more than he wants to deal with.

Music critics, especially the famous ones who write about pop music, make up most worthless form of art critique on the planet.

Fuck off, Gene Simmons.

Based Lou

"You spend an entire year working on something only to get a B plus from some asshole at the Village Voice. Fuck that, I don't need someone to tell me I'm good. I know I'm good! What does Robert Christgau do in bed? You know, is he a toe-fucker? Man, anal-retentive—The Consumer’s Guide to Rock? What a moron! A Consumer’s Guide to Rock, man! I object to the fucking liner notes. Start studying rock and roll? I can’t believe it. “Baroque Rock: A Study by Robert Christgau."

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Street Hassle [Arista, 1978]

I know Lou worked his ass off on this one, but he worked his ass off on Berlin too--like so many of his contemporaries, maybe he should stop trying to create masterpieces. After being annoyed for the longest time, I eventually warmed to "I Wanna Be Black", which treats racism as a stupid joke and gets away with it. But the production is muddled and the self-consciousness self-serving. B-

You can tell from this review that he was feeling a slight tinge of guilt from Take No Prisoners.

I have to say I disagree, Christgau, being the seasoned reviewer he is, has a lot of things to say. His reviews tackle the very core of the music he's listening to, he's heightened critic sense and intelligent being his main weapons, making him the epitome of a music critic. No one else has ever reached such a level of consistency, commitment and analysis he has. He submits himself to listening to all kinds of music, be it intelligent prog or shallow heavy metal, a noble sacrifice in order for us that are less learned than him can safely listen to only music with the highest degree of meaning, thought and talent poured into it. While sometimes he has recommends duds, he, for the most part, has a very good and well rounded taste in music, after all no one's perfect, not even such a man. It's safe to say that Robert Christgau is the best rock reviewer out there, fact that can easily be proven by taking a quick gander at his writings on his multiple magazines (another proof that he is, in fact, a great reviewer) and his website. Only a less intelligent and simple minded would think so, don't you agree? You should.

nice bait

t. Christgau

lol

>it's not a pasta
oof

You're always so verbose, condescending, defensive, and self-defeating in your postings here that there is even less chance of you not getting dunked on in high school, middle school, grade school, and pre-school.

You're wrong though. Christgau has major bias against artists he doesn't like, to the point that he'll disregard entire albums by them. He's an insecure cunt, and your pasta is stale.

Isn't this the same guy that dismisses progressive rock because it's too pretentious or high concept?

To be fair, he makes it clear what his biases are from the getgo, and doesn't waste his own or his audience's time reviewing albums by artists he already knows he is very unlikely to enjoy or recommend.

he called ITCOTCK "ersatz shit", so yes

>To be fair
No. As a reviewer your job is to provide people with an unbiased review of the artists work.

Thank god we had gangsta rap in the 1990s to save us from all that rock and roll nihilism.

Even though this is clearly bait, as "intellingent" and "sophisticated" as he is, he never offered anything other than emotional descriptors in his reviews. That is, when they were vaguely related to the music or the band he's discussed.

Well it sounds like he wants to have it both ways. He wants music to have no particular meaning while also being ABOUT something. Fuck him.

Yes. He shit all over ELP because you "can't dance to it"

he's afraid of people being better than something at him. that's why he likes punk music and meme rap, because anyone can make it

Nobody on the planet has no biases.

christgau is a faggot and all but that's impossible

You really don't know what constitutes a music review, do you? It shouldn't be a persuasive essay or a reaffirmation of reviewer's own taste.

Not quite, he wants all rock music to be made by working class white men or opressed minorites about being working class, an opressed minority, and girls. Anything trying to be more than that or tell some kind of story is "ersatz shit"

But your post said that a reviewer's job is to be unbiased, which is literally impossible. Even the best reviewers tend to stick to genres they understand, and that's because their biases makes them unqualified to evaluate certain types of music. There's a reason Simon Reynolds doesn't mouth off about jazz. He's a brit who grew up in the '80s and doesn't really understand jazz. He understands punk and electronic music, and that's what he's talked about his entire career. He has his biases, and he knows to eliminate them in his writings. Now if Christgau could do that, he would probably be much better.

A lot of metal is made by working class whites. He sounds like a hypocrite or somebody with an inconsistent set of moral values.

>But your post said that a reviewer's job is to be unbiased, which is literally impossible
Again:
>It shouldn't be a persuasive essay or a reaffirmation of reviewer's own taste
That's exactly where biases appear, if these elements are introduced. I will provide an example, don't worry. A music review should describe what someone is listening to, as clearly and as thoroughly as possible.
davidliebman.com/home/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/meditations.pdf
rbt.asia/mu/thread/78167929/#78172255

Once again, the uneducated masses proves Christgau's point.
First of all, I am not Robert Christgau. He wouldn't waste his time on a decadent imageboard that praises unintellectual music like Radiohead and King Crimson. He doesn't need the approval of any of you, he's comfortably fine with his own intellect. I speak on his behalf, as a fellow intellectual and an admirer. Second of all, I don't know what some of you "Anonymous" means by bait (sorry, still getting the hang of it, I'm a 75yo old man who doesn't have the time for this kind of millenial thing). I am saying my own, and by proxy, Christgau's opinion on lesser music.

I see there are fellow intellectuals on this thread. Keep on educating the masses. I have to warn you that such a job isn't a rewarding job, as exemplified by all the people who have "replied" to my post.

ITCOTCK (or In the court of the crimson king, for those like me, who aren't very good at stooping as low intellectually as to spell things with acronyms), is artificial shit. It has no soul. No technicality. No melody. Nothing. It's just there, the only remotely enternaining thing about it is the album cover, because it perfectly represents my reaction when I listen to it. Maybe if you had more knowledge, and studied a bit, you'd know that.

I do not have biases. I, being a professional music critic, am not capable of having biases. My writings are completely objective, as anyone with the mental capacity of an adult would know. You should be ashamed of spouting bullshit over the internet.

I have certain genres I like and don't like, for example country doesn't appeal to me much, but I don't go out of my way to dismiss the entirety of country, attack its fans, and argue that it has objectively no artistic merit.

I am sorry. On my last line, I meant "He" instead of I. I'm not Christgau. He wouldn't post here, because he doesn't need the approval of anyone here. He's above that.

Yeah and that's why Christgau is a bit of a hack. But there are all these tiny biases people have even in the genres they really understand. I'm biased against punk bands who copy and paste formulae established in the early and mid '70s, and it's probably not a good thing because there's (probably) been a lot of good music with those formulae.

You are putting too much effort for a dead board. This could be a Monty Python sketch. Do anything even resembling that, please.

Me, I fail to get the appeal of punk. How many 90 second three chord songs complaining about the government can you listen to?

>How many 90 second three chord songs complaining about the government can you listen to?
Many, and even praise them, when you're a hack like Christgau is.

Yes but it's themes are many times nihilistic or telling some kind of grand story which is no-no to Christgau

>Well it sounds like he wants to have it both ways. He wants music to have no particular meaning while also being ABOUT something. Fuck him.

All those first generation rock critics were like that. They wanted rock to be taken seriously as an art form, but at the same time they still wanted it to be silly, loud dance music for teenagers like the 50s rock and rollers they grew up with. That was why all these guys embraced punk, because it was simple and loud, but it had politics so had at least a superficial degree of "seriousness" to it.

And somehow, Bruce Springsteen could write nihilistic songs about decaying Rust Belt towns multiple times across many albums and get A, A, A, A, B Plus, A, A, A ratings.

Springsteen is the most dire, fun-free artist I've ever heard. Nebraska isn't my idea of fun rock and roll, I'm sorry.

Go fuck yourself christgau, prog rock is great and you have shit taste.

youtube.com/watch?v=OTCZq_n-5qA
This is a real gem.

Punk politics are absolutely cringe for the most part.

Is this post bait or just hardcore cherrypicking?
This dude got shoved into lockers every other day as a kid. You can just tell.

youtu.be/OTCZq_n-5qA?t=5m17s
>Used to be able to see Ornette Coleman and John Coltrane on the same bill. That was good.
But rock music trying to elevate itself to the same heights jazz did? God, no.

Not everyone can be as big of a faggot as Christgau.

:^)

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The other day I happened to listen to Hellyeah--Hell of a Time and I thought "Christgau would probably like the working class anger in this song, but he'd hate their image because they'd remind him of his old high school bullies."

neo-Sup Forums is so shitty that the "shit on christgau" threads are still better and more entertaining than 95% of threads on this board

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+

Catch the projection he's doing here.

Janie=me
Janie's abusive dad=my old tormentors from Jamaica High

my favorite is the one where he fantasizes about how much robert smith gets laid

>Staring at the Sea: The Singles [Elektra, 1986]
Caught in his least lugubrious moments, Robert Smith stands revealed as a guy who gets a lot of skin because he believes he can live without it. He just won't play the "stupid game" that hooks the definitive "Let's Go to Bed," with its rotating I-don't-if-you-don't challenges--care, feel, want it, say it, and of course play it (and now let's go to bed, it's getting late). Guys who don't make passes because they wear glasses hate him for this, as do guys who don't get laid despite their muscular bods and heads. Above the fray, I think he's kind of amusing myself--a real cool type. B+

This was, uh, deeply personal and odd if true.

Lol, perfect analogy for people who wont shut up about how soy everything is.

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you had me going up until this post

>tfw Robert Smith has been with his wife since they were 14

Master of Puppets [Elektra, 1986]

I feel at a generational disadvantage with this music, not because my weary bones can't take its power and speed, but because I was born too early to have had my dendrites rewired by progressive 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 Schwarzenegger as Conan the Barbarian--all flowing hair and huge pecs. That's the image Metallica calls up, and I feel no more obligated to summon their strength of my own free will than I would the 1812 Overture's. B-

your trying too hard buddy

Sounds exactly like pretentious gamers today
>video games are a legitimate art form with social importance
>but they’re also just silly games for kids and the violent content has no reflection on reality

He loves speculating about artists' sex lives for some reason.