Intended as a parody of prog

>intended as a parody of prog
>ends up making the best prog album
How did he do it?

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He's just a madman with a flute

Anderson had something most prog rockers simply lacked — common sense, and a very British kind of it at that. Unlike other popular bands he didn't get carried away into complete bullshit fairyland territory. That's something unique to TAAB among its contemporaries — it's very real, instant, urgent even. Also, it's radically different from what was considered the typical prog soundscape of the time — instead heavily inspired by shit like electric blues and folk. It's a breath of fresh air even in the golden age of prog and seriously one of the top albums of its genre.
On another note, Passion Play gets a bum rap, despite being both catchy and bizarre as fuck. The rabbit interlude makes people think the album is far up its own ass, when really it makes fun of high-concept prog by making Winnie the fucking Pooh high-concept. The joke literally went over everyone's head. I swear I've heard some of PP's more chorus heavy bits heavily referenced in 90's rock, electronica and even fucking Nintendo vidya soundtracks.

Passion Play gets a bad rap because music journalism is composed exclusively by brainlets

I'd love to attribute the critical panning to people riding punk's dick really hard, but the three most well-known punk outfits formed in the three years after the release. Still a mystery to me, how dumb do you have to be to completely miss an album of crazy poppy prog?

Music journos have always been retarded, them panning another pinnacle of the genre surprised me as much as the average sunrise.

This Was [Atlantic, 1969]

Ringmaster Ian Anderson has come up with a unique concept that combines the worst of Arthur Brown, Roland Kirk, and your local G.O. blues band. I find his success very depressing. C-

Stand Up [Atlantic, 1969]

Fans of the group think it's a great album. I am not a fan of the group. I think it is an adequate album. B-

Benefit [Atlantic, 1970]

Ian Anderson conducts himself with a principled arrogance that has very little to do with his actual artistic accomplishments. He does admittedly have one great gift--he knows how to deploy riffs. Nearly every track on this album is constructed around a good one or two, and after a few listens you'll have practically the entire thing memorized. But I defy you to recall any lyrics. For all his careful en-un-ci-ation and wordcraft, Anderson creates the impression that he either can't or won't care about his principle theme, which I take to be love/friendship/privacy or something along those lines. I'm sure I hear at least one satirical exegesis on the generation gap, though. C+

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Aqualung [Atlantic, 1971]

Ian Anderson is like the town freethinker--so long as you're stuck in the same small town as him, his inchoate cultural interests and skeptical views on organized religion and human nature can come off as refreshing. Meet up with him in the big city however and he can turn out to be a real bore. Of course, he can also turn out to be Bob Dylan--it all depends on whether he rejected provincial values out of a desire for more, or out of a more axiomatic (and somatic) negativity. And whether he was arrogant simply because he didn't know any better. C+

Thick as a Brick [Atlantic, 1972]

Ian Anderson is the guy who will tell you that one album is a single song and that each side of another album is a theme. The usual shit--rock (getting heavier), folk (getting feyer), flute (getting better because it has no other choice), words. C-

Everything Rocks and Nothing Ever Dies [1990s]

How retarded can one publication be

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Christgau saw Jethro Tull live as well, he wrote a column about it where he said he found it very depressing to pay money to hear a guy with a guitar bitching about society and organized religion for two hours and he'd much rather see the Rolling Stones who at least were capable of having fun.

>Jethro Tull
>Not fun

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Christgau is a brainlet and everybody knows. Also, as another user dutifully noticed
>Jethro Tull
>not fun
You have to be retarded to consider stage antics of a bunch of extremely British bums not fun.

Wait, why was it ok for punk bands to complain about society and organized religion?

Because they dumbed it down enough for Christgau to actually get it.

He said when he went to this concert, some kid told him "The good thing about Ian Anderson is that he's not corny" which I guess ties into what said, he didn't have wizards and unicorns shit like Uriah Heep or some other such bands of that time.

Because none of them really meant it and the music was palatable to everyone, especially "reviewers" who couldn't play an instrument or couldn't express anything other than emotional descriptors when discussing a piece of music.

>>intended as a parody of prog
>>ends up making the best prog album
Sounds familiar.

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He seems to have a real problem with nuance in music or artists using metaphors. Actually since the Rolling Stones were mentioned, he complained in his review of Some Girls that the title track was too indirect for his taste.

Yeah, I don't get the whole "prog is humourless" thing. Sure, some bands are. But Tull and Genesis had a very British, almost Python-esque humour under the surface.

I think Queen were the worst example of it--all the critics ran them into the ground. Their British sense of humor and sarcasm went completely over American critics' heads.

I KNOW WHAT I LIKE
AND I LIKE WHAT I KNOW
GETTING BETTER
IN YOUR WARDROBE

>I think Queen were the worst example of it--all the critics ran them into the ground. Their British sense of humor and sarcasm went completely over American critics' heads.
Also this. It's ridiculous how they could write such obviously silly songs and be seen as trying to be taken seriously.

>got into dartmouth at 16 because he aced his sat

christgau is literally the galactic brain of critics. fantano went to like a community college.

>he didn't have wizards and unicorns shit like Uriah Heep or some other such bands of that time

Dio loved Tolkienshit and he always claimed his songs had social commentary in them, but he left it up to the listener to figure out what he was trying to say.

>he was a smart guy so he's inherently a good music critic
What the fuck are you talking about?

>galactic brain
>only understands punk
>likes iggy azalea
Yeah, no.

>But Tull and Genesis had a very British, almost Python-esque humour under the surface.
Almost the entirety of Canterbury scene bands as well.
youtube.com/watch?v=pu1uRC4tOh0

David Marsh called them the world's first openly fascist rock band. But then, Marsh has been known to call any music he doesn't understand racist and fascist.

Critics are usually very smug, self-important people and one thing they hate is an artist who's smarter than themselves.

>christgau is literally the galactic brain of critics. fantano went to like a community college.
How come he never provided anything other than emotional descriptors and assertions of personal preference then?

i didnt say he was a good criti, just that he wasnt stupid. this is why you didnt do well on your sat like christgau.

Yeah I remember talking with you (or somebody else) about that David Marsh quote. So fucking silly. He took "We Will Rock You" as a fascist creed. Like, holy shit.

>David Marsh
Went to his site and now I'm sad, it's literally years upon years of annual letters to his dead daughter. Still a bad critic though.

Canterbury Scene is the tightest shit and, like all the tightest shit, forever destinied to be relatively niche and unpopular.

Their songs essentially featured throwaway lyrics and were just there to be there. But hey, fascists, right?

Remember that this is the guy who's forever complaining about misogyny in rock but he gave Done With Mirrors a B plus when even Rolling Stone Magazine called out Aerosmith for debasing women there.

While we're on the topic , that's exactly what they mocked in "Share it":
genius.com/Hatfield-and-the-north-share-it-lyrics

Legends were born
Surrounding mysterious lights
Seen in the sky
Flashing
I just lit a fag
And then took my leave
In the blink of an eye

It was a football chant. I mean, there wasn't that much subtlety or underlying meaning to the song. But actually, since it's also been a staple at American sporting events for 40 years, it seems most Americans "got" the song.

Take a look:

Yeah but those are people who pseuds would probably call "plebs" in an attempt to devalue their opinion or general enjoyment of the music. It's vapid, but it's not really supposed to have a deep meaning, and I think the public fundamentally understood (and still understand) that. Over-intellectualising vapid shit is how you get a critic calling them fascistic.

He's also the world's greatest Springsteen nutrider because he's married to a high-ranking Springsteen associate. The dude thinks every album The Boss puts out was crafted by the angels themselves and came down from the heavens to bring light to the world.

Personally, my favorite rock critic was the Brit Nick Cohn. Now there was a guy who was fun to read. I disagree with about 60% of his conclusions, but he was still entertaining to read and you could understand his POV even if you didn't agree with it.

I felt that Cohn stood out because the guy had a sense of humor about himself and the music he was reviewing. He always believed "C'mon, it's just rock and roll. Quit taking it all so seriously." That's something Christgau and so many others fail to grasp, and even worse they treat their personal subjective tastes as objective truth. Few things are more annoying. There are some American critics (Jon Landau) who took self-importance to levels of obnoxiousness previously undreamed of.

If I remember correctly, there was a suspicion of Springsteen's nephew visiting this board and defending everything and anything about Bruce.

I could easily buy the idea that Christgau felt threatened by the possibility that Ian Anderson might be smarter than he is.

Springsteen is a guy of average intelligence who often dabbles in subject matter that's over his head because he feels that he has to live up to the "America's Poet-Laureate" and other titles that the media have bestowed on him.

You'd like Mark Prindle, probably, if you aren't already aware of him.

While we're discussing Jethro Tull, here's another friend of ours with a similar opinion to our favorite friend Christgau:
youtube.com/watch?v=lOqo6scHOwc
>What the hell are we going to do musically now?
>Musical sterility at its pinnacle
And all that in the time of the uprising of progressive rock, the evolution which rock music deserved.

I think there's a fine line that someone like Cohn rides, while people like Scaruffi or Christgau fail. Christgau said on numerous occasions that r'n'r shouldn't be taken seriously, but I think unlike Cohn he completely misunderstands the concept. Yeah, because of post-modernism it's all a joke, a goof, we can all laugh and have fun and not be serious all the time, but it still doesn't mean you can do a half-assed job as a critic. Because by presenting yourself as a critic you say "I know shit, listen to me". And if you aren't doing your best after saying that you're just lying to people. To be frank, I don't think Christgau ever in his life tried his best. He's the definition of half-assed.

There was some British critic--forget who it was--that called Devo a fascist band. To be fair, they didn't ingratiate themselves too well with the media by giving evasive answers in interviews and talking about silly conspiracy theories. All intended humorously, but the media did not like this kind of attitude at all.

>ELP
>Preset solos
I think I barfed a little.

How much of a brainlet do you need to be to think that people singing literally about getting retarded and being happy about it are fascist?

>Christgau said on numerous occasions that r'n'r shouldn't be taken seriously

Unless metal where he usually takes the songs way out of context and imagines that they're suggesting things they aren't or else failing to get the whole humor in them.

I wanna say that Simon Reynolds covered this in his book Rip It Up and Start Again. Devo deliberately used fascist imagery as a joke in their early days and a lot of people never forgave them for it? I remember something like that, but I'm not a big Devo guy so I can't remember the details.

>christgau and metal
Don't even remind me. Like most other things
>the joke
>his head

Very likely.
youtube.com/watch?v=EbK-mt-CP0Y

His review of Master of Puppets also shows that he really didn't understand what Metallica's fanbase were like--he seemed to think they were meathead jocks like the kind who beat him up in the 10th grade when actual thrash metal fans back then were kind of loners and social outcasts. Jocks in the 80s didn't listen to thrash, they were into hair metal and top 40.

Look up the lyrics to The Number of the Beast. The song is about a normie who goes to a metal concert and is shocked by what he sees. I mean, it's pretty obvious.

>too much politics
>not enough politics
Fucking Christgau bitched about Sup Forums before it was mainstream. Trendsetter in the worst way possible.
Have you read his review of Atomizer? I don't think I've ever seen a piece more cowardly — built completely on assumption, concentrated entirely on the percieved fanbase of the band, completely scathing, yet awarded a B+. A 7/10 for an album he said was completely without merit. What?

Billy touched on politics in a few other songs, but it was more generally about the state of American society and how everybody is to blame in ways big and small for the state we were in at the time. And that's a good thing. Because self-aggrandising statements about how the President is bad and the People are good is so grossly hypocritical and ignorant that it makes me want to puke. I'm really glad the album was more general than that.

Just looked up his review and he gave it a C+? That's fucking ridiculous, knowing his tastes. I'm pretty sure he let those preconceptions about Bush and politics get in the way of him really evaluating the content of the album. If The Clash had made the same album he would have praised it like crazy. Also, Christgau completely misunderstood the symbol on the album cover

>That red grenade in the upraised fist? It's also a heart--a bleeding heart. Which he heaves as if it'll explode, only it won't, because he doesn't have what it takes to pull the pin.
The point is that it isn't going to explode because it's a heart and not a grenade, meaning that Billy isn't interested in perpetuating violence. How this could be misconstrued is beyond me because it's a very overt and obvious reference to anti-war libs being referred to as "Bleeding Hearts". He himself comes off as an American Idiot when he complains about it being generically about war and about the album symbol the way he does.

A lot of his reviews (like for Atomizer and Follow The Leader) seem to be based on the assumption that the music is just First World problems/privileged white boy suburban angst and that the fanbase/band has nothing in their life to actually complain about.

Christgau is the guy who thinks The Who should have just kept making TWSO for the rest of their lives instead of evolving artistically.

I don't even think the view on Atomizer as a pretty angsty album is that wrong. But if you get that vibe from it, that's on you, don't immediately go around screeching "that's what fans are like". Christgau not only fails to explain why he feels one way or another, he fails to even acknowledge that it's actually him who's feeling something, he always needs some proxies.

James Hetfield lost both parents by the age of 16, like shit he had no real pain in his life.

Yet somehow he loved Motorhead who were a very meathead band with meatheaded fans.

No, he was a middle class white boy and didn't know suffering, so he turned to metal because it's hollow buttrock.

He thought they were trve pvnk, which is the wrongest way of approaching Motorhead, almost objectively.

Foxtrot [Charisma, 1972]

This band's defenders--fans of manual dexterity, aggregate IQ, "stagecraft," etc.--claim this as an improvement. And indeed, Tony Banks's organ crescendos are less totalistic, Steve Hackett's guitar is audible, and Peter Gabriel's lyrics take on medievalism, real-estate speculators, and the history of the world. This latter is the apparent subject of the 22:57-minute "Supper's Ready," which also suggests that Gabriel has a sense of humor and knows something about rock and roll. Don't expect me to get more specific, though--I never even cared what "Gates of Eden" "really meant." C

Another classic in which he imagines what a band's fanbase is like or what they want in their music.

Peter Gabriel [Mercury, 1980]

After hitting a sophomore jinx with Peter Gabriel, on Atlantic, the first man of Genesis fulfills the promise of Peter Gabriel, on Atco--with pessimistic postprog art-rock minidrama rather than DIY DOR. "Games Without Frontiers," a different kind of internationalism, and "Biko," a different kind of Africanism, lead and finish side two rather than side one. Either he doesn't know his own strengths or he underestimates his audience--or both. B-

Bob...Bob...England was a mess back then with breadlines and IRA bombings. Nobody wanted to have a dance party.

Lemmy never claimed to be punk anyway, he always just said "Motorhead plays rock and roll".

Would apply to Lars Ulrich though. Fucking rich douchebag who just wanted the rock star lifestyle and didn't care about the music.

I've written this once in a Christgau thread, but here it is again, line by line
>immediately attacks his strawman perception of band's fans
>completely omits Banks' parts on Supper's Ready
>yeah, no shit guitar is audible, the previous album had a complete shit mix
>praises Gabriel's versatility and admits that he knows something about r'n'r
>"deep" finisher
>5/10
The only thing you can actually learn about this album from the review is the fact that it's mixed better than the previous one. What's the point of this "criticism"?

Memes aside, Lars has always come off as an ungrateful, entitled jerk. Everybody else in the band (or at least Kirk and James, I'm not familiar with the bassist) seem like nice guys who are grateful to their fans. But Lars throws fits about the people who've supported him who have also torrented his music. Like, fuck that guy.

That's what makes him a trvepvnk

>poor not-actually-abused Jonathan Davis
This was pretty douchebaggy on his part. Wasn't Jonathan Davis actually molested as a kid or something?

Yes, that's what "Daddy" was about, and it's become one of Korn's most notorious songs in a way because of the history behind it.

Cliff Burton was the guy who made Metallica tick. He made the rest of the fuckers work their asses off. Seems like he was a bit OCD about getting shit just right. Poor bastard died in a way no one should.

Oh when I say the bassist I mean the current one, not Cliff. Though, to be fair, I don't know a lot about him either. I just know he was kind of like the manager for the band in terms of setting shit up or getting shit done.

He also accused Siouxse Sioux of being a poseur/Sex Pistols groupie when she was raped as a child.

The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway [Atco, 1974]

I wanted to call this the most readable album since Quadrophenia, but it's only the wordiest--two inner sleeves covered with lyrics and a double-fold that's all small-type libretto. The apparent subject is the symbolic quest of a Puerto Rican hood/street kid/graffiti artist named Rael, but the songs neither shine by themselves nor suggest any thematic insight I'm eager to pursue. For art-rock, though, it's listenable, from Eno treatments to a hook that goes (I'm humming) "on Braw-aw-aw-aw-aw-aw-dway." B-

He gives this one a bit of a pass because it's set in NYC.

Really? Not saying you're a bullshitter because Christgau saying something awful wouldn't surprise me, but do you have a link?

Christgau thinks that because nothing bad ever happened to him, the same must be true for everyone else he dislikes

Go to his website and look up the reviews for Siouxse and the Banshees, it's all there.

>not being able to follow the plot
>not enjoying the beautiful pop arrangements
What
A
Brain
Let

He didn't call her a groupie, but does assert she was a Johnny Rotten fan. Still, he comes off as an ignorant dude who asserts things wildly without really knowing if they're true or not

>repeatedly calls her "Siouxsie Pseud" as if he's even moderately clever for coming up with a bad pun
>one of his reviews doesn't talk about the music one bit aside from the stupidly - and purposefully - contradictory statement "tunefully atonal"
>shits on her the entire second review while giving her a B+ purely because he likes the genre
>repeatedly compares her to Jim Morrison, because why not?
Oh well.

>intended as a parody of waifu simulators and sonic.exe
>ends up making the best in both categories simultaneously
Art is independent of the context in which it was made, and even the explicit purpose for which it was made.

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I feel like we can write a bingo card on this guy and fill it with any random review.

>bideo bames
>art

You know what's great? Tull's folk phase is great. What's your top track from their "country life" albums? Heavy Horses gets me every fucking time.
Doki is shit, but c'mon, stop this.

pop music isn't even considered art. idk why you think bideo shits are

Okay let's make a list. We need 24 tiles, right?
>Talks about a band's fanbase
>Talks about an artist's upbringing negatively
>Complains that the album is too high concept
>Review is only 3 sentences or less
>Review doesn't talk about the music
>Gives an album he shits on a B+ or higher just because it's punk or hip-hop

Any others?

>Finishes with an abstract pseudo-deep sentence
>Complains about political content of the album (too much/not enough)
>Bitches about sexist lyrics
I'm not sure about the last one, might be too rare for a bingo. Let me think some more.

Yeah I'm not sure Christgau talks enough about sexism for that to be on his bingo card.

>calls a band punk despite it being not punk at all
Also, make the free square "ersatz shit", that phrase is the best meme Christgau ever coined.

Yeah I gotta give it to him, "ersatz shit" makes me laugh, and he wrote it nearly 40 years ago.