Christgau is a fucking hack

The deal with punk is that most rock critics are failed musicians/lyricists so they like music that doesn't take any skill to play so they can say to themselves "Hhhhyeah I could totally do that music. Yyyknow, if I wanted to."

critics are the biggest fags in the world and anyone who pays attention to what they say are brain dead morons who cant make their own decisions or interests

Maybe because compilation albums like that one only features the best 3 or so tracks from those albums?

That's the funny part. I've seen various stuff he's written where he admits he can't find an objective problem with metal and whatnot and falls back on the the "Wwwwell it's just my subjective taste, y'know?"

Falling back on the subjective taste argument is a cheap cop-out if you ask me. You don't have to like something but it couldn't kill you to at least give an analytical reason why it's bad.

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He said something about the first three Sabbath albums were slightly preferable to Vol. 4 and up because they were more accessible and pop-structured.

Wait isn't this the same guy who gave an A to a Sleater-Kinney album or something?

but isn't most taste subjective though?

He's admitted he very rarely changes his opinion about an artist or album other than Shania Twain's Come On Over which went from a Neither to an A- rating in Consumer Guide to the '90s.

That's what happens when your main grounds for rating an artist is whether or not it fits your political beliefs. See again . The dude is such a pathetic wigger it's sad in a way.

>You don't have to like something but
It could also kill you to not sound so douchey about it as he does here.

>gets his ass beat by guys who look like Elvis in the 9th grade
>spends the rest of his days being eternally butthurt at any music he thinks his old bullies would listen to

From my experience, it always seems like he's regarded Sabbath as one of his nemesis and although he grudgingly accepted their place in rock history, he's never really liked them or what they represented.

Yeh but S-K matched up with certain political agendas accepted in critical circles.

It always seemed to me that you had to be from the suburbs to "get" metal and maybe being a cityfag, Cuckgau just never had the feel or context for it which is also probably why he gravitates to hip-hop so much.

Rob Halford always claimed that.

I told you.

Why do you faglords follow ANY off these retarded celebrity music "experts"?

In this interview he said hip-hop somehow "clicked" with him even though he has no connection to the culture surrounding it, yet at the same time I'd argue he did for the reasons you mentioned.

We don't. They're mostly memes.

Lyl everyone's known for decades that Black Sabbath are his Kryponite.

Christgau is an embarrassment but Lester Bangs disliked Sabbath too. Hell, a fair amount of critics disliked Zeppelin for that matter.
I can see that being the case. It's why when critics seem to reassess "uncool "bands/genres like prog, metal etc. its because enough "hip" musicians acknowledged their influence

Bangs only disliked the first album and then became a big Sabbath partisan.

>William Hjelte

when did leffen interview christgau

Half this board is that shit now though. It's fucking stupid.

FWIW Tony Iommi admitted he was kind of a bad kid and a bully in his childhood. You wonder if Cuckgau didn't pick up that vibe from their music? ;)

In Consumer Guide to the '70s he said "That's why in this guide I made the case for the McGarrigle Sisters and against Black Sabbath."

I tried Dancer With Bruised Knees which made his top ten albums of 77 and it was all but unlistenable. The best I could make of it was that they were a more upmarket, "hip" version of Heart (who aren't that good anyway, but...)

I'm so glad James Chance punched his stupid smug face in.

themaneater.com/stories/opinion/objectivity-vs-subjectivity-music

thats not true at all, though it may be for you

didnt he say he hates metal because its too masculine or something

Yeah he said Master of Puppets was kind of ok but he thought James Hetfield's hair was intimidating.

I think a lot of American critics panned groups like Sabbath, Queen, and Zeppelin because they didn't understand the British side of the counterculture movement.

black sabbath is one of the most overrated bands in rock music

He got his ass kicked by greasers in the 50s so he hates any music that reminds him of his old bullies.

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>He was every white Southern boy who envied his black neighbor
so much projection

I think he mentioned somewhere that he didn't care for rockabilly. No surprise.

Black Sabbath is fucking boring
>dude tritones lmao
>dude wizards and demons and shit xDDD
>dude check out this really basic riff lets play it for the whole song and have the vocals sing the exact same thing \m/ rock on!!!

Their sound was more about that crunching, heavy power groove than blinding speed and huge vocals.

What a retard

My sister has been to a billion metal and punk shows but she's never liked Sabbath or Zeppelin that much because she says they're too slow and metal pretty much begins with Motorhead for her.

Black Sabbath doesn’t sound remotely heavy considering what exists today. Their music is almost joke tier.

>comparing 1970 to the present
That's a lot of evolution in metal, I mean it's been almost 50 years.

Also power metal is for fags.

...

depends on what you'd classify as heavy really. sweet leaf is still pretty fucking doomy even by today's standards

i take it you don't like stoner metal either then

The riffs on the first 3 Sabbath albums are still fantastic

>music is not subjective
it's not like culture/social interaction/upbringing/language/exposure/experience/emotions affect your perception or taste in any way right?

Still, we can all objectively agree that Nickelback and Soundcloud rap sucks, right?

I would argue there's some degree of subjectivity to music tastes, but at the same time there's also an objective factor otherwise we'd regard Death Magnetic as being as good as Ride the Lightning, except nobody sane does that.

That’s my point. It’s lost the context that made it exceptionally heavy for its time.
Sure the writing can be doomy but the actual production, the songwriting doesn’t flatten you the way a modern doom record does. Like I said, age hasn’t been kind to it.
That’s memorable songwriting, which doesn’t make it heavy at all.

i mean nickelback yes. 'soundcloud rap' as a whole no, because that's generalizing, and generalizations are a. not objective, and b. willfully ignorant. it's not impossible for there to be something good within the genre, even if i personally haven't heard anything of note.

Modern metal (or to say since the 90s) went off the rails by being too inaccessible and extreme.

also though, if even one person enjoys nickelback, then that is their opinion. whether or not their taste itself is 'good' is another matter, but it's still subjective by all definitions of the word

>if even one person enjoys nickelback
Chad Kroeger's mom. That would be it.

>too inaccessible and extreme
nah, there are heavier, more inaccessible forms of music that have nothing to do with metal

There's always a political aspect to taste, don't there isn't. People on the right side of the political spectrum tend to be drawn towards hard rock and metal, people on the left side get drawn to folk and alternative.

I'm not entirely sure I'd consider Whitehouse "music".

So far as there exists objective elements of good music, the biggest is:

Expressiveness. You need to be able to sell the listener on your music. If you don't believe in what you're doing, it can be heard immediately. So even if you don't like something, you can still at least tell when the artist is passionate about what they're doing.

Insincerity is the worst thing that kills a song. It's why Nickelback were shit on--they were only in it for money and basically admitted as much in interviews.

and the millions of people that made them one of the highest grossing live acts between 2000-10. i fucking hate nickelback, and obviously i don't think 'if everybody likes it, it can't be bad!!', but my point is, there are a lot of people out there with different tastes. it doesn't matter what we think about it, it's still just different. good and bad are relative terms anyway, every single person has at least a slightly different way to conceptualize them.

So let's go back to the 50s.

youtube.com/watch?v=rE6V9sxdGpg

This is one hell of a plastic corporate simulation of rock and roll. Note how flat and empty of any feeling it is when you compare the song to Tutti Frutti or Hound Dog.

i can get behind this, but not everybody gives that much of a shit about music. the majority of the public just thinks 'i want something that'll make me happy' and doesn't know how to tell the difference between something cookie-cutter and bland vs something made with obvious love and talent, as long as it fits their general criteria of 'good times' or whatever

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and yet it was probably played on the radio quite a bit because it wasn't considered OUTRAGEOUSLY PROVOCATIVE NEGRO MUSIC and thus fit the severely moderate standards of the era

I'm not sure this is true. I mean, a fuckton of vapid, soulless garbage becomes top 10 hits but it doesn't stick around long or influence any future musical trends.

fpbp

Fabian lasted all of nine months while Elvis will be remembered forever, so... :^)

A lot of people tend to dislike music that relies too much on studio gimmicks or doesn't use real instruments. Not that that makes it objectively bad or anything, but electronic music by definition can't have any expressiveness. The way you play an instrument or sing is a window into your soul, so to speak.

cf.

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I agree but then you get into metalfags claiming people like Frank Sinatra weren't real artists because they didn't play an instrument.

>William Hjelte

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The dude should have asked about Paranoid rather than MOR because it's generally regarded as their magnum opus.

No but he still had real bands with real instruments behind him. As you got past a certain point in time, less and less actual instruments and more electronic chicanery got used in albums.

well sure, i just mean as far as the consumer side. innovative sounds take a long time to make their way to hit-making, and by that point the 'cutting edge' has shifted drastically beyond that. i mean most stuff i've heard in passing on the radio has sounded more or less exactly the same for the past 5 years, with only incremental differences in the production. and even then, some of it wouldn't even sound out of place next to a bunch of early 2000s top-40 stuff.

>electronic music by definition can't have any expressiveness

you haven't heard much electronic music have you?

That fact that he gave Sabbath a C- bothers me less than the fact that he thinks New York Dolls S/T and The Clash S/T are the two greatest rock albums of all time. One sounds like a mediocre Stones cover band, the other is just generic three chord rock that happens to have a political message he agrees with.

Political music is pretty lame. It's equivalent to yelling at the TV because of something you saw on the evening news.

you're talking about two different things. pitch correction and quantizing and so forth, i agree, make music more 'soulless'. but synthesizers, drum machines, samplers, etc. are all incredibly expressive in the right hands, people just tend to underuse them

Critics are mostly English/lit majors which is why they only really like lyrics and they cannot into the musical side of things.

Yeah that. See, the thing about metal is that it deals more with universals like human existentialism. Cuckgau pretty much admitted on more than one occasion that that stuff is more than he likes to deal with.

>To that end, I preferred the knee-jerk sexism of GNR I to the asshole existentialism of GNR II. I found myself putting James Hetfield out of his misery inside of five plays. Life is short and I found it getting shorter with every song.

nah man new york dolls s/t and especially rundgren's production is fantastic. context is everything also, they were more of a big deal in the 70s than they are now.

Metal is shit and you're an embarrassing retard for liking it.

youtube.com/watch?v=Qkja45bS-zc

This sounds cornball as fuck especially the dude's silly Jagger impersonation. Also while the idea of dudes dressing like women seemed kind of edgy in 1972, it wasn't so funny anymore by the late 80s, in fact it was a horrible mistake for what it started.

A B minus band at best and nowhere near the saviors of rock and roll that Bobby thinks they were.

DO YOU THINK PEOPLE COULD HAVE KNOWN ABOUT POISON IN 1972?

I think the guy's problem is that he's never had a real job or been a wagecuck. You have to have done that to "get" a song like Sad But True.

tune kinda kicks ass though... I like the background vocals. I bet they were good live

Ramones [Sire, 1976]
I love this record--love it--even though I know these boys flirt with images of brutality (Nazi especially) in much the same way "Midnight Rambler" flirts with rape. You couldn't say they condone any nasties, natch--they merely suggest that the power of their music has some fairly ominous sources and tap those sources even as they offer the suggestion. This makes me uneasy. But my theory has always been that good rock and roll should damn well make you uneasy, and the sheer pleasure of this stuff--which of course elicits howls of pain from the good old rock and roll crowd--is undeniable. For me, it blows everything else off the radio: it's clean the way the Dolls never were, sprightly the way the Velvets never were, and just plain listenable the way Black Sabbath never was. And I hear it cost $6400 to put on plastic. A

>I love this record--love it--even though I know these boys flirt with images of brutality (Nazi especially)
Oh god, don't tell me he's scared of Beat on the Brat when the song was _clearly_ talking about defending oneself from muggers in the shithole of 70s New York.
>But my theory has always been that good rock and roll should damn well make you uneasy
Interesting how this guy isn't able to follow his own internal logic because I mean, if, say, Iron Maiden or something offends him the way they apparently do, then aren't they doing their job and what proper rock and roll is supposed to do?

Song triggered PTSD attacks of having his face punched in in Jamaica High by guys who looked like James Dean.

Yeah the Dolls are pretty corny but I always had a soft spot for the Ramones, at least the classic late 70s albums. Everything after that I can do without.

>Interesting how this guy isn't able to follow his own internal logic because I mean, if, say, Iron Maiden or something offends him the way they apparently do, then aren't they doing their job and what proper rock and roll is supposed to do?
You'd be surprised at how lacking in self-awareness that most people actually are.

Interesting how, even though I don't agree with this user's opinion, he still provides a better set of reasons for disliking Sabbath than Cuckgau ever did. At least the actual music is mentioned here instead of "I don't like them because they sound too white male identified."

I mean, really. I'd have a hard time even naming a review where he mentions the actual music instead of the artist's image or politics.

based and kurtpilled

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That shitty live album wasn't worth any kind of an A, also the reviews of Nevermind and IU were the usual gibberish and self-projection.

In regards to punk, I guess a lot of critics somehow thought it was a return to 50s rock and roll or at least the British Invasion era before the days of triple albums with 20 minute drum solos. Thing is, it wasn't and it could never be because the times had changed. The late 70s wasn't 1965. It was a cynical time without hope unlike the sunny optimism of the mid-60s.

Yet they praised people like The Stooges who were the antithesis of everything the 60s stood for

I can say one thing I've never liked about country is that slide guitar thing (you know what I mean).

It's more funny because Iggy Pop was ultimate trailer trash, he wasn't part of that effete hipster demo at all. I mean, he was just a dude who jumped around on stage and cut himself with broken glass while high and somehow critics interpreted it to be some postmodernist "art"/critique of modern society.

They always do that, the critics. They take pop music to usually mean more than it does. Sometimes a band is just trying to rock out and there's no hidden messages in their songs calling for world revolution.

I can enjoy Chuck Berry as much as Megadeth. This guy doesn't seem to realize that you can have your cake and eat it too.

No idea about you but Megadeth sucks ass. I like a lot of metal but they were never good and Dave is a faggot.

is that the guy in the cover of Naked City's s/t

>112 posts
>25 ips
yikes

>being "uneasy" about Jews using Nazi-imagery
Jesus Christ, what a huge faggot.

B I G L E F F

Not him but Megadeth is peak thrash and you are a pleb

>Wait isn't this the same guy who gave an A to a Sleater-Kinney album or something?
Find a big name critic who didn't give glowing praise to Sleater-Kinney. They and Pavement were the critical darlings of the 90s. And both certainly had their moments, but critical consensus tends to raise a number of other questions.

not just big but
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Rundgren could make anything sound good, The Dolls were pretty shitty