Albums The Critics Got Wrong?

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 jude111 wrote:

 moshkito wrote:

Hi,

The long cuts from 1970 to 1972 and 1973 got pasted by the press regularly, and it was considered by many to be over done and not musical, because it did not follow the top ten blues/song format that the corporate kissing magazines were supporting!

As such Yes, got a terrible licking for Tales from Topographic Oceans, and it was one of the best thigns ever written in rock music! Jethro Tull took just as much abuse for "A Passion Play" which is a prophetic work in terms of its analogies to the history of music and rock specially. And many others fell into the same thing to the point that everything had to be 4 minutes long, specially when the FM radio in America got bought out by the corporations that alread owned the music distribution circles.

A lot of the European scene got terribly pasted in the American press. England had a more interesting attitude about European music, but the hippocrisy never stopped. But Melody Maker one day even said that Tangerine Dream sounded like Washing machine music, and of course, that told you that they were stoned senseless, to the point that they did not even know what a washing machine sounded like! But we didn't give a sh*t, enough, to put those morons in their place! But the joke is on them ... their favorite kissypoo rock bands are not remembered and a lot of the other stuff they hated ... there it is!

It's one of the saddest and hippocritical things about life ... we never appreciate things HERE AND NOW ... we always love something else, and ignore our own children, and thus the arts for their day, never arrives! We're too damn selfish to even spend time understanding that and seeing things in a more historical vein. The 70's became the greed is good generation, and their kids, are the ones that picked up the progressive music where their parents left it off!

Some good stuff here. One of the good things about the internet is that it's broken the hegemony of the corporate music press, in which a handful of critics and magazines decided what was "good" and what wasn't. I remember when the American music critics were pushing Tom Petty, Jackson Browne, and Bob Seger as the saviors of rock music. (American music critics tended very strongly to promote American music. I believe this still continues, on sites like Pitchfork and others, if to a lesser extent.) I pretty much had no use for them from that point on. Those critics became the dinosaurs they accused bands like Yes and Floyd of being. Poetic justice indeed.

The inane  New York clique of critics, like Robert Christgau and the imbeciles at Rolling Stone were pushing their agenda very early on and were extremely negative about Prog music (as Mosh mentioned Jethro Tull regularly received scathing reviews). But even someone who now commands much respect in the rock world like Neil Young got horrible reviews for albums like Harvest and After the Gold Rush.

Humorously, after vilifying Neil in their magazine, Rolling Stone later gave both albums 5 stars in their ratings books -- because the rag spends most of its time trying to rewrite rock history, ignoring its own lunacy with a revisionism that equates to publisher Jann Wenner's need to include only bands he approves of in his b*****dized Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Hence, rap bands, the Jacksons, ABBA and other pop performers who were never considered specifically "rock" bands are enshrined, while Yes, King Crimson, Jethro Tull, Deep Purple and The Moody Blues are not. Which is profoundly f***** up.

Edited by The Dark Elf - January 26 2014 at 11:04