Search Results
7/1/2025, 7:14:18 PM
how does he do it?
6/27/2025, 5:11:07 AM
>>126835925
>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 time are Duke Ellington and John Coltrane, who were not the most famous or richest or best sellers of their times, let alone of all time. Classical critics rank the highly controversial Beethoven over classical musicians who were highly popular in courts around Europe. Rock critics, instead, 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.
In a sense, the Beatles are emblematic of the status of rock criticism as a whole: too much attention paid to commercial phenomena and too little to the merits of real musicians. If somebody composes the most divine music but no major label picks him up and sells him around the world, most rock critics will ignore him. If a major label picks up a musician who is as stereotyped as can be but launches her or him worldwide, your average critic will waste rivers of ink on her or him. This is the sad status of rock criticism: rock critics are basically publicists working for major labels, distributors and record stores. They simply highlight what product the music business wants to make money from.
>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 time are Duke Ellington and John Coltrane, who were not the most famous or richest or best sellers of their times, let alone of all time. Classical critics rank the highly controversial Beethoven over classical musicians who were highly popular in courts around Europe. Rock critics, instead, 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.
In a sense, the Beatles are emblematic of the status of rock criticism as a whole: too much attention paid to commercial phenomena and too little to the merits of real musicians. If somebody composes the most divine music but no major label picks him up and sells him around the world, most rock critics will ignore him. If a major label picks up a musician who is as stereotyped as can be but launches her or him worldwide, your average critic will waste rivers of ink on her or him. This is the sad status of rock criticism: rock critics are basically publicists working for major labels, distributors and record stores. They simply highlight what product the music business wants to make money from.
6/23/2025, 11:33:53 PM
>Automatic for the People (Warner Bros, 1992) confirms, a year later, the crisis that had been latent, drawing inspiration precisely from the weaker songs of the previous album, emphasizing orchestral arrangements and an elegiac mood. R.E.M. have often changed personality from one album to the next, and Automatic perhaps represents the peak of this schizophrenia. Suddenly, Stipe immerses himself in a dark and fatalistic atmosphere, halfway between a heroin addict’s nightmare and the final note of a suicide. Drive finds the strength to rise up in one of their epic psalm-like chants, perhaps the most heartfelt of their career, underlined by orchestra and accordion. Buck accomplishes one of his masterpieces of understatement and sparseness, limiting himself to strumming the acoustic guitar motif. Obsessed with the theme of death, the album broods over moods without offering solutions. Drive passes the baton to Everybody Hurts, an even more absorbed meditation, sung in a high, vibrant, soul-like register (and featuring yet another riff stolen from the Troggs), which then hands it off to the tender tribute of Man on the Moon (where the tragic fate of comedian Andy Kaufman becomes a metaphysical allegory), with finally a classic-style surge.
Page 1