"Metal is a world of its own, and even listeners who grew up hearing Led Zeppelin or Quiet Riot on AOR radio rarely combine an appetite for difficult ideas with a continuing passion for such music. Rock intellectuals prefer 'alternative,' even rap, and their disdain rankles the metal faithful--for instance, Deena Weinstein, whose valuable if pedestrian "cultural sociology" Heavy Metal is Bob Walser's* only academic competition. Walser shares this resentment, and indulges in the defensive overstatement it invariably sparks (you'd never guess that many of the young critics who grew up hearing metal remain selectively sympathetic). But the intellectuals who really get his goat are his own professors--anybody in authority who ever gave him a hard time about his plebeian passions."
*Rober Walser, author of "Running With The Devil: Power, Gender, and Madness In Heavy Metal Music"
> getting this intellectually hung up over a genre started by skinny white druggie betas from the united kingdom
He's right. Metal is for literal children.
>Rock intellectuals
Pure Guava [Elektra, 1992]
It's to the half-credit of these Bucks County wise guys that the studio amenities of their major-label debut impel them toward fucked-up sounds, which come hard, rather than fucked-up songs, which they write without thinking (and how). But I don't buy the claim that they'll do anything for a laugh. Ever since they went on about pussy for nine minutes (good idea) in a Princey blues-minstrel drawl (also a good one), I've assumed they were the kind of rec-room gigglefritzes who enjoy a good nigger joke when they're sure their audience is sophisticated enough to enjoy it. And to be perfectly honest, I don't hear one of those here. C+
what the fuck
"And most important, he writes from so deep inside the aforementioned "assemblage of disparate styles" that he pays too much attention to metal's now obsolescent neoclassical strain and too little to the punk-influenced schools that succeeded it. It never seems to occur to him that, for many of us, metal's classical affinities are the very thing that renders it unlistenable--that as far as we're concerned, the instrumentally dexterous, rhetoric-drenched, and often melodramatic approach to meaning the two musics share is what rock-and-roll was put on earth to save us from."
Black Sabbath [Warner Bros., 1970]
The worst of the counterculture on a plastic platter--bullshit necromancy, drug-impaired reaction time, long solos, everything. They claim to oppose war, but if I don't believe in loving my enemies I don't believe in loving my allies either, and I've been worried something like this was going to happen since the first time I saw a numerology column in an underground newspaper. C-
Paranoid [Warner Bros., 1970]
They do take heavy to undreamt-of extremes, and I suppose I could enjoy them as camp, like a horror movie--the title cut is definitely screamworthy. After all, their audience can't take that Lucifer bit seriously, right? Well, depends on what you mean by serious. Personally, I've always suspected that horror movies catharsized stuff I was too rational to care about in the first place. C-
Master of Reality [Warner Bros., 1971]
As an increasingly regretful spearhead of the great Grand Funk switch, in which critics redefined GFR as a 1971 good old-fashioned rock and roll band even though I've never met a critic (myself included) who actually played the records, I feel entitled to put this in its place. Grand Funk is like an American white blues band of three years ago--dull. Black Sabbath is English--dull and decadent. I don't care how many rebels and incipient groovies are buying. I don't even care if the band members believe in their own Christian/satanist/liberal murk. This is a dim-witted, amoral exploitation. C-
Obsessively despising a genre of music he's aggressively ignorant of and deriding it's listeners as mindless subhumans? Looks like Christgau has more in common with metalheads than he'd like to admit...
>>66439014
honestly christgau is just fucking old
he was old decades ago and he's old now
I don't even like metal and he's a shit tier critic
>>66439126
i have a weird kind of respect for him because he's basically been writing tripfag shitposts since the 60s and getting away with it
>>66439150
kek that is surprisingly apt
>>66439091
Yes, anon, you do truly prove that very few people over 15 listen to metal.
Load [Elektra, 1996]
The good thing about being old is that I'm neither wired to like metal nor tempted to fake it. Just as I suspected, these Johnny-come-lately-meet-the-new-boss-same-as-the-old-boss-es can no more do grunge than they can double ledger bookkeeping. Grunge simply isn't their meter. So regardless of what riff neatniks think, this is just a metal album with the songs shortened, which is good because it concentrates their chops, and bad because it also means more singing, which they can't. C+
>>66439150
>>66439196
what makes you think im 15
>tfw I started the copy and paste christgau reviews meme
>>66439150
kek
Backstreet Boys [Jive, 1997]
I'm not claiming I would have gotten the message without a 13-year-old I know broadcasting it from her boombox. But keynoted by two guaranteed pop classics, one dance and one heart, this is genius teensploitation. I give half credit to songwriter-svengali Max Martin, who's put in time with Ace of Base. But as someone who still suspects ABBA were androids, I award the other half to the Boys, without whose sincere if not soulful simulations of soul and sincerity Martin's slow ones would be as sickening as any other promise that's made to be broken. Together the team manufactures a juicy sexual fantasy for virgins who get nervous when performers grab their dicks and think it's gross when teenage ignoramuses copy the move. They deserve one. After all, it is gross. A-
>>66439931
how is he so goddamn based
>>66439408
desu this is a 100% perfectly spot-on assessment of Load and even most Metallica fans would agree with that.
>making a grunge album when grunge was on its last legs
>it's at best ersatz grunge and you can tell these guys don't really have it in them to do it
On Avery Island [Merge, 1996] :(
In The Aeroplane Over The Sea [Merge, 1998] :(
>>66439408
>caring about anything Metallica did after the 80s
lad...
It's Only Rock and Roll [Rolling Stones, 1974]
This is measurably stronger than Goat's Head Soup, and I hear enough new hooks and arresting bass runs and audacious jokes to stretch over three ordinary albums--or do I mean two? I also hear lazy rhymes and a song about dancing with Father Time and two sides that begin at a peak and wind down from there and an LP title that means more than it intends--or do I mean less? B
>>66440077
>>66440196
>they fell for the Load/ReLoad is bad meme
>>66440196
Sure, from a 2016 POV. In the mid-90s however, people were still hoping TBA was a temporary diversion and they'd get back to MOP kinds of business. Load however's when they cut their hair and I think most of the diehard metalheads totally gave up on them.
>>66440213
I remember one of his other columns where he called GHS and IORR "lazy and phoned in" which is not wholly inaccurate, though I don't get why he mentioned Fingerprint File as one of the worst songs on those albums because I think it's pretty damn cool myself.
Making Movies [Warner Bros., 1980]
If any up-and-coming rock-and-roller aspires to auteur status it's Mark Knopfler, and among those with a taste for his rather corny plots (Romeo and Juliet, fancy that) this establishes his claim. Me, I note that this third album closes with his second gay-baiting song, and that I wasn't surprised. Better he should work on somebody else's stories--his guitar has emerged from Eric Clapton's shadow into a jazzy rock that muscles right past Larry Carlton and ilk. Steely Straits, anyone? Or would that be Dire Dan? C+
Arrival [Atlantic, 1977]
Since this is already the best-selling group in the universe, I finally have an answer when people ask me to name the Next Big Thing. What I wonder is how we can head them off at the airport. Plan A: Offer Bjorn and Benny the leads in Beatlemania (how could they resist the honor?) and replace them with John Phillips and Denny Doherty. Plan B: Appoint Bjorn head of the U.N. and Benny his pilot (or vice versa) and replace them with John Lennon and Paul McCartney. Plan C: Overexpose them in singing commercials. Plan D: Institute democratic socialism in their native land, so that their money lust will meet with the scorn of their fellow citizens. C
Reinventing the Steel [Elektra, 2000] *bomb*
>>66438905
but those arent the bad sabbath albums...?
hes like a foreigner in the land of awesome
Follow the Leader [Epic, 1998]
Korn deny they're metal; that's Judas Priest, all four-four pomp and guitar solos. But they nevertheless demonstrate that the essence of metal--an expressive mode it sometimes seems will be with us for as long as ordinary whiteboys fear girls, pity themselves, and are permitted to rage against a world they'll never beat--is self-obliterating volume and self-aggrandizing display. Now calling up death metal's signature groan to prove only to prove he's authentic, poor not-actually-abused Jonathan Davis raps, recites, scats, and sings dull tunes landscaped with eerie licks, odd bridges, and a hyperactive rhythm section. How much his fans identify with "My Gift to You" ("I kiss your lifeless skin"), "Cameltosis" ("You trick-ass slut"), or the tragic "Seed" ("Do I need this fame?") remains unclear. But I'm parent enough to hope they can find a more fully formed designated someone than a guy whose idea of transgressive art is netcasting soft-core s&m to any teenager with a logon. C
>>66440563
>Jonathan Davis
>not abused
Wow, Bob, you hit a new level of dickishness here.
>>66440599
Getting beaten up in school because you were a little faggot who liked The Cure doesn't count as abuse, you know.
>>66440677
No, he was literally abused by his psychotic stepmother and molested by a babysitter. So he made a career out of making music for other faggots who had abusive parents/babysitters. I'm not kidding. Like 85% of Korn fans back in the day were 13 year old daddy issues girls with black nail polish and eye shadow.
>>66440677
Jon was sexually abused by a next-door enighbour as a kid, though. I don't really think Christgau knew about it tho, but if so, yeah, dickish.
>claims to not like metal
>proceeds to give one of Metallica's shittest albums a decent grade
>>66440708
>>66440706
>implying you don't wish you had a hot teenage girl babysitter mentoring you when you were 10
>>66440736
He rated MOP a B- though, still higher than Load.
Dirty Work [Rolling Stones, 1986]
Dreaming of solo glory, Mick doesn't have much time for his band these days--just plugged into his Stones mode and spewed whatever he had to spew, adding lyrics and a few key musical ideas to tracks Ron and Keith completed before the star sullied his consciousness with them. And I say let him express himself elsewhere. For once his lyrics are impulsive and confused, two-faced by habit rather than design, the straightest reports he can offer from the top he's so lonely at, about oppressing and being oppressed rather than geopolitical contradiction. In the three that lead side two, always playing dirty is getting to him, as is his misuse of the jerks and greaseballs and fuckers and dumb-asses who clean up after him, yet for all his privilege he's another nuclear subject who's got no say over whether he rots or pops even though he'd much prefer the former. Especially together with the hard advice of "Hold Back," these are songs of conscience well-known sons of bitches can get away with. Coproducer Steve Lillywhite combines high-detail arena-rock with back-to-basics commitment and limits the melismatic affectations that have turned so much of Mick's late work in on itself. Let him have his own life and career, I don't care. What I want is the Stones as an idea that belongs to history, that's mine as much as theirs. This is it. A
>>66438253
>Le punk rock guy
>>66440820
He's gotta be the only person on the planet who thinks DW is actually a good album and not a complete travesty made by a bunch of guys who had to fulfill a recording contract and wanted to kill each other the whole time. Even diehard Stones fans hated DW.
>>66438740
Hey Art Weeb, what do you think of Neon Genesis Evangelion?
>>66438730 I don't get it when people are hating on a genre of music. It's just so juvenile. If you're talking about a Manowar-style of heavy metal, well yeah, it gets freakin' boring after a while. But there are some really original and "deep" metal bands like Tool, Opeth, Meshuggah... etc. just to name a few.
>>66440563
post more reviews of numetal bands because these are so accurate
>>66440882
Ok, but again he probably didn't know that since there was no Internet in 1986. I'd guess most people probably didn't know about all the turmoil between Mick and Keith back then. They broke up for several years because of massive creative disputes and egos. I mean, come on. Dirty Work is literally a bunch of songs about how much they can't stand each other.
Still, I'll give Xgau the benefit of the doubt that, like the bit with Jonathan Davis, he simply didn't know a lot of the album's context.
>>66440915
>But there are some really original and "deep" metal bands like Tool, Opeth, Meshuggah... etc. just to name a few.
you were completely right, then posted that
Mechanical Animals [Nothing, 1998]
If only the absurd aura of artistic respectability surrounding this arrant self-promoter would teach us that not every icon deserves a think piece, that it's no big deal to have a higher IQ than Ozzy Osbourne, that the Road of Excess leads to the Palace Theater. Instead, his banned-in-Wal-Mart slipcase job will fade into the haze of records people found interesting at the time. Its strategy is to camouflage the feebleness of La Manson's vocal affect by pretending it's deliberate--one more depersonalizing production device with which to flatten willing cerebella whilst confronting humankind's alienation, amorality, and failure to have a good time on Saturday night. Catchiest songs: "The Dope Show" and "I Don't Like the Drugs (But the Drugs Like Me)." Duh. C+
>>66440932
He wrote a column about DW where he implied that he enjoyed it because of its "honesty" which I assume is because the mid-80s rock scene was so full of fake MTV hairspray rock.
