Rock Critics are Worse than Useless

This is a long one.  If you're looking for the TL;DR version, sorry oh denizens of Short Attention Span Theatre, there isn't one.

My oldest (Thing 1) and I recently had a debate over the relative musical merits of Kate Bush: I think she has merit, Thing 1 thinks she does not.  It was one of those debates and ultimate disagreements that reasonable, educated people have that, far from being destructive, add the sort of spice to life to keep it from being an unrelieved death march.  I'm not a fanboy for anyone, including Kate Bush.  I long ago started thinking of her as the Charles Ives of pop music: a pile of interesting ideas that often deliver something significant but at least as often get in each other's way.  Like Ives, people tend to either love her or hate her and have legitimate reasons for both positions, but tend to simply entrench for "reasons."  And this sort of "debating" got me thinking (a dangerous prospect).

The whole discussion with Thing 1 started when I watched a 2014 BBC documentary on Kate Bush.  I thought it was pretty well done.  It showed a number of intelligent, talented people who find merit in Bush's work.  It interviewed Lindsay Kemp, who still had four years left in the tank at that point, and showed his influence on art rock at the time (basically everybody from Bowie on) (It also showed a couple of other things, perhaps without meaning to.  It showed through Kemp's gestures the extent of mime vocabulary's influence on what might be characterized as "gay mannerisms", Kemp being a dancer and choreographer with heavy mime influence, having studied with Marcel Marceau.  It also shows the difference between European artists and intellectuals and US pseudos.  In the interviews, several people casually remark on having seen Kemp's "Flowers", based on Jean Genet's "Notre Dame des Fleurs".  You would be hard-pressed to find any in the US to this day, outside of core LGBTQ+ culture, who have heard of Kemp, "Flowers", or even Jean Genet other than by reference.).  And then toward the end it shows why rock critics as a group are ignorant, vicious little parasites.  More on that below the fold, wherever the Hell that might be.

Once upon a time I was in newspapers, and one of the things I did was write music reviews.  It was a paycheck, and as I’ve noted elsewhere, I’ve always been closely involved with music.  I wrote by two rules: 1) Be consistent, and 2) make it about the music on its own terms.  On the first point, it doesn’t matter if the readers agree with you; they just need to know what to expect from you.  If they know you don’t like a particular artist or a particular type of music, they can read you through the appropriate filter.  The second point breaks in two.  First, it’s about the music, not the people.  I did not savage Van Halen because they were pricks who brutalized the little people who had to service their every whim.  I went after Eddie Van Halen (who let’s face it was the real core of the band) who went shredding up and down the fretboard at random with no regard for chordal or modal structures (In fairness to Mr. Van Halen, he no longer plays like that and is a far superior musician than when every blockhead with a K-Mart electric six-string thought Eddie was God and gave us a generation of speed monkeys with zero musicianship.) (The speed monkey syndrome unfortunately spread to other instruments.  It was the overwhelming norm among the Celtic fiddlers who followed Bonnie Rideout to Ann Arbor and insisted on playing faster than their talents, compensating by dropping notes out at random, and then blaming all the rest of us for all the ensemble issues.  To all of you, I give an eternal, “Fuck you and the banshee of an instrument you tuck under your hiply stubbled chins and rape with your bows.”).  Second, you have to put it in the music’s own frame of reference.  It makes no sense to pan a Metropolitan Opera performance of Cosi fan Tutte because it isn’t a Black Sabbath concert.  I realized early on that almost no rock music critics could grasp either of my rules (From this point on, you may assume that “Robert Christgau is a wanker” is flashing subliminally in the background.).

From the beginning of such things, Rolling Stone has been the center of rock criticism (I just damned near wrote “crock recidivism”.  I’m not a nice person.).  It has also been the center of what is wrong with rock criticism for just as long.  These guys were groupies.  They were wannabes who couldn’t cut it, so they hung out with the guys who could, basking in the limelight.  The reviews weren’t reviews, they were hagiographies.  “The music must be great because I party with these guys.”  “They must be significant because I party with these guys.”  Everything was on a chummy, first-name-only basis (“Mick and Keith were really rockin’ it Thursday night.”) that became the norm for roughly forever (Cam Crowe slipped a screamingly funny joke about The Rocket’s review style in his movie Singles.).  As tastes changed and their substance-abuse buddies died, faded away, or became arena bands (and now nostalgia bands playing the Peppermill in Wendover), Rolling Stone found itself unsuccessfully playing catch-up, jumping on every bandwagon that rolled down the street in a desperate attempt to get in front of The Next Big Thing and failing miserably.  If it weren’t for Matt Taibbi, that rag would have no reason to exist.

In the 70s other rags stepped into the breach, but they took the Stone’s style sheet and were all clones of one another.  They couldn’t comprehend my rules, either.  I remember one of these rags (probably Circus, but who honestly gives a shit at this point, they were fungible) going after every Harry Chapin recording because it “wasn’t rock.”  Well no shit, Sherlock.  Chapin wasn’t a rocker, he was a folkie, self-proclaimed, and condemning him for not being what he wasn’t was…well…not even wrong.  Congratulations, rock critics, you just earned Stephen Fry’s second-greatest insult, right after “I almost care.”

There was one exception to the Clone Wars: Creem.  But that didn’t make it good, just different.  Admittedly, Creem was covering a lot of things no one else was, including the early days of punk and all that was happening over at CBGB.  But my gods the pretension.  Memo to Lester Bangs: Just because you covered something doesn’t mean you invented it.  Just because you came up with the label “punk rock” doesn’t mean you created punk rock.  Punk rock was created by garage bands (US) and pub bands (UK) (I always envied the UK guys because no matter how, frankly, BAD you were, there was someone willing to book you.  Here in the US?  Not so much.  Although you could always get homecoming and prom gigs if you were just another shitty cover band.) (Punk was spawned by my half-generation, the Late Boomers.  The reason was simple: We were fucking sick and tired of the hypocrisy of the Early Boomers, our big brothers and sisters.  They were the 60s Children, the Flower People, and they were still peddling that bullshit even though the wheels had fallen off the wagon and there was a global recession.  They accused us of being self-centered for not “working for change” like them while they busily leveraged the huge advantage of having sucked up everything before we ever got on the scene.  They took their 60s, corporatized, commoditized, packaged, and slapped a smiley face on them, and expected us to swallow it all without question.  The problem was that we just didn’t believe hard enough in the dream.  Meanwhile we were saying, “The fuck?  Our dreams hit the wall at 110 per in Fall ’73!  The wreckage is everywhere, but you dicks and everybody else is just stepping over it like it isn’t there!”  We wanted to wave our private parts at them, so we did.  Which is a long way of telling you Millennials that, if you lump the Early and Late Boomers together, your ignorance is showing.  Yeah, there are plenty of Late Boomers who sold out [You hear me, Barry Obama?  You sold us all out, but history will always remember you fondly because you landed between the Texas Turd Tornado and Hitler 2.0.], but we were the first ones to face the New Normal you folks are now dealing with.  You need old wise men and women for your villages?  Trust me, we’re available in hordes.)

As yet another aside, there were garage bands, and there were garage bands.  None of us were very good, but most of us wanted to improve to something resembling competency.  The early punkers simply didn’t care (Hell, a lot of them, such as the New York Dolls, were so bad they made The Kingsmen sound like conservatory virtuosos.  And the Noo Yuck critics, apparently on permanent bad acid trips from frequent visits to Andy Whore-wall’s Fucktory, kept rubbing out one after another for them all.  “Daringly campy!”  “A raw, animal sound!”  Shit-shoveling by rapidly deteriorating white guys desperate to continue being perceived as bleeding edge.).  Fortunately, this only lasted a few years before a lot of the punkers decided it maybe would not be so inauthentic if they actually learned how to play their instruments.  I don’t care what John Lydon continues to blow out his ass, Black Flag was never boring.

But I really can’t leave the topic of pretension without a mention of The Village Voice, the self-proclaimed font of all things cool and hip for over six decades and running.  In reality The Village has been overrun with gentrifying yuppie scum straight off the set of Thirtynothing since before Rudy Giuliani parked his malignancy in the Mayor’s Office, and The Voice has followed suit.

And Robert Christgau was at the center of it all.  It has never ceased to amaze me how someone so admittedly ignorant could be such an expert on everything.  He admits he is “not at all well-schooled” (understatement) in 50s and 60s jazz, yet he has reviewed jazz artists such as Miles Davis, Ornette Coleman, and Sonny Rollins without any of that context and has declared Frank Sinatra the greatest singer of the 20^th Century (A meaningless statement.  How can you compare Sinatra and, say, Pavarotti?  You can’t, and anyone with a lick of humility and two brain cells to rub together doesn’t even try.) while apparently ignorant of Nelson Riddle’s role in creating Sinatra’s best albums.  He was an early promoter of punk, right through all the “authentic vs. poseur” wars, blissfully unaware that this was not a rebellion unique to punk but rather was a recurring fight in music, most recently before that in the “this is jazz/this is not jazz” that started with the rise of bebop after the Second World War, that caused a butt-ton of damage to the genre, and that Miles Davis was a pivotal player in until he finally got over it and put on that shiny red leather suit and released Bitches Brew, which Christgau unironically nominated to Jazz & Pop as jazz album of the year in 1970.  He considers the New York Dolls one of the five greatest artists of all time.  Please.  The Dolls were influential, true, and for two reasons: 1) Their show was cheap and entertaining and so readily copiable and copied, and 2) their musicianship was so crude a half-trained baboon could cover it.  Not exactly reasons to put them in GOAT contention.  Finally, Christgau doesn’t like and is nearly completely ignorant of classical music.  This tells me so many things, but two bubble immediately to the surface: 1) He has neither the music history nor the music theory to hold 90% (at least) of the opinions he’s been paid for over the last half-century, and 2) he’s a shallow little shit who needs to sit in a corner and STFU.

And believe it or not, all that was just a warm-up to get around to John Harris.  Toward the end of the Kate Bush documentary is a roundtable discussion of her latest album (Aerial) by several UK rock critics, including Harris.  Harris makes the remark that the music sounds like something you’d hear in a department store and that it’s obvious Bush hadn’t been in a studio for 12 years.  I’ll start with the statements themselves and then turn to their wider ramifications.

Department store music?  I’d like to know where Harris hangs out that this is the ambient Muzak.  Let’s chalk this one up to hyperbole and move on to the “12 years” remark.  He doesn’t really elaborate on this (not entirely his fault, given the roundtable format) so we can only speculate on his actual point.  Do her pipes sound rusty?  Not really.  Does the technology sound dated?  No (And trust me, I keep up.  It’s not like I sit around listening to Sergeant Pepper’s going, “Oh wow, they played those tapes backwards!”), and even if it did, that would be one to lay on the producer and the engineer.  Is the music dated?  An ambiguous word, “dated”, but I’m afraid we’ve finally reached what Harris was driving at.  By “dated” do we mean it doesn’t sound like other music being produced now?  First, when has Kate Bush ever sounded like anyone else, and second when did sounding like everyone else become a standard of musical quality?  It hasn’t and it shouldn’t, but I’m afraid this is the point Harris is trying to make.  Perhaps, though, he meant this sounds like her old material.  Saying that an artist is repeating themself is a helpful criticism, especially if you explain why you think so.  Frankly that’s a point I can agree with; I find a certain sameness in her work since Hounds of Love.  But that isn’t even remotely what Harris says.  He says she sounds old-fashioned, which is never a useful comment, merely a pejorative one, and worse, a pejorative aimed not just at the artist but at the listener.  You are listening to old-fashioned music.  You are old-fashioned.  You are outdated.  Catch up!

Under the best of circumstances, this is unmitigated bullshit.  Coming from Harris, it is unmitigated bullshit that is part of a career full of it.  Harris’s cred as a “serious person” essentially rests on his 2003 book The Last Party: Britpop, Blair and the Demise of English Rock (repackaged in 2004 as Britpop: Cool Britannia and the Spectacular Demise of English Rock) and the follow-up BBC Four 2005 documentary The Britpop Story.  His thesis is that 90s Britpop was the last great shining moment for UK pop.  No, really.

At this point, let facts be placed before a candid world.  The UK has been a popular music powerhouse for quite awhile, and by “powerhouse” I mean a global influence.  Let’s start arbitrarily with Gilbert & Sullivan, pass the baton to Ivor Novello, and then to Noel Coward.  The Second World War made hash of it all, and the post-war generation found that the US had stolen the baton, but rather than going gentle into that not-so-good night, both the rockers and the mods invaded the US and stole much of the thunder back.  This continued into the 70s, whether you’re talking about arena bands, metal, prog rock, or punk, and on into the 80s, again whether you’re talking about power pop, synthpop, or New Wave.  Big influences that can still be heard around the world.

Compare Britpop.  The whole point of Britpop was to be a calculated foil for Grunge and as safe and marketable as possible, the perfect theme music for the Tony Blair years.  It has so little edge it couldn’t leave a mark on a piece of talc.  Its influence has been negligible except as a template for profitable pap.  In 1997 the whole sham came unraveled as Oasis released the bloated disappointment Be Here Now and Blur abandoned the field to join the US “lo-fi” movement (and, through Damon Albarn, generate Gorillaz, which is actually something that matters).  Their lasting influence is Coldplay, and let’s be honest, if Coldplay is your gold standard, I’m afraid you actually have a pyrite mine.

But Harris thinks Britpop was the shining end of UK rock.  There are a number of holes in this assertion; two are glaring.  First, there are still plenty of new bands in the UK churning out good stuff (That Harris seems blissfully ignorant of these bands makes me wonder just who is out-dated and needs to catch up.).  Look them up yourselves; I’m not falling into the trap of naming a few here.  Suffice it to say they’re diverse, and you’re likely to hit on several you consider acceptable regardless of your musical tastes.  They’ve even been having an influence in the EU, but we’ll see what Brexit brings (Influence in the US?  Not so much since we have reached a level of insularity here that rules out anything beyond our borders having merit, in spite of having access to it all on The Interwebz.).  And these bands have a Hell of a lot more to offer than the Britpop slag did.

Which brings us to glaring hole two.  As noted previously, Britpop didn’t really have an impact.  None outside of the UK, and damned little in the UK on any time scale longer than the life of a mayfly.  Britpop was a nothingburger with a side of flies and a So? Duh!  Harris, though, raises this localized, ephemeral phenomenon and turns it into the last scion of the UK pop tradition.  This should just be considered a bad case of the sillies, except that Harris’s new schtick is political commentary, especially for The Grauniad.  In keeping with The Graun’s policies, his position is “Support Remain but maintain that ‘both sides have merit’.”  Which raises his Britpop position from silly to ironic, because Harris’s thinking on Britpop (“It was important in the UK, ergo it was IMPORTANT!”) is just the sort of insular, UK=World mentality that made Brexit possible.  Brexit happened, for the most part, because of a bunch of people who believed that, whatever the puzzle was, the UK was the only piece that mattered.  Harris’s elevation of Britpop on so high a pedestal rests on the same belief, even though he’s a Remainer.  So it’s unintentionally ironic.  It’s symptomatic of a malignant mindset.  And it’s still silly.

And so I give you Christgau and Harris, Exhibits 1 and 2 in my case for the beyond-uselessness of rock critics.  And the former is still being allowed to write revisionist histories of the music of the last half-century while the latter is still being allowed to…well…write.  What a world.