In
his review of Black Sabbath's eponymous debut, Lester Bangs wrote: "The whole album is a shuck — despite the murky
song titles and inane lyrics that sound like Vanilla Fudge paying doggerel
tribute to Aleister Crowley, the album has nothing to do with spiritualism, the
occult, or anything much except stiff recitations of Cream clichés that sound
like the musicians learned them out of a book, grinding on and on with dogged
persistence." Isn’t that funny? Talk about murky. James Joyce would find
that sentence exhausting.
Ralph
J. Gleason, co-founder of Rolling Stone and critic for The San Francisco
Chronicle, was incredulous of Brian Wilson's purported "genius." "The
Beach Boys are a logical extension of Pat Boone and Ricky Nelson (as well as
Paul Anka)," he wrote in 1967. They look like and perform like summer resort boozers,
Fort Lauderdale weekend collegians. They sound like that, too." In
retrospect, the fact that anyone would think "Surfin' Safari" or
"409" had more "validity," and a broader scope than
"God Only Knows" (or that Brian Wilson
was the "logical extension of Pat Boone"!), is funny like the best
episode of Big Bang.
After the critical love affair with
Blue and Court and Spark, Joni Mitchell’s The Hissing of Summer Lawns was fair
game for criticism. The critics were ready to ambush, as they would for the
follow-up to Wish You Were Here, waiting to pounce on the Animals. Though not
the complete dismissal Lester Bangs offered for Black Sabbath, Rolling Stone reported that The Hissing of Summer Lawns was "ultimately a great
collection of pop poems with a distracting soundtrack." Distracting was the term. "Four members of Tom Scott's L.A. Express
are featured on Hissing, but
their uninspired jazz-rock style completely opposes Mitchell's romantic style.
Always distinctly modal, Mitchell's tunes for the first time often lack
harmonic focus. They are free-form in the most self-indulgent sense, i.e., they
exist only to carry the lyrics. If only I’d had the critic in my English class:
“...not to mentioned that your review serves nothing but to scratch a critical
itch. C+.”
Twenty years later, RS panned the
greatest power pop album in the history of everything, Weezer's Pinkerton,
(just, oh brother), and in 2005, The Killers released their sophomore effort
Sam's Town, which The New York Times called "Painful." Painful. They called it Painful. My head is spinning.
The goal at AM is to examine as
closely as possible what is best about rock music. At times we are overzealous
or what many would consider obvious, but rarely are we callous; never are we ridiculous. As definition for "ridiculous," here is one
final sampling of the negative review as offered up by the inimitable Rolling Stone: Abbey Road
("…side two is a disaster"), Led Zeppelin ("prissy"), Déjà vu ("…only such a
trio of wimps could think of him [Neil Young] as a hard rocker"), After the
Gold Rush ("…uniformly dull surface…"), Aqualung ("overly pretentious, ponderous
and didactic"), Sticky Fingers ("good but not that good"). For Your Pleasure,
Exile on Main Street, Imagine…I'm sorry, but this is some funny shit. Maybe this article should have been titled "The Definition of a Horse's Ass."