Sabbath = the great deaf-spot (auditory and ideological) of the Last Waltz/Stranded generation of rockwrite
Every generation of rockwrite has one, and has to have one. It's the essential by-product of having a value-system, a metrics of valorization.
So what was ours? (I'll leave the "us" of "ours" open-ended for now).
Thought: the vitiation of contemporary music-write = its attempt not to have any deaf-spots ... none at all, not one.
Given his recent book, I was just thinking about Cameron Crowe's evasion of that 'value-system', and how it plays now versus how it played then - then, his acceptance of everyone from the Allmans and Yes to Station to Station era Bowie to Joni Mitchell was viewed, arguably more than his utilitarian prose, as his ultimate failing; now, it make him look more 'modern' than many of the more respected critics then
ReplyDeleteCrowe is probably the chief example of 'second-tier' rockwrite of that era also lacking a recognizable 'system', which has minuses and pluses, I think
The way the question is posed leaves so many interesting paths open.
ReplyDeleteGenerally speaking, as a rockwrite-reader in the late 80s/early 90s, I found a really striking contrast between US and UK critics. At that time it seemed like the "great deaf spot" in the US was just about anything that came along after, oh, 1978, while in the UK there was deafness for anything *before* that year. I'm picking a somewhat arbitrary year, I know, but as a reader it just seemed like those were the two dominant value-systems on either side of the punk/post-punk divide, and they excluded a lot.
(Greil Marcus crosses over, beautifully, but much to my chagrin I didn't discover that until I started reading his stuff after 2010.)
More specifically, if we're talking about bands, I'd nominate Rush as the band critics in my lifetime have inexplicably ignored. I don't even like Rush, really, but I'd have thought a band with their longevity, chops, and brains-- backed by a loyal and surprisingly huge following, endearingly captured in "I Love You Man"-- would have gotten a lot more ink.
And since it's Friday and I'm feeling frisky, I'll throw in an undoubtedly partisan opinion about another band. So many of the younger artists and critics I read these days trip through the field of "mental health" in some way or another-- every goddamn record is a therapy session, every young critic wants to "platform" people to share their "journeys", everyone's got trauma and sickness to broadcast-- and yet there seems to be a deaf spot for the one band which, for better or worse, laid a lot of the groundwork.
I'm talking about The Smiths. These days they're unceremoniously dumped in the same "80s legends" bucket as your Cars 'n' Cures. I'd have thought they're due a wee bit more serious critical attention. Of course, there's no mystery as to why they don't get anything but cursory mentions: the singer is problematic. Amazing to think that a figure who in the Reagan/Thatcher 80s stood for non-binary sexuality, feminism, anti-capitalism, vegetarianism, unashamed avowal of illness, and loving acceptance of self should be totally ignored today. (If he'd just had one more "anti" on his resume...!) It's an interesting form of ideological deafness, and I'm sure there are other cases.
I dunno, I think Smiths have a pretty strong half-life as a cultural presence among the young, even with Morrissey’s political turn turning off so many. Indie-ish young types discover the music in perpetuity, like with The Cure. The DNA entered emo.
DeleteI suppose it depends if we distinguish between fandom and criticism - with the latter being the focus of my point. Maybe you are right then about them dropping off the critical radar, a de-canonizing drift out of centrality.
Yes, I was talking more about criticism. Below you said The Smiths were "one of the most lauded and critically analysed groups of the Eighties". At some point that ceased to be true and I think it's only partly explained by the natural waxing and waning of critical appreciation which any band, over the decades, passes through. They're very much in the canon, today, it's just that it's been done in a way-- deliberately, I believe, though far from conspiratorially-- that leaves them irrelevant, stuffed and mounted on the wall, no longer part of any real conversation about how Anglo-American culture has evolved into whatever it's evolved into.
DeleteOf course, I also have to concede that I don't actually know if The Smiths are truly off the critical radar, in contemporary rockwrite, because I don't even know if there is a radar anymore. I don't know of any "conversation" taking place at all, which is more to do with the internet than anything else.
I definitely have the sense that trying to embrace everything (especially if it's popular and made at least 15 years ago) is one of the main problems with contemporary music criticism. Really, it's OK to hate Nickelback, Creed and Limp Bizkit! For heaven's sake, the Guardian ran an op-ed accusing everyone who dislikes Nickelback of dishonest contrarian posturing. You can really feel the hand of the market here.
ReplyDeleteIt is also okay to feel un-engaged by Taylor Swift.
DeleteAt one of the EMP rock write conferences there was a push to celebrate or at least rescue from condescension the Mediocre - rhe idea being that the hamburger helpers of rock like Nickelback or Staind were valid and meaningful to many.
They are easy to spot in hindsight. For the post-punk / soul / jazz / funk NME crowd of the early 80s, it was the NWOBHM and its antecedents: Saxon, Maiden, Motörhead Whitesnake. Status Quo. IIRC US punk was completely ignored, too. Black Flag, Minor Threat, the early stirrings of Husker Du. Bad Brains. And then a lot of indie music. As I remember it, the real hipsters absolutely hated the Smiths. And I think the feeing was mutual.
ReplyDeleteThen of course the inkies insulted or ignored hardcore techno in the early 90s and UK Garage in the late 90s, with Simon just about the sole defender.
As you say, though, for reasons both ideological and commercial, it is really hard for those blind spots to exist today. In a world where the new Taylor Swift album can get a 100% grade from Rolling Stone, there seems to be no music that won’t be championed by somebody.
(Although apparently everyone has decided it’s OK to hate the new Tame Impala album, for reasons that are not really clear to me.)
Actually the NME had a contingent of US hardcore supporters, that is how I even heard about groups like Black Flag Flipper Minutemen Angry Samoans Negative Approach Descendents etc. and i am pretty sure the second wave punk championing Sounds gave similar coverage to US hardcore.
DeleteThe Smiths were one of the most lauded and critically analyses groups of the Eighties. There were a few people who sneered ar Morrissey as a wet wallflower miserabilist but The smiths were constantly on the front covers of the music papers. Indie generally was NME’s bread and butter.
Iron Maiden were not celebrated outside of Sounds but i suppose my question is really ‘what innovative and seminal band was unrecognized in its own time by the alleged cognoscenti?’. I don’t think Iron Maiden and their peers count. I am wondering what massively significant, genre-birthing band of recent times got undeservedly (from a hindsight-wise perspective) neglected and demeaned.
Pitchfork recently made an argument for Enya as being a disrespected significance. And there have been attempts to auteur-ize Sade.
Sabbath (deservedly) enjoyed a critical rehabilitation during the 90s (Led Zep too) - the similarly reviled Iron Maiden, Judas Priest, Saxon et al remain in critical purgatory, and one suspects if reassessment was going to happen, it would have happened by now.
ReplyDeletePaul McCartney's early solo work seems to be enjoying new found respect though - I've seen "Ram" hailed as the first ever indie album.
My sense is that Status Quo are ultra-hip these days: the Norwood Neu and all that. Of the class of NWOBHM proper, Venom and Diamond Head are key influences for speed metal and everything that came after, including the Young Gods. Speaking of which, Def Leppard also became very cool, although admittedly for their later studio experimentation rather than their early 80s breakout. I personally have a soft spot for Saxon: Wheels of Steel points the way to Band of Susans, and does it better.
DeleteIron Maiden, I will admit, have yet to achieve critical rehabilitation. But their music does play a key role in the fantastic Netflix thriller Rebel Ridge.
Judas Priest got into the Wire magazines albums of the year recently if I recall right. Or maybe it was reviewed positively.
DeleteI don’t know if being sampled by Young Gods really counts as beinf an influence on Young Goda. Thats just them cannibalising auto parts - repurposing a riff. In other respects the aesthetic impact of Diamondhead is not really discernible in the Franz Treichler vision.
I don’t know. One of my theories about why the Young Gods are great is that it’s because the sources of their samples, both Classical and Metal, are still legible / audible in their music. Not usually in the sense of being identifiable, but in the emotions and energy they carry.
DeleteThe artistic goals of the Young Gods are essentially the same as those of Diamondhead and Venom: high drama, grandeur, aggression. The Young Gods execute on it with more flair, sure. But the intent is surely not a million miles away.
Sociologically, I have always thought an important part of the Young Gods’ project has been to take the impulses and energies that drive Metal, Classic Rock and Romantic Classical music, and repurpose them for an audience that would otherwise recoil from so much raw intensity, but will welcome it from a group of European aesthetes who use cutting-edge technology and love Kurt Weill.
I suppose the only real way to stay in a deaf spot nowadays is simply to be ignored, and that is hard to do if there is anything at all interesting about you. Geese were a minor cult last year, even though their Strokes-play-Beefheart music was pretty cool. But this year they have been everywhere, to the point that they have apparently recorded a Bruce Springsteen cover for an Xbox ad.
ReplyDeleteThe biggest deaf-spot of our era is Coldplay, who I think will one day be critically lauded.
ReplyDeleteFrom the late 80's it's Slowdive - amongst zoomers they are considered the number one shoegaze band, with MBV being firmly number two.
Haha yes I keep getting confronted with that about Slowdive. My kids say to me: “How lucky you are to have been around when Slowdive were coming out. That must have been amazing.” And it’s a bit embarrassing to have to admit: “Actually I never made much of an effort to listen to them, because they were really seen as Second Division shoegaze, and people laughed at them for being posh. So I never saw them live, and never bought the albums.”
DeleteWith Queen it’s the opposite. My peers used to laugh at me for having seen Queen live in Milton Keynes. But the kids now are massively impressed.
Not sure if you're serious about Coldplay, Phil, but I did have a thought that both U2 and Coldplay never seemed to get any serious critical attention. They weren't ignored, I just can't remember anyone even trying to write anything but cursory pieces about them, as if they were McDonald's franchises and occasionally it had to be grudgingly acknowledged that, okay, huge numbers of people like fast food, let's move on.
DeleteRe: Slowdive - I quite liked them at the time, and bought the Just For A Day e.p., but I didn't expect them to go anywhere. And if the internet had not been invented I would probably have been right!
DeleteBut I think late eighties and early nineties music has aged very well - we didn't know how lucky we were, etc.
I am serious about Coldplay. On my long deleted old blog I wrote a post making the mildest of cases for the group, and it was easily the post I got the most comments on. They're a band people tend to feel very strongly about, and it's the very strength of the negativity towards them that tells me there is something there.
People tend to forget the feeling that was around in the early 2000's before Brexit and Trump spiced things up - that vague sense of anomie, that late capitalism was taking us into an inescapable relationless void. I thought Coldplay's music summed up that era perfectly well, for better or worse, which is why they either resonated with people or rubbed them up the wrong way.
Coldplay - bulls eye.
DeleteSlowdive are an odd one as their first three EPs were raved about in some quarters (Melody Maker) but then there was a big deserved backlash against their debut LP. And then immediately after they suffered from the abrupt general collapse of shoegaze into unfashionability (MM did a piece in 92 titled Whatever Happened To Shoegaze, reports on current whereabouts of those bands as if they had been out of view for decades - when only a year earlier a group like Moose enjoyed a two page spread)
Slowdive’s stealth rise to streaming magnitude is extraordinary. And adding savour to their young fandom is this myth thst they were vilified and actively ignored by the press. In fact they put out a duff album having shot their wad of brilliance on the three preceding EPs.
U2 had plenty of critical support, and analysis, right from the start and all the way through until the debacle of Rattle and Hum and a general feeling of them being overexposed post Joshua Tree and what an exhausting presence Bono was. I myself wrote an enormous largely sympathetic piece on them around Joshua Tree and the big Wembley Arena shows in 87.
DeleteThey have always had critical haters too. But that underlines that they have been a bone of contention, a crux of debate. I think it carried on through Achtung and the embarrasing pomo phase of Pop and McFisto etc.
I stand corrected on U2! Or maybe my frame of reference only includes the post-Joshua Tree period, I hadn't followed them in the press prior to the summer of 1987.
DeleteI'm curious to read your 1987 article. Have you collected that somewhere? I take it the article didn't fit in with the rest of "Bring The Noise"?
Phil, I'd be very interested in your thoughts on Coldplay. Can you post a link?
DeleteI get why Coldplay might be considered neglected, or a blind/deaf spot. But I'm genuinely curious as to why they might one day be "critically lauded".
Well, as I said my first blog was deleted (by me) years ago. I sort of wish I'd kept it up, but it was a bit of a "brain fart" blog.
DeleteBut generally the earlier Coldplay seem to me to have been musically meritorious and widely appreciated by the public, and the antipathy towards them seems to have been for largely peripheral reasons - they're from privileged backgrounds, people like Jeremy Clarkson and Gordon Ramsay liked them, their politics were Centrist Dad with commercial opportunist characteristics, and there was the whole saga with Gwyneth Paltrow (the bourgeois Katie Price).
And I think one day, when all those peripheral things no longer matter, everyone will have to come round to the fact, however much they may dislike it, that they were a good band, and were popular for a good reason.
Interesting, thanks. I'm sure you're right that their talents have been overshadowed by peripheral factors. I'm not convinced they're worth a second listen, though. I'm not sneering. From the start, knowing only their radio songs, they failed to capture my interest.
DeleteHowever, if a critic took on the "hear me out..." task of rehabilitating them it would make for a hell of an entertaining piece of writing, I'm sure. It's almost more interesting to read a critic gouging out some praise for a "Centrist Dad/commercial opportunist" group than a band that was just plain dreadful. We shall see!
It there's a rehabilitation it will start with newer bands acknowledging them as an influence, and the critics will at first grudgingly, and then enthusiastically, follow in their wake.
DeleteThe Slowdive mania had been building for years though. Yes the 90s music press bigged up the early EPs but it was ‘Souvlaki’ and ‘Pygmalion’ that subsequently became hailed as complete masterpieces etc from early on in the noughties. Bar a couple of exceptions both those albums had been roundly slated in the 90s and they were eventually dropped from Creation before breaking up with their heads down. Nowadays ‘Souvlaki’ is a permanent fixture in the top 4 of any shoegaze all time list and ‘Pygmalion’ is placed as high in any post rock pantheons and cited as a big influence on many current artists. So when they reappeared at Primavera Barcelona in 2014 they were given a hero’s welcome which was a long way from the quarter full small London venues they ended their first incarnation on in 95/96. Also, in fairness, they really delivered as well in the studio with that eponymous 2017 ‘Slowdive’ album. Apart from maybe Portishead’s ‘Third’ It might be the best comeback album by any 90s act. Nothing groundbreaking or anything but they knew where their bread was buttered and it’s lovely stuff mostly.
ReplyDeletehttps://youtu.be/gwgq-IWtcPE?si=_fN9mJLJoT4QueVO
The recent second comeback album from 2023 is also very good. I’ve seen them three times since they reformed and they really have it down to a tight tee now with the 20 and 30 somethings lapping it up. Nice as well that’s it’s the original lineup still.
Unfortunately they are one of the many bands who have sartorially "let themselves go" as the years have passed.
DeleteNowadays they look like the cast of a reality TV series about bounty hunters that airs in the late evening on the Discovery Channel.