Albums The Critics Got Wrong?

 

Honestly, compared to what "Animals" was before it became "Animals" two or three years earlier, it deserved the warmed over something or other. But it wasn't that bad, and it should not have been given those words, and the concerts showed that the reviewers were quite wrong!

 

Music journalists are PEOPLE. And the ones at the LA Times, loved to show off their favorites and trash everyone else. They were all experts on The Who and Led Zeppelin and Rolling Stones, but their music tastes after that tended into the area of ... cheap and trash music!

 

A lot of this came to a head when the FM radio coming up, was playing more music than they knew or wanted to discuss, since they had not heard the new stuff enough to know where to go piss and poop. But there were some folks that helped. It's hard to think that Jim Ladd in LA was not major for Pink Floyd, BEFORE the Dark Side.days. But even at that time, Roger already did not care what reviewers said, and later you know how he reacted to things in the "Radio Kaos" thing.

 

The Wall, by the way, also got some bad reviews early, and when the movie came out, all of a sudden, it was great. And then the album hit really big. But it took a couple of months for it to take hold, and in LA, they were playing only two songs (Hey You and Comfortably Numb) until some time later when the other song became a radio hit -- We Don't Need no Education. And from that point on, there were some pundits in LA that thought the whole thing pretentious, but their voice lost its strength given the numbers, the sales and everything else. The 4 shows at the Sports Arena were sold out in like 20 minutes! A totally insane number.

 

So who needs "critics" when they only like crap anyway?

 

It's the same here, really, and you have to put a little salt or sugar on things, and you must remember that it is about YOU, and your listening ability and less about what I or anyone else says.

 

However, you have to know the "inner truth" to know what someone is saying, because not everyone is talking crap! And this is where "fans" get lost in the translation and advertising!

 

Humorously, after vilifying Neil in their magazine, Rolling Stone later gave both albums 5 stars in their ratings books -- because the rag spends most of its time trying to rewrite rock history, ignoring its own lunacy with a revisionism that equates to publisher Jann Wenner's need to include only bands he approves of in his b*****dized Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Hence, rap bands, the Jacksons, ABBA and other pop performers who were never considered specifically "rock" bands are enshrined, while Yes, King Crimson, Jethro Tull, Deep Purple and The Moody Blues are not. Which is profoundly f***** up.

you shouldn't be that mad about it

also, "because these critics don't know to play on instruments" is not really a valid argument 

Same for me.  My wife bought me a biography of him last Christmas and I just started reading it last week.  After a few nights I gave up halfway through because I just couldn't relate to him and what he was all about.  The book was strange, as a teenager they claimed he was a Jeff Beck skill level guitar player then he got his 1st recording contract as a Bob Dylan singer-songwriter unaccompanied acoustic player kind of guy, then he brought his old buddies in and that became the horn based rocking E Street band and he was "The Boss".  That's when I decided I'd rather play I-pad Scrabble than read this silliness 

It's probably something only (some) Americans (not me! :-) find appealing. Springsteen, the guy from New Jersey who lived a little too close for comfort to the mean old NY City "jungleland," and wanting to find freedom by jumping into his Chevy, hitting the highway and not stopping till hitting "Nebraska." Probably his music is more a critique than a celebration of this migration out of the cities. Much of America, or at least white America, made the same trek to the suburbs and exurbs to try to escape (blacks) er cities. JP Sartre wrote some essays about his visit to America, and he wrote that Americans really live in their cars, and abandon their homes on the slightest pretext. (His essay on Detroit as a shiny new city birthed overnight and likely to be abandoned at some point seem esp. poignant considering its postapocalyptic decline and bankruptcy. Expect Cheney's Halliburton to come swooping in from their headquarters in Qatar to help oversee its "reconstruction.") Marshall McLuhan wrote, "America's contribution to Architecture is the Highway." I guess Springsteen's music charts this to some extent. The hopes and dreams of his protagonists are victims of these historical and economic processes, but given ideological coatings as "yearning for freedom and the American Dream" bull****... Okay I'll shut up now, haha.