Sgt Pepper Must Die!
 

Ever wondered what some bloke from Franz Ferdinand thinks of Marquee Moon?

Or why some bloke from 1990s (who???!!) doesn't rate the Smiths' Meat Is Murder?

No, me neither, but this is a quite interesting read regardless.

http://music.guardian.co.uk/rock/sto...102991,00.html

Conclusion: well loved records are not loved by everbody. Good for a heatd debate though.

I like it when they dis albums I don't like (Dark Side of the Moon, Pet Sounds), hate it when they dis albums I love (VU & Nico, Trout Mask). Just proves the old adage, to each his own.

I was totally shocked to find out the guy from Franz Ferdinand think's Marquee Moon is overated, i thought the band worshipped that album on a daily basis, they even say the Strokes did something better! And on the paragraph before, Ian Williams from Battles is totally slating 'Is this it', but that is something i would totally expect.

luke pritchard can suck one of my shits

It doesn't surprise me when people, even musicians, maybe especially musicians, don't like the supposed classic albums. If everybody liked everything, I think that would be a bit scary.

Uncut magazine used to have that 'Sacred Cows' section that was fun to read, regardless of the fact that sometimes the cow might have been slaughtered unfairly.

stone roses do suck ass

This was written by David Stubbs, and these pieces can be found here:

http://www.mr-agreeable.net/story.lasso?section=reaper

Cool, thanks. I knew the site because I like Mr Agreeable, but I had never seen those.


Whooo hoooo!!!!!! Whoo!!! Hoo!!! Hoo!!! Hooooooooo!!!!!

I like the s/t album. I don't love it to death, but I like it.

Beck isn't an eccentric but the embodiment of the zeitgeist of the white college 20something American consumer, in all their arrogant doziness, quietly mocking the world with deadpan irony but too lazy and cynical to energise modern culture with something new. They use the idleness they've been afforded by the world's richest state to opt out of making any meaningful contribution of their own but look on at the wealth-creators and the culture makers with flippant scorn, even as they're gulping feebly on their teats.


^ haha. I remember reading that and loving it.


Beck's camp fascination for the myriad of pop styles he affects to adore reflects a typical American hipster's basic contempt for modern culture. He refers to The Gap band's "fat beats" as "musical hamburgers" which sums it up - pop is fun but not especially nutritious and even though we know better, we can't help ourselves. That's his attitude that has him eat up American folk music and r&b, yet mock it in his silly rhinestone outfits or the lampooning dance steps of his 1997 MTV Awards performance.

^ Spot on!

In total agreement with Mr Agreeable about the Scream, THAT'S for sure.

Poetry, sheer fucking poetry.

Anyone who takes the time to display that smug, humourless prat Beck for what he is, is fine with me.

Yep, I couldn't have put it any better. I think I'll write something similar about Pavement.


A classic "slacker". Yet ironically, Beck isn't even that. He actually works very hard as a good little major player in the record industry should. Beneath that lame duck surface persona there's a lot of furious paddling going on. He's as busy as a busker, writes a song a day, has another album out soon. His slowness, his innocence, his "laziness" are themselves affectations. Beck is the biggest fraud in modern American music today.

This one reminds me of the time that it was written at, but still very true:



18 September 2000
REVOLVER


In recent Greatest Album polls, it's become increasingly hip to cite Revolver as the finest Beatles album, and therefore, the greatest and most important rock album ever made. Revolver, so the new wisdom goes, is the album on which The Beatles begin to emancipate themselves from their Epstein-controlled moptop image and graduate to the second, more experimental half of their careers, from monochrome to colour, dragging Western popular culture behind them.


Revolver does contain a miniature masterpiece - "Eleanor Rigby". That apart, however, it's a hotpotch - conservative, derivative, saccharine, mean-spirited, whimsical and just plain tedious by turns, with the odd, tinny flurry of backward guitar hardly bolstering the argument for its monumentalism.

Let's examine this 35 minute "masterpiece". George Harrison's "Taxman" kicks it off. Over a petulant, jerky riff later ripped off by the similarly petulant, jerky Paul Weller on "Start", George Harrison delivers a tirade against the Inland Revenue which would embarrass even the most dyspeptic Daily Telegraph correspondent. "If five per cent should seem to small/Be thankful I don't take it all," whines Harrison with all the harrowing self-pity of one so hard done by he's down to his last three Bentleys. The supposed even-handedness of the overlaid harmony line, "taxman, Mr Wilson/Taxman Mr Heath" only exacerbates the small-mindedly disgruntled Poujadism of the song; "why, they're just as bad as each other, to my mind, these politicians."

This proto-Thatcherite drivel would be hard enough to swallow - but then who's this, three tracks later, waggling his sitar and filling the studio with Hindustani musicians? Why, it's George again, transformed from Disgusted of Tunbridge Wells into pseudo-Eastern spiritualist, warning us of the futility of materialism; "A lifetime is so short/ A new one can't be bought." So stop moaning about your tax bills then, you late, lamented wanker!

Far from exhibiting the Beatles' hidden depths, Revolver inadvertently reveals their hidden shallownesses. Lennon's "I'm Only Sleeping" is a shambling, sub-Kinks paean to his own idleness which would later see him holed away for years in his Dakota apartment, smacked up to his fatuous eyeballs. McCartney's "For No One" is his astonishingly cold farewell to former lover Jane Asher, a formal back-step from true emotional responsibility worthy of Larry Sanders. Notably, he's comfier with the chocolate box blandishments of "Here, There And Everywhere", perhaps the soppiest song The Beatles ever recorded. But then, that's McCartney for you - hard and soft in all the wrong places.

Revolver is supposed to herald The Beatles' psychedelic futurism. If so, no one told McCartney. He also contributes the laboured, retro, Motown pastiche of "Got To Get You Into My Life", "Good Day Sunshine", which sounds like a jingle for a Kelloggs Cornflakes ad, and "Yellow Submarine", lambasting which is like like lambasting the Teletubbies.

Lennon, meanwhile, gives us the supercilious "And Your Bird Can Sing", noteworthy only for inspiring the "And Your Bird Can't Sing" joke when Yoko Ono took up her screeching career. The small-chorded, cynical "Dr Robert" and "She Said" are the last, grumpy 'old Lennon' stabs at the bullshit spawned by the burgeoning drugs culture - only for Lennon himself to weigh in for the finale with the biggest load of drug-inspired bullshit of the lot. "Tomorrow Never Knows" heralds his asinine decision to start taking LSD.

Revolver apologists regard this gormlessly naive, sub-Learyesque call to universal brainrot as the album's defining moment. Yet even here, Lennon hasn't the courage of his convictions, undermining the track with a lot of silly Red Indian noises and Goon Show-style tuneless piano, signifying that banal and very English fear and loathing of pretentiousness that passed for his "wickedly surreal sense of humour". As Lennon later proved on "Revolution", he was far too indecisive and pusillanimous a soul ever to lead "us" anywhere.

The only reason Revolver is feted by critics is as a hipper-than-thou debunking of the conventional wisdom that Sergeant Pepper was The Beatles' finest album. "Oh yes, everybody talks about Pepper but of course, Revolver is vastly superior. Came out a year earlier, you know." This, however, has become as conventional and under-examined a truism as the notion that Sergeant Pepper's very English, boiled sweet psychedelia is the apex of all rock achievement. The Beatles' brightest work was behind them in 1966, their truly darkest work ahead. Revolver was their greyest.

My hatred for Beck knows no end. I'm just so glad that I'm not alone in this.

Everything I've ever said about The Doors, Paul Weller or anyone else pales into total insignificance when compared with my thoughts on this total, fucking, cunt:

Beck's a meanie, he was horrible to the flaming lips, he treated them like crap.

Not sure if I agree with him there. Which isn't to say that Revolver is The Beatles' greatest album either.

Yesssss, show more loathing for the Beck. What did the insignificant one do to Flaming Lips? Be detailed, I need anti-Beck fuel for later battles.

i don't like beck either.

he's too boring, too much trying to be eccentric but detached, too labored, too much of a poser.

Stephen Malkmus, Kathleen Hanna and Ian Mackaye annoy me too. A lot.

Beck's a God-botherer, so he'll never be welcome at Melly Towers.

"Eminem is probably the Dylan of rap, whereas Tupac just sounded like he was whining."

what the fuck?

Not that I disagree, at all, but why?

First of all the use of the english language in his lyrics is risible and at best meaningless at meaningless' worst. Secondly he's some sort of wimpy indie kid who's lanky enough for basketball, but looks like he would be swept off by a simple cold. The general insipidness of the majority of his work and public persona. Kinda like when someone keeps on not making sense, but they are smug and consider themselves to be clever clever, anyway. I hate him, and I will write it 100 times in Japanese, if you want me to.

Yes, Sarramkrop, but would you kiss him?

No, I think you've stated your reasons quite well enough.

Although you did forget to mention his tendency to reduce the innovations of others into some kind of food-court wackiness.

shocker:

people have differing opinions!!!!

though, speaking of sgt peppers, it's obviously overrated. it's like the bible: it was a good thing for the civilization back then but now? not so much. ahead of its time, sure, but besides a day in the life and a few other classics, it just doesn't hold up to classic albums of today.

like, y'know, "pulse demon".

With Beck, it's the ' A bit of this, and a bit of that' attitude to music that never cut it with pretty looking me.

okay i just read this.

anyone that calls trout mask replica "boring" is.. well.. honestly, you can say you don't like it, i can understand that, you can say you love it, of course i understand... but how can you find it BORING?!

shocker:

people have differing opinions!!!!

We're back to the 'wackiness' issue again, when it comes to my disliking of Beck.

Oh, they can say it because they think saying it sounds audacious. It doesn't.

Really? How so?

On "White Riot", The Clash complain that, unlike their admirable brick-throwing black contemporaries, "White people go to school/Where they teach you to be thick." This is a slight not just on the teaching profession in general, who are waging a daily war against the bonehead chic propounded through street culture by the likes of The Clash for whom intellectual aspirations equal ponciness. It's also an implied slur on the staff of Epsom - yes, Epsom Boarding School, where in spite of their best efforts it was evidently as much as they could do to teach the schoolboy Strummer to spell C-A-T, so addled was his mind with fantasy notions of rock rebellion.

ha!

What do you mean, 'Really? How so?' ?

People (myself included) often write things off without any real understanding of what it is they're actually writing off in the first place. They have the right to do that, just as others, who may know a bit more about it than they do have the right to dismiss their views.

Nah, what doYOU mean by saying that they can say it because they think saying it sounds audacious?

haha.

no it doesn't shock me, i just can't understand how anyone could find it BORING. that's like someone saying sex is boring. it just blows my mind. i'd reeeeeeeally like to know what isn't boring to him...