LordofDaRing wrote:Most critics are frustrated muscians who never made it. They think most of the arena bands were over night success stories (so untrue). They also are the worst case for group think, find one critic who has ever dissed Bruce Springsteen or Bob Dylan. If you ever read a critics review of a Styx album, it does not take long to realize that they did not actually listen to it at all.
I interviewed Howard Bloom, who was Styx' publicist during Paradise Theatre, which if you look is the one and only era that they started to get some respect. It was largely because of his work in turning the band's image around. Howard was perhaps the most successful rock and roll PR guy of his era, and he also happens to be the same Howard Bloom who is one of the world's foremost sociologists. He got into PR to prove a hypothesis that he had about entertainment as a form of mass psychology, and of course he was right, which is why he was so successful at directing the public on what to think about an artist.
Anyway, Howard said that the critics have an ego stake in creating stars, that if they can take a no-good band that people are disinclined to like such as the Modern Lovers and make them like it, they can demonstrate their own power. But in the case of the Midwestern bands, because they had worked to form their own followings before they came to national attention, the critics could not "make" them. They were already made. Thus, the only power critics had over them was to try to destroy them.
And it's also the sheep theory . . . you know, you put a pole over the path where the sheep are following each other, and if the leed sheep jumps it and then you take it away, the others continue to jump when they get to that spot even though the barrier has been removed. Critics are the same way. Back in those days Rolling Stone, Village Voice and the New York Times were the leed sheep, and everyone else followed (it's still pretty much that way now). So you only had to get one or two bad reviews and the others were pretty much written in a very predictable pattern of imitation. And yes, many of the critics were not listening at all. Look at Lester Bangs' absolutely ridiculous "review" of Pieces of Eight wherein he said, "If these are the champions, gimme the cripples". Well, the problem with that is that Styx never said they were the champions. Queen did. But Lester knew that rock and roll reviews are a sound byte medium, and he wanted to get his quotable in there, so he wrote the review in such a way that he could compare Styx' lyrics to those of Queen - thus he could mention Queen and set himself up to use his tag line, which is memorable and has followed the band to this day. Now, he never actually got around to saying much about the MUSIC that was on PO8; that was incidental. He had his angle, he exploited it and he wrote a one-liner that has endured for nearly thirty years. Same goes for headlines like "Styx S-T-Y-N-X", or the writer who compared Styx' music to a parking lot full of whale vomit. It never had anything to do with the music at all, it was a way to promote their own ego and career agendas.
If these are the cripples, gimme the champions.
Sterling