I love the smell of roasting music critics in the morning
I know NRT won’t agree with me, but things like this Guardian Music Blog piece convince me that the war against lazy NME-consensus music journalism is still worth fighting.
Summary, hack music critic gets out the big book of punk-era cliches when dismissing Pink Floyd, and gets roundly clobbered by commenters who correctly inform him that he’s talking complete and utter bollocks.
He starts with the mother of all bad clichés
In 1976, purging Britain of progressive rock was so urgently necessary that putting Pink Floyd, Genesis and their public school ilk up against the metaphorical wall and shooting them was the only way forward.
When taken to task over this, he has to resort to the old Cliché-O-Matic again:
… extended guitar solos, inflatable pigs, pretentious concept albums, expensive studios, stadium gigs, albums in gatefold sleeves, dim-witted social commentary, rock songs that last longer than three minutes. All these things are as objectionable now as they were in 1976.
But the fun bit is watching the commenters comprehensively taking his second-hand arguments apart, even those that don’t actually like Pink Floyd. Far more people will read that and come to the conclusion that the author of the article is an ignorant twit than will come away with negative impressions about Pink Floyd. One small victory…
January 12th, 2008 at 7:54 pm
Nope, you’re wrong.
Couldn’t agree more. Naylor was acting like an arse; his ‘more-NME-than-thou’ attitude would have been laughable if the Guardian hadn’t paid him to spout it. Okay, normally I would recommend just ignoring that sort of nonsense (literally non-sense), but a few prods got him frothing and nicely destroyed his credibility as a music reviewer (and remember, as the NME says, credibility is all). Well done.
January 12th, 2008 at 9:00 pm
Note how so many commentors are both better writers and better framers of arguments than Naylor. And unlike him, none of them were paid for it (I don’t *think* any of them were Guardian staffers, although one or two might have been).
Shows how peer-to-peer nature of the Blogosphere is better in many ways than the top-down model of dead tree journalism.
January 15th, 2008 at 7:37 pm
Oh, my. Fantastic! I haven’t laughed like that for months. Well done, sir (and the other commenters, of course)…
What an arse, eh? They actually pay a moron like that to write music reviews? Christ, I’ll cheerfully do a better job for nowt!
January 16th, 2008 at 8:47 pm
>>I’ll cheerfully do a better job for nowt!
You already do. I pay more attention to your blog (among others) than I do to any music rag, even “Classic Rock” (a.k.a. Guns’N'Roses monthly)
January 16th, 2008 at 11:27 pm
And in another equally stupid blog today he admits to being in his early 30s. Which means he’d have been two or three years old in 1976. Too young to actually have been there. Explains why he’s swallowed the revisionist narrative wholesale.
January 19th, 2008 at 2:39 pm
Did you all see Stuart Maconie and David Quantick following the usual prog-bashing party line on Pop On Trial: The 70’s? Then they predictably brown-nosed Stevie Wonder and Marvin Gaye, which was my cue to turn off.
February 10th, 2008 at 5:41 pm
Actually Stuart stayed pretty quiet IIRC.
In fact, he’s quite a big fan of prog - Gentle Giant are one of his favourite bands and I saw him in the foyer waiting to go into a Yes gig about 3 or 4 years ago.
Marvin Gaye and Stevie Wonder aren’t really my thing, but I wouldn’t condemn anyone for liking them. They clearly did some work that is worthy of respect even if I don’t find much in it to match my tastes. But I don’t think we should turn it into an either/or thing; otherwise we make the same mistake as the Guardian journalist.
October 10th, 2008 at 10:37 pm
[…] We never managed to get an apology out of Tony Naylor. […]