What’s the Point of This?
On Friday, Roy told me that Pitchforkmedia.com just gave the Beastie Boys‘ second album, Paul’s Boutique, a 10/10 – something the overly elitist, pompous, horn rimmed glasses with a septum ring wearing hipster douchebag of a website almost never does. Holy fucking shit! You think, 20 years after it’s release, Paul’s Boutique was a perfect album? Way to go, assholes, you came to a conclusion everyone who’s ever listened to the album has come to. Also, you did it in the most obnoxious way possible:
10/10! Brilliant! Especially since we can now see in hindsight its impact on that which eventually succeeded it!
Paul’s Boutique is a landmark in the art of sampling, a reinvention of a group that looked like it was heading for a gimmicky, early dead-end, and a harbinger of the pop-culture obsessions and referential touchstones that would come to define the ensuing decades’ postmodern identity as sure as “The Simpsons” and Quentin Tarantino did.
Thanks.
Here’s another great single sentence of ridiculousness:
There’s dozens of clever touches and big, ambitious ideas that still sound inspired: a cameo appearance by the opening drumbeats of Mountain’s “Mississippi Queen” in “Looking Down the Barrel of a Gun”; the manic yet seamless percussion rolls and the giddy tour through the Car Wash soundtrack on “Shake Your Rump”; the two-part slow-to-fast tweaking of late-period Beatles on “The Sounds of Science”; a sparingly-used Alice Cooper guitar riff adding a mockingly pseudo-badass counter to the whimsical Gene Harris-based soul jazz backbone of “What Comes Around”.
Why can’t it be enough to like to get fucked up listening to the album? I like to imagine the Beastie Boys weren’t as focused on reinventing the wheel so much as they were stoned out of their minds for a few months and ended up just packing into one record as much insanity as they possibly could. For some reason, they were incredibly disciplined and we got this gem of an album. Oh yeah, and the Dust Brothers don’t suck at producing wacky ass beats.
Of course, there is an inherently massive amount of bullshit in this post as I’m sitting here reviewing a review which I think shouldn’t have even existed in the first place (touche, Mr. Patrin). I’ll now direct your attention to Rolling Stone – possibly the pinnacle of “things that used to matter to people who like to listen to music,” kinda like “The Grammy Awards” and “quality songwriting.”
The following links are different after-the-fact reviews of AC/DC‘s Back In Black, like that hasn’t been beaten to death:
Number 1 (2005, 25 years after its release) – 5/5 stars. Mind-numbingly predictable.
Number 2 (2002, 23 years after its release, which isn’t even a noteworthy anniversary) – 4/5 stars. Edgy, controversial rating. Good work, boys.
Here’s the original review from 1980 – no pansy ass star system. Because this publication used to know that anyone listening to rock n’ roll who isn’t in love with Paul Stanley doesn’t give a shit about how many five pointed stars are being associated with their favorite music.
Music journalism blows. Especially the current incarnation of Rolling Stone. Check out the first two paragraphs of their 1969 review of Led Zeppelin II:
Hey, man, I take it all back! This is one fucking heavyweight of the album! OK—I’ll concede that until you’ve listened to the album eight hundred times, as I have, it seems as if it’s just one especially heavy song extended over the space of two whole sides. But, hey! you’ve got to admit that the Zeppelin has their distinctive and enchanting formula down stone-cold, man. Like you get the impression they could do it in their sleep.
And who can deny that Jimmy Page is the absolute number-one heaviest white blues guitarist between 5’4″ and 5’8″ in the world?? Shit, man, on this album he further demonstrates that he could absolutely fucking shut down any whitebluesman alive, and with one fucking hand tied behind his back too.
That rules. So hard, man. Fuck, Jimmy Page can fuckin’ play. (If you want kickass reviews like this go out and get the latest copy of Decibel Magazine). Fuck Rolling Stone.
I guess that’s all I got. Anyone else have any glaringly stupid music reviews? I tried to find a case where Rolling Stone gave a record a low rating and then after it became iconic it got a perfect or near perfect score. I’m actually stunned they haven’t re-reviewed Nirvana‘s Nevermind, which they gave a 3/5 stars. I guess I’ll have to check back in another 2 years, when it turns 20.
12/17/2010
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