WORST (meaning best) Xgau opinion4u re: BLACK SABBATH

oh wait oh wait hang on are you saying people who get paid to write about music are fucking retarded? oh holy shit we may have to shut down the internet for a while. is this for real?

seriously you should have told me before you started this poll.

jesus christ.

OK I can't get ahold of my boss but I figure the best we can make of it is to just try and ironically appreciate how retarded music criticism is in kind of a general way, like with a metaphor, like building dams out of sand, or honking a car horn at the crucifixion. People can probably talk about that for a while and it'll be okay for a few days, but you fucking started it, so you gotta at least help shoring this up. Pitchfork et al have maybe 48 hours left in 'em if this gets out, you and I both know I'm not even fucking kidding. This did not need to happen.

happy birthday

: D

Who put you up to this? You fucking son of a bitch.

THIS SHIT IS SO ON

no turning back now, amirite?

wow guys

seriously though where do we go from here

wait until j0hn "i wrote the book on Black Sabbath" D. shows up, ooooooh boy

i can has salvation

CHOOSE SIDES, HOOS, YOU'RE PART OF THIS NOW!!!!

hey dudes I found a gong. I'ma beat on it until I faint? This will help.

"incipient groovies" deserves some consideration

Only two cuts total (out of seventeen) from LPs five and six, but three from four, cleverly entitled Black Sabbath Vol. 4, which I never got around to putting on in 1972.

Soooo many numbers. O_O

Personally, I've always suspected that horror movies catharsized stuff I was too rational to care about in the first place.

this is the kind of shit that drives me crazy about xgau, his rong-o opinions would be easier to take if he didn't feel the need to constantly remind the world how he smart is.

how smart he thinks he is

self-directed LOL

who is this guy and why should i care?

critic not liking your favorite band shockah

more like critic dislocating shoulder to pat self on back non-shocker (cf. m coleman's post)

oh gershy, you're the gershiest

voted Masters of Reality for "I feel entitled to put this in its place." he really laid it all out there.

none of this is really up to the standards of his best work - maybe combine the best parts from all then youd be on to something.

Black Sabbath [Warner Bros., 197X]
The worst of the counterculture on a plastic platter--bullshit necromancy, drug-impaired reaction time, long solos, everything. Black Sabbath is English--dull and decadent. I don't care how many rebels and incipient groovies are buying. I've been worried something like this was going to happen since the first time I saw a numerology column in an underground newspaper. They do take heavy to undreamt-of extremes, and I suppose I could enjoy them as camp, like a horror movie. This is a dim-witted, amoral exploitation --"Rat Salad" has vanished without a trace-- -the title cut is definitely screamworthy.

Yep, "bullshit necromancy, drug-impaired reaction time" is what takes the cake.

Now then, since I'm not a professional writer, I might be having a hard time picking up on some of the in-trade irony that might have been laid down.

No-one's REALLY bothered that Christgau wrote some reviews expressing distaste for Black Sabbath, are they? To me as a reader, the idea that different crtics are gonna be more simpatico to different things is kind of like an axiom.

As is the idea that some of what I read--even from people who are quote unquote respected, whether it's Christgau or Reynolds or Chuck Eddyor anybody else--is gonna be bullshit. It comes with the territory, and if I had a problem with it I wouldn't be reading about rock 'n' roll, I'd be reading about something else, high particle physics or something. . . .

Although, again, if I'm missing something, I'm sure someone will tell me.

No-one's REALLY bothered that Christgau wrote some reviews expressing distaste for Black Sabbath, are they?

Well, maybe they were 37 fucking years ago, back when other critics were first making fun of him for it -- in ways that were actually funny back then.

I gotta go with "I've been worried something like this was going to happen since the first time I saw a numerology column in an underground newspaper."

i voted for the first one because i would've bought a copy of that album based on that review.

I've been worried something like this was going to happen since the first time I saw a numerology column in an underground newspaper.

C'mon, this is hilarious.

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/thumb/2/25/Marvin-TV-3.jpg/240px-Marvin-TV-3.jpg

Hey, at least the debut improved to C- (from its original E!) in the ensuing decade! Yeah, I own the 70s "Consumer Guide" book. (Own the '80s one too.) The guy's entertaining even when he's RONG.

My favourite bit: That sinister Christian/satanist/liberal cabal. (That shit reached all the way up to the Nixon White House!)

I was all prepared to get pissed off at Christigau here - like I did when I read that bit where he called Hendrix a "psychedelic Uncle Tom" - but I think his logic hangs together here, his points are fair enough - especially when he's writing about the first two records. "Masters" and the comp are kinda skimmed over, he's already too bored by them to get into anything interesting.

I love Sabbath, but I imagine some of their excesses must have made it harder to give them the benefit of the doubt back in 69 than it is now. They were campy, dimwitted and stoned. Now I like campy, dimwitted and stoned sometimes myself - but I see how it got under his skin back then.

I think maybe he's ascribing more cynicism to them than they deserve ("amoral exploitation" is a bit over the top), but "Christian/satanist/liberal murk" is as good a description of Sabbath lyrics as any. Now again, I kinda like that murkiness now - but I remember being frustrated by it when I first discovered the early Sabbath records, when I was a teenager and expected things to make more sense. Christgau spends a fair bit of energy wondering whether they mean it or not, whether the audience takes it seriously. In a small way, I wonder if it's sad that this question is mostly lost in rock criticism - it seems most music writing starts from the premise that anyone taking anything seriously is a fool anyway, so who gives a fuck anyway.

One thing to consider is that one of Christgau's first published works was a straight ahead news story on a young hippie girl who died from being on some ridiculous mystically-inspired macrobiotic diet. Maybe the murk felt a bit more dangerous then. I reread Joan Didion's White Album recently, and she paints a pretty bleak picture of the post-hippy drugged out scene too.

But I think liking Sabbath or NWA or The Misfits or whatever horror movie catharsis art you want to pick does take a leap of faith - you do need to put aside your rationality to truly dig it. You have to stop worrying if the artist or other people mean exactly what they say. He's unwilling, and I think it's his loss. But I don't think it's the reader's loss - he writes consistently and passionately here, even though he's clearly irritated by the band and everything they seem to stand for.

On the other hand, he doesn't give the music much of a chance. "Drug-impaired reaction time", if he's talking about the playing, is dead wrong. "Drug-enhanced reaction time" would be much more accurate. Dismissing them just for having long solos seems as weak as dismissing the Ramones just because they played short songs would have been a couple of years later. It just seems like - even if you don't like it - there's more to say about how Sabbath sounds than he does here. Otherwise I'd review the reviews as follows:

Black Sabbath [Warner Bros., 1970] A+
Paranoid [Warner Bros., 1970] A
Master of Reality [Warner Bros., 1971] B
We Sold Our Souls for Rock 'n' Roll [Warner Bros., 1976] C

"I've been worried something like this was going to happen since the first time I saw a numerology column in an underground newspaper."

totally lol'd

Good remarks, Fritz. The "drug-impaired reaction time" actually makes sense in the context of Xgau, if you know that his bias against sl-o-o-o-w music has been pretty consistent and oft-stated over the years. That Sabbath (or anybody) might have WANTED to play that slow was apparently an alien concept that he may have refused to accept. But I still think it's a pretty hilarious remark, however false the logic and the very premise itself.

Fritz totally OTM. Also, who cares how some critic's tastes/ideas 40 years ago square with yours today. How can those things even be compared?

But I think liking Sabbath or NWA or The Misfits or whatever horror movie catharsis art you want to pick does take a leap of faith - you do need to put aside your rationality to truly dig it. You have to stop worrying if the artist or other people mean exactly what they say.

-- fritz

Dunno about putting aside rationality, but I hated NWA when I first heard 'em. Not so much for the music itself: mostly due to my hatred of the people I knew who most liked 'em. I hated the thoughless assholery they seemed to represent and inspire. After a while, I got over all that and just accepted the music on its own terms, but for a while there, I was as RONG as can be, for reasons similar to Xgau's.

I pretty much hate most horror movies; they totally bore me, always have. So I've always kind of liked his swipe at them, whether he was patting himself on the back or not. (And so what if he was?)

omg dude hav u ever seen the ring tho!

For a lefty like xgau who found much to like about 60s activism, the descent into 70s navel-gazing hit particularly hard. Great as that navel-gazing may have been, he wasn't a navel-gazing kinda guy. Give him points for recognizing in real time what was happening as the decades changed, and how it got reflected in the music.

I'm gonna ask a dumb question here. I think I've read somewhere that Black Sabbath were never popular with critics in general during the 70s, and were only given props later when their influence on metal and harder rock on the whole became apparent. (Obvs influencing hip post-hardcore stuff like Black Flag and Dinosaur Jr couldn't have hurt.)

Is this true, an exaggeration, or just a load of bollocks?

http://www.rocksbackpages.com/artist.html?ArtistID=blacksabbath

Black Sabbath: Nobody But The Public Digs Sabbath

Keith Altham, Record Mirror, 30 January 1971

THERE WOULD seem to be a lot of unnecessary resentment over Black Sabbath's success in this business. And even outside it by those bastions of public musical taste who regard any kind of youthful success on an inflationary scale as some kind of obscene hype.

Hmmmm...

Master of Reality
Black Sabbath
Warner 2562
Released: August 1971
Chart Peak: #8
Weeks Charted: 43
Certified Platinum: 10/13/86
The second-generation rock audience (that is, those who went steady to "I Wanna Hold Your Hand" and got serious with Highway 62 Revisited) suffer mightily wrestling with the phenomenon represented by Grand Funk and Black Sabbath. If nothing else, though, both Funk and Sabbath are for all their monotony at least supremely consistent -- as opposed to shtick collectors with no personal vision like Deep Purple. And since when is monotony so taboo in rock & roll, anyway? Rock has been -- some of the best of it too -- in large part monotonous from the beginning, hypnotically so, as rightwingers would say. As far apart as they are, Black Sabbath is only slightly more monotonous than James Taylor or Joni Mitchell, and any Stooges or MC5 fan who disdains Black Sabbath is just bigoted.

The thing is that, like all the best rock & rollers since the Pleistocene era, Black Sabbath (and Grand Funk) have a vision that informs their music with unity and direction and makes their simple structures more than they might seem. Grand Funk's vision is one of universal brotherhood (as when they have spoken of taking their millions to the White House with a list of demands), but Black Sabbath's, until Master of Reality anyway, has concentrated relentlessly on the self-immolating underside of all the beatific Let's Get Together platitudes of the counterculture.

Master of Reality both extends and modifies the trends on their last album, Paranoid. It has fewer songs, if you discount the two short instrumental interludes, but it is not that the songs are longer than the first record -- the album is shorter. The sound, with a couple of exceptions, has evolved little if at all. The thick, plodding, almost arhythmic steel wool curtains of sound the group is celebrated and reviled for only appear in their classical state of excruciating slowness on two tracks, "Sweet Leaf" and "Lord of This World," and both break into driving jams that are well worth the wait. Which itself is no problem once you stop thinking about how bored you are and just let it filter down your innards like a good bottle of Romilar. Rock & roll has always been noise, and Black Sabbath have boiled that noise to its resinous essence. Did you expect bones to be anything else but rigid?

The rest of the songs, while not exactly lilting, have all the drive and frenzy you could wish for in this day and age. Thematically the group has mellowed a bit, and although the morbidity still shines rankly in almost every song, the group seems to have taken its popularity and position seriously enough to begin offering some answers to the dark cul-de-sacs of Paranoid. "Sweet Leaf," for instance, shows that Black Sabbath have the balls to write a song celebrating grass this late date, and the double entendre, if you can even call it that, is much less tortuous than it would have been in 1966, with an added touch of salvation from grosser potions: "My life was empty forever on a down/ Until you took me, showed me around... Straight people don't know what you're about..."

Unfortunately, the religious virus also rears its zealot head, in "After Forever," which is a great Yardbirds-type arrangement nevertheless and despite its drubbing us over the head with "God is the only way to love" it does have the great line "Would you like to see the Pope on the end of a rope?"

And besides, isn't all this Christian folderol just the flip side of the Luciferian creed they commenced with and look back on balefully in "Lord of This World?" And for those of us, like me, who prefer the secular side of Black Sabbath, there's "Solitude," a ballad as lovely as any out of England in the last year (with flute yet), and "Children of the Grave": with "Revolution in their minds -- the children start to march/Against the world they have to live in/Oh! The hate that's in their hearts/They're tired of being pushed around, and told just what to do/They'll fight the world until they've won and love comes flowing through."

I'm not saying that either that or the arrangement it's set in is the new "My Generation," but it is a rocking, churning addition to the long line of defiant, self-affirmative and certainly a little defensive songs that goes right back to the earliest whap and wail of rock 'n' roll. It's naive, simplistic, repetitive, absolute doggerel -- but in the tradition. Chuck Berry sang in more repressed times, "Don't bother us, leave us 'lone/Anyway we almost grown." The Who stuttered "hope I die before I get old," but the MC5 wanted to "Kick Out the Jams" or at least escape on a "Starship," and Black Sabbath have picked up the addled, quasi-politicized desperation of growing up in these times exactly where they left off: "Freedom fighters sent out to the sun/Escape from brainwashed minds and pollution/Leave the earth to all its sin and hate/Find another world where freedom waits."

The question now is not whether we can accept lines as obvious and juvenile as that from a rock & roll record. They should be as palatable to anyone with a memory as the stereotypic two- and three-chord structures of the songs. The only criterion is excitement, and Black Sabbath's got it. The real question is whether Black Sabbath can grow and evolve, as a band like the MC5 has, so that there is a bit more variation in their sound from album to album. And that's a question this group hasn't answered.

- Lester Bangs, Rolling Stone, 11/25/71.

gershy I didn't really write the book on black sabbath I just wrote a novelette about one of their albums, the only music I'm an authority about is Christian Contemporary

Give him points for recognizing in real time what was happening as the decades changed, and how it got reflected in the music.

OTMx10000000

According to xhuxk, Sab were well-dug by Phonograph Record Magazine which I've never read.

If anyone is perversely interested in further exploring rips on Xgau's rips on Sab, Carducci already covered this ground at length in Rock & The Pop Narcotic. He even speculates on who those "rebels and incipient groovies" might be. IIRC, it was Bangs and Marsh (did Marsh dig Sab? I don't recall).

Next poll: WORST (meaning best) Xgau opinion4u re: ABBA

Black Sabbath: Black Sabbath Volume 4
Metal Mike Saunders, Phonograph Record, November 1972

IT'S EARLY 1965. Suppose, just for once, that folk-rock never happens. Instead the English Invasion proceeds to its logical conclusions and rather than marking the effective end of the era, 'Help' and'Satisfaction' mark the beginning of the second English wave.

Them and The Who attain enormous popularity. The Zombies rack up nine Top 10 hits in a row. 'My Generation' makes number one in America, and avant-garde English rock and roll explodes into a frenzy. On the Kinks' smash hit of early 1966, 'Gotta Let Me Know', Jimmy Page plays the most incredible guitar break of all time, and he immediately becomes the most famous individual rock musician in existence. With his own group Jimmy Page and the Esquires (Née Neil Christian and the Crusaders), he reels off two straight smashes, 'Here Right Now' and 'Psycho'.

The Small Faces break with 'All Or Nothing', and the subsequent Who/Small Faces tour takes America by storm. 'Substitute' by The Who sells two million copies. Perhaps due to Jimmy Page's feats, fuzzboxes become the rage in summer 1966 and the sounds get louder, harder, and more and more experimental. Finally, in late 1966 around the time of the Yardbirds' 'Happenings Ten Years Time Ago', out of a decaying English steel town and armed with their debut album entitled Master of Reality, and yet another totally new, unheard of rock sound, come. ...Black Sabbath.

It's really not such a farfetched hypothesis. Black Sabbath at their best have been perhaps the all-time ultimate rock and roll noise – their music has relentlessly developed upon the idea the early Who were getting at, that mystical moment when the music takes off and just becomes pure sound. That, indeed is where Sabbath have made their basic stand: sound.

And that's where the one big disappointment with Black Sabbath Volume 4 lies – the sound itself. For some inexplicable reason, Black Sabbath, saw fit to record Vol. 4 without their previous production/engineering team of Rodger Bain and Tony Allom, a move that has to be one of the biggest mistakes in recent rock history.

As a result, Vol. 4 is the most conventional sounding of any Black Sabbath album, lacking entirely the furious slab-thick bass sound which reached its apex on Master of Reality. Large stretches of Vol. 4 sound a lot like Led Zeppelin, in fact – which is great, but not Sabbath's main turf.

The engineering deficiencies of Vol. 4 are largely compensated for by a stunning new development: Black Sabbath playing at fast tempos! Around 5 of the 7 rockers on the LP feature Sabbath simply revving up at a pace previously unknown! The mind boggles. 'Supernaut' is the real standout, one of Sabbath's two or three best tracks ever.. .to hear this song on AM radio would be the greatest thing since Uriah Heep's 'Easy Livin''.

The remaining fast tracks are all very good, and 'Cornuponia' is an effective slow workout more in the old Sabbath mold. Not much can be said for the album's two ballads, though. 'Laguna Sunrise' and 'Changes' are irritating exercises in the mawkish that fall just short of unlistenable – that is, if you regard the latter as an Elton John parody, which it unfortunately isn't.

Black Sabbath's songwriting has changed a lot with Vol. 4. Musically, the group's material is more diffuse and less monomanically vicious – fewer pulverizing riffs this time out. The music nevertheless still shines, but thematically the songs just don't stand out as they have in the past (who can ever forget 'War Pigs', 'Hand of Doom', or 'Into the Void'? Whether, as one non-convert put it, you want to or not!).

So Black Sabbath Vol. 4 is both a confusing and an exciting album. Good but not great. In the long run Vol. 4 may be a more durable effort than Paranoid, but the two are so dissimilar I hesitate to compare them. And it's still impossible to tell whether the comparative lack of fire here is due to the inferior engineering, or to a decreasing savagery in Sabbath's playing. Considering how 'Under the Sun' (the album's least successful hard rock number) is almost wiped off the board by the thin recording, the former seems more probable at this point in time.

Black Sabbath going through the motions still shuts down 99% of today's rock, but there's one group it won't beat:
Led Zeppelin. The Zep's fifth album, which should be out by the time you read this, may well decide who wears the crown of heavy metal champs for the next year. Also hanging in the balance is whether Jimmy Page's time for long-overdue recognition (he being a man who, as Todd Everett of this magazine pointed out, can outrock Keith Richard and Mick Taylor combined without sweating) has finally come.

Black Sabbath Volume 4 vs. Led Zep V...only the hardy are invited, and only an ingrate would miss such a confrontation of the giants. Best of all, the cruel fate to be dished out to the loser: ELECTROCUTION!

© Metal Mike Saunders, 1972

Actually, now that I write that maybe his Sab/ABBA problem is that their albums just aren't consistent which I think is true (same with AC/DC). As much as I love Sab and worship the ground ABBA walks (walked?) on, there's not a single album by either that I love start to finish. I bet someone could compile a Sab comp that would bring it up to C+ levels (B-?).

P.S. Fritz, fantastic post, btw!

its pretty fascinating to hear people try and talk abt metal before there was metal

haha eddybait

He (Xgau) clearly didn't like the letters A-B-B-A juxtaposed.

The Christgau reviews are an embarrassment. Here's the worst "...Black Sabbath Vol. 4, which I never got around to putting on in 1972. And you know, I'm still not sure I've ever heard anything on it." How can you evaluate a band in good faith without ever hearing what many consider their masterpiece> Fucking idiotic.

you know he's laughing at you, rite?

this is even funnier if you're meh on sabbath btw

the butthurtedness, i mean

did Bill pass the SAT?

On his way to work, maybe.

How can you evaluate a band in good faith without ever hearing what many consider their masterpiece

See many, many, many Richard Meltzer reviews.

Personally, I've always suspected that horror movies catharsized stuff I was too rational to care about in the first place.

ugh

"did Bill pass the SAT?"

1050. But I know enough to know Christgau's a tin-eared idiot.

Automatic thread bump. This poll is closing tomorrow.

Automatic thread bump. This poll's results are now in.

bullshit necromancy, drug-impaired reaction time, long solos, everything

xgau, way, ahead of, his, time

that line should've been on a sticker on the album.

I bought albums because they were described like this.

inconclusive results, runoff needed

I feel entitled to put this in its place.

I agree. Black Sabbath is music for the childish, stupid and / or tasteless.

any Stooges or MC5 fan who disdains Black Sabbath is just bigoted.

This is a dim-witted, amoral exploitation.

The Gau's writing is so impenetrable, yet oddly compelling.

Before the internet, I guess this could be like some kind of oracle; gullible readers were intrigued to the point of forsaking their good old "wait, what?" instincts and actually think that there could be some kind of meaning to those ramblings.

http://i5.photobucket.com/albums/y176/edwardiii/OL-SixthFinger15.jpg

I that Brian Eno in white?

After all, their audience can't take that Lucifer bit seriously, right?

oh man, lol @ el tomnboto at the top