Re: Melody Maker review of AQO/WSO

["Kevin Winn" <kwinn@chrome.com>]

Thanks to Joe for posting the MM review, providing me with plenty of 
opportunity to rebut (always liked that word!).

>Thanks to Pete Townshend's unwavering populist aesthetic (in 1965, he told 
>Melody Maker that his favourite kind of music was "anything currently 
>recognized as being liked"), 

Now here's a stupid thing to do: try to apply a 30 year-old quote by Pete 
Townshend to his current state of mind...


>The Who's 20-year career ran absolutely parallel to pop's rise and fall:  
>from mid-Sixties optimism, through psychedelic-era 
>portentious/pretentiousness and Seventies disillusionment, right up to the 
>moribund mawkishness of the mid-Eighties, The Who soundtracked Their 
>Generation's ups and downs with bang-on accuracy throughout.

On the contrary, the Who's 20 year career DEFINED pop's rise and fall.  
Everyone else was following.


>Thus, those of us young enough to see the Woodstock generation for what 
>they are (a bunch of whingeing failures, basically) 

I'm glad to include myself in those old enough to have seen the promise 
of the Woodstock generation, as well as watch it get corrupted and 
marketed until it was just a facade.  That was the beginning of the end 
of Rock.  Now the Posers are the rule, rather than the exception.  At 
least in the Seventies, you knew right away if a band was in it for the 
money or not.  Is this idiot actually trying to tell me that there are 
*less* artists now that come off as whining, self-pitying simps?  Someone 
should crack a Les Paul over this guy's head.

>find Townshend's descent from pop prophet to washed-up rock apologist 
>particularly nauseating (though there's actually something compelling 
>about the apocalyptic self-pity of 1975's millionaire whingefest "The 
>Who By Numbers").

Has Pete ever apologized for *anything* ?


>A glorious celebration of pop as useless commodity and a 
>commercially-corrupted art form (hackneyed now, but visionary back then), 
>it pushes pop's essential brashness, bravado and bad taste to preposterous 
>extremes, and, in the process, makes them holy.  Alternating songs of 
>adolescent trauma, spiritual bankruptcy and drug-assisted flight from 
>convention with the band's reconstructions of adverts for acne creams and 
>Heinz beans, it crosses art-school intelligence with pop flash with 
>neither being cheapened or degraded, and is, as such, a stupendous 
>achievement.

Blah, f*cking blah, f*cking blah... Sooner or later critics have to have 
their little image-filled soliloquy where they try to impress by sheer 
volume of words crammed into one sentence.  This sounds like a bad review 
of an art critic visiting yet another rehash of Andy Warhol works.


>That, just two years later, Townshend could have come up with "Tommy", 
>the epitome of everything--phoniness, pomposity, pop masquerading as 
>capital "A" ART--that "Sell Out" debunks with such incisive, effortless 
>glee, is unfathomable.

What a jerk.


>TAYLOR PARKES
>7/22/95

Clearly this is the birthdate of the reviewer.  (no offense intended to the 
younger members of the Right Honorable List, who, by the fact that they are 
members of this group, have demonstrated without question that they have 
superior musical taste!).


OK,
KLW