why did rock critics hate Queen so much in the 1970s/80s?

I know this answer won't please anyone who's a fan, but I don't think it's a confusing question to anyone who remembers that moment. There were a lot of reasons, many already spelled out above. It's like with Rush. Putting my own opinions aside, these bands were simply not liked by critics in the late '70s.

to be fair, hearing "Rock You" at a sports event is going to give you Triumph of the Will vibes

hey now contendo I was just quoting their publicist, not sure I agree w/him

would like to see more bad reviews from the era

(Or at the very least, by the most of the critics who would have voted in Pazz & Jop--I'm sure they had some critical support.)

pretty impressive calling Queen "fascist" before they accidentally played Sun City

accidentally?

"We've thought a lot about the morals of it a lot," claimed Brian May at the time, "and it is something we've decided to do. The band is not political - we play to anybody who wants to come and listen."

shocked

Ugh, "not political" -- what a fucking bullshit cop-out.

Also worth noting is that to get off the UN boycott list, all an artist had to do was issue an apology for having played South Africa and promise not to do it again. It's telling that Queen did nothing of the sort.

(One group -- possibly the only group -- that apologized and got off the UN register were the O'Jays; they were profoundly embarrassed at having played there, seemingly duped into it by unscrupulous promoters.)

by playing to anybody who wanted to come and listen Brian was explicitly demanding the release of Nelson Mandela

They were stunning showmen; I've never NOT been impressed by a live clip I've seen. The Live Aid appearance deserves the received notions about its awesomeness.

For me, a gay man and rock critic, I just don't hear many impressive tunes on the four albums I've heard. Bizarre, for they had it all: excellent frontman, flash guitarist, solid rhythm section. And four songwriters in the band. Few rock bands had every one of its members write songs, all of which were hits in some chart or other. A lot of those songs aren't very good. They lack...mystery, without which their formidable audience-instinct powers looked hollow or at their rare worst grotesque. Plus, Roxy Music!

But I'm totally up for a reconsideration of Body Language, A Kind of Magic, etc!

The stomping beat of "we vill rock you" sounded like jackboots to boomer rockcritics who also saw the arena concert scene as Nazi rallies revisited. "we will rock you" quickly became crowd-pumping music at sports events in the 70s which further explains some of the Fascist association. Truth be told, even Queen's best work could wear pretty thin when you heard it on the radio all day every day. Like their contemporaries Steely Dan & Hall/Oates I think Queen are best appreciated at a distance in measured doses. Constant involuntary exposure to elaborately produced OTT rock bombast such as Queen could make it sound oppressive.

of course Burce Sprungsteen is guilty of some of the same sins as Queen - musically anyway - so on that level Dave Marsh seems heavy-handed/hypocritical.

i forget when Springsteen supported apartheid

dave marsh seems like a really, really angry guy. he even seems angry when he's writing about stuff he likes. i have a soft spot for him because you never really see his byline anywhere anymore (or at least i don't -- is he currently writing for anything?) and thinking about him takes me back to high school, when i'd spend a lot of lunch hours in the library pouring through things like that huge red rolling stone history of rock book, and he was all over that. i remember he had an essay in there about neil young that was so contemptuous and dismissive of him that i was surprised later when i realized that young is mostly pretty highly regarded. i also remember a piece he wrote about kurt cobain's death where he expressed horror and disbelief that cobain actually admired and looked up to freddie mercury.

The difference for me, m, is I want to return to those Steely Dan and H&O songs after airplay has worn them down to nubbins; they persuade me to listen to those albums. Queen don't do this to me.

Dave Marsh is on record as "hating" Neil Young. Because Neil Young said nice things about Reagan, Marsh says, Neil Young killed his dad. Thanks to Neil Young and Reagan, Marsh's dad could not retire and thus worked until he dropped dead.

x post me neither!

god i feel like a jerk thinking about queen singles while dave marsh's dad is dead

i can't believe dave marsh was ever wrong about something.

can't believe Dave Marsh took money from a racist political regime

What Marsh wrote about Young/Reagan/his dad was absolutely meant to be taken literally/at face value.

So was that.

"Freddie Mercury is worldly and sophisticated, a man who knows what the muezzin sounds like. More to the point, you don't. What trips the group up, as usual, is the music. "Mustapha" is merely a clumsy and pretentious rewrite of "Hernando's Hideaway," which has about as much to do with Middle Eastern culture as street-corner souvlaki."

lol, freddie (aka Farrokh Bulsara) was probably THE most successful zoroastrian of parsi descent in history.

ty scott, did not know that

that's a whole lotta rrongg

Give'em credit -- looked up those foreign words in a Spanish dictionary.

dave marsh seems like a really, really angry guy. he even seems angry when he's writing about stuff he likes. i have a soft spot for him because you never really see his byline anywhere anymore (or at least i don't -- is he currently writing for anything?)

He has a blog, although at a glance it looks like he's been specializing in obituaries as of late (Pete Seeger, Bobby Bland, Chet Flippo, Lou Reed...). He has an entry about Rock & Rap Confidential that mentions his growing silence as a writer. It seems like he pops up in Mojo every once in a while to say something about Motown, or The Who, or Bruce. He also used to have a hosted blog at some newspaper site back in the early 2000s--I seem to recall one post about his Buffy fandom, which was surprising to say the least.

He has two weekly shows on Sirius XM: one called Kick Out The Jams, which is largely political, and another called Live From E Street Nation, which is self-explanatory.

Marsh otm in original post imo. Queen is def fascist and it creeps me out, even when its of the campy gay variety.

GrissoM: Can you post a link to the Rock & Rap Confidential piece? I'd like to read that. I looked around his blog, couldn't find it.

It's this about SXSW, and in the introduction he mentions in passing that he hasn't been writing as much, but hopes to fix that. Not a full piece about R&RC, or why exactly he slowed down.

I'm trying to think of an example of, when there was an artist or act who made music over time that I viscerally disliked, I thought those people were truly evil, worthless and otherwise detrimental to humankind. Yeah, I don't think that I've ever thought that about someone based on making music I didn't like. I might have known musicians personally who were repulsive, but that ain't the same.

marsh give the impression that making music he likes is right, and that making music he strongly dislikes is wrong, and that where an artist/act falls w/r/t his own aesthetic determines whether they are good or bad for humanity. This is boomer narcissism, to which many many critics of his generation succumb.

I so wish Zombie Formalist would do like a AMA about the differences btwn 70s/80s RS/Creem/Hit parader/Lisa Robinson-era (is the reason there has been no thread about her book is because she's terrible and always has been?) rock press milieu vs the 90s-10s one that I reckon most of us worked in.

fucking pseudo-Broadway leatherman shit that makes me embarrassed to be a fag

fwiw i kinda hate Springsteen and '70s Who too

queen rox and u r all gay

they were awesome. they could do anything kinda. but i'm a hard rock fan who loves disco and broadway and glam. so they were kinda made for me.

and pop. and metal.

and rap. and funk.

I love disco, glam, rap, and funk, but despise broadway, and am 50/50 on metal.

Queen for me was always a workmanlike (at their absolute pinnacle) rhythm section, a not-wholly-uninteresting guitarist (the apolitical Tom Morello of his day), and a singer who, to paraphrase one musician's view of trumpeter Freddie Hubbard, exemplified "the Rolls-Royce aesthetic, but without the Rolls-Royce."

Freddie rules so hard

Hubbard too, obv, lol

otm (x2)

Was it Wayne's World that shifted opinions from "they're so serious" to "they're in on the fun"?

they could be serious AND funny. in the same song. which i like.

yeah, i dunno about pegging reassessment to any particular thing. i figure it's more likely generational progression. i grew up w/ queen as a radio staple, both their old classic rock chestnuts and their then-contemporary MTV hits ("another one bites the dust", "under pressure", etc). i didn't have to process them as the opposition to anything i might hold dear, they were just THERE, part of the eternal pop architecture. from the beginning (mine, i mean), it seemed obvious that they were awesome, funny and very clearly in on their own joke - but not so much so as to spoil it.

Anxiety about pop fascism seems to have largely faded, but if one were to dredge it up again, wouldn't the obsessive "nation"-building attempts that seem so ubiquitous now (from reverb to live to e-street to ford) seem to be yearnings toward that hegemonic "glory" of mid-70s arena rock?

For ppl my age and I guess thereabouts (I'm 35) the Wayne's World thing ws MASSIVE, me and loads of guys I knew at school bought (or got copied) Queen's Greatest Hits 1 and 2 and got into Queen overall cos of it

Freddie's voice when he does that "scat" thing that sounds like he has a hairball in his throat is literally the most unpleasant sound in all of nature

Bizarrely, I saw a clip of the famous live aid footage (I think?) and it was just him doing that for like 5 minutes

queen shite

& for dicks

There are still some Queen records I think are great (Don't Stop Me Now, Under Pressure, Another One Bits The Dust) and more that I find teeth-grindingly impossible to listen to (Bo Rap, We Are The Champions, We Will Rock You, Radio Ga Ga, anything involving girls with large bottoms), but they've become the epitome of something really quite horrible in British culture that has nothing to do with why critics hated them in the 70s and 80s. I've met people who still say that Queen are their favourite band and they all seem to be the worst kind of reactionary Middle England types.

I accept that this stigma probably doesn't exist in the US (or at least you have your own version of them, although I'm not sure who that would be).

dat's true.

except ABBA's tone is often playful and silly, U2's us unrelentingly Serious and Important

they've already done some U2 songs on glee AFAIK

There was a monthly all-employee work rally at my job, and they closed the presentation with "We Will Rock You" blasting through the hotel ballroom speakers.

(moments ago)

Didn't U2 score an ill-fated Spiderman Broadway show?

Yes: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spider-Man:_Turn_Off_the_Dark

Bono, admitting that his description is a little "pretentious," has referred to it as "pop-up, pop-art opera," noting that Julie Taymor is calling it a "rock-and-roll circus drama."

calling anything a rock and roll circus drama is going to make me hesitate before moving forward. i might step back a little...

"Bono has also described the production as "wrestling with the same stuff" as "Rilke, Blake, Wings of Desire, Roy Lichtenstein, and the Ramones."

Bono starts to seem like a better lyricist when you realize how many terrible things he says in interviews that don't find their way into the songs

lol

Lady Gaga could learn a thing or two from him

turn off the dork

(what i say when bono is talking)

calling anything a rock and roll circus drama is going to make me hesitate before moving forward. i might step back a little...

― scott seward,

not a fan of Bowie's non-linear Gothic drama hypercycle?

There was only one rock and roll circus drama:
http://www.dailymotion.com/video/xhwie_the-who-a-quick-one_music

Surprised this thread didn't get revived when this happened: http://www.ew.com/article/2016/07/18/rnc-donald-trump-we-are-champions-queen

that review OP posted makes Queen sound so much better than they actually were.

Queen were awesome. I was so OTM on this thread.

By the way I think there's a legitimate case to be made for "We Will Rock You" being a "Born in the USA"-style ironic anthem (albeit a bit of a clumsy one). If I'm reading the lyrics right they follow the protagonist through three phases of life: first he's a rowdy kid "playin' in the street," next some kind of nationalist thug ("waving your banner all over the place"), and then finally an old man "pleadin' with your eyes gonna make you some peace some day" — i.e. regretting his life of violence? At the very least there's some ambiguity there, though it does tend to be overshadowed by the stomping and the giant chorus.

Also, yes, Queen are/were awesome

Queen is one of the best rock bands of all time fuiud

i still can't get over the fact that Brian May played the same guitar that he made when he was a kid on every Queen album. that is just so endlessly cool to me! You think of all those big flashy rock bands with their truckloads of guitars...

Surprised this thread didn't get revived when this happened: http://www.ew.com/article/2016/07/18/rnc-donald-trump-we-are-champions-queen

― goodoldneon

I wrote this in July: http://www.rollingstone.com/music/features/5-reasons-trump-shouldnt-use-a-queen-song-in-his-campaign-w430028

I tried listening to a Queen album a while back and there were like THREE 20s/30s pastiches on it - I thought, fuck this McCartneyesque empty eclecticism tbh.

― A frenzied geologist (Tom D.), Sunday, 18 May 2014 16:13 (two years ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Ah so this is the thread where I posted this. OTM, still.

Queen is one of the best rock bands of all time fuiud

― though she denies it to the press, (Joan Crawford Loves Chachi), Saturday, November 5, 2016 7:09 PM (yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

OTM.

id

i still can't get over the fact that Brian May played the same guitar that he made when he was a kid on every Queen album. that is just so endlessly cool to me! You think of all those big flashy rock bands with their truckloads of guitars...

I love that story about how when they were tracking "Crazy Little Thing..." it was decided they needed a Telecaster tone to achieve the desired Rockabilly feel, and Brian was all like, "Give me a couple hours, and I can make [my guitar] sound like a Tele!"--To which Mercury or somebody responded by having an engineer pull a Telecaster from the gear vault and saying something to the effect of, "No! Real Telecaster! You play--Now!"...and that ended up being the one song in the catalogue he didn't use his own guitar on.

haha

The solo to 'Crazy Little Thing Called Love' was done on an Esquire, I think, even though he used a Tele in the vid.

this is one of my fave things on youtube:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jJ_OamX-PA8

I think there's a video on Youtube from the early '80s where he just demonstrates riff after riff...

Spent the afternoon reading this thread, it was fun!

Few rock bands had every one of its members write songs, all of which were hits in some chart or other.

I just noticed that every member of Madness wrote songs - that's seven writers. I don't know if they all wrote hits but at least five of them did.

TS: Queen vs Madness

I'm afraid the Queen revival is over. In New Zealand.

(Note: smug man with cellphone = embattled deputy prime minister)

‘Listen up’ – Winston Peters plays Queen’s Radio Ga Ga to journalists during questioning of SFO investigation
- https://www.tvnz.co.nz/one-news/new-zealand/-listen-up-winston-peters-plays-queen-s-radio-ga-journalists-during-questioning-sfo-investigation

Just hope no politician tries to ruin the Disposable Heroes of Hiphoprisy

Dave Marsh otm