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

See also: Bangs on ELP, Christgau on Journey, every Golden Age critic on Rush, etc

Certainly, The Game is less obnoxious than Queen's last few outings, simply because it's harder to get annoyed with a group that's plugging away at bad rockabilly than with one blasting out crypto-Nazi marching tunes.

Most of the songs on News of the World either challenge Queen's artistic enemies or endeavor to establish a vision of the new order. "We Are the Champions" ends with the line, "No time for losers, 'cause we are the champions—of the world." It's an appropriate comment for a side that also includes "We Will Rock You," which has the atmosphere of a political rally in a Leni Riefenstahl movie and is at once a rock anthem and a commandment.

Speaking of the NY Dolls, does anyone remember when David Johansen went on the Tonight Show as Buster Poindexter and explained to Johnny Carson that he quit singing rock music because his shows were becoming like Nazi rallies? I swear this really happened.

I found it. About 40 seconds in:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EalIXbQsLCA

tons of reviews of Queen albums here, incl. dave marsh's "fascist" comment in the rs review of 'jazz.'

http://www.queenarchives.com/index.php?title=Queen_Music_Reviews

haha, from david fricke's review of live killers: "There are also two versions of their Aryan command, 'We Will Rock You.'"

most of this stuff just seems like a bunch of uptight guys justifying their hatred of a band with whatever cultural/political boogeyman seemed most damning at the time

probably because it remains such a popular practice to this day

otm. today they'd undoubtedly be racist/sexist. oh wait they were sexist then too.

News of the World [Elektra, 1977]
In which the group that last January brought us a $7.98 LP to boycott devotes one side to the wantonness of woman and the other to the futile rebelliousness of the doomed-to-life losers (those saps!) (you saps!) who buy and listen. C

70's crit is chock full of homophobia. almost the default setting.

queen has always had a large female following. or at least from a night at the opera on. they appeal to drama queens. like me. and my sister.

rock critics have always sneered at stuff popular with teens. i think that's it more than anything.

freddie was soooooooooo gay! way campier than bowie. way more proud of his strutting and preening too. he owned it. and teen boys and girls thought he was the coolest! i always thought that was awesome.

Longshot, but it's also possible Christgau, Marsh, Marcus, and the rest despised Queen's music.

:D scott, you are such a happy writer

xp

what's Tarfumes gonna do with this quote:

"When we lost Freddie, we not only lost a great personality, a man with a great sense of humour, a true showman, but we lost probably the best. The best virtuoso rock 'n' roll singer of all time. He could sing anything in any style. He could change his style from line to line and, God, that's an art. And he was brilliant at it."
Roger Daltrey

christgau and marsh hate or are indifferent to about 80% of the things i love. that's okay though. i will always read xgau even though we are polar opposites. i probably have more in common with greil. he likes a lot of stuff that i like. xgau has always hated metal pretty much.

man its impossible to overstate how huge bohemian rapz was after wayne's world came out. it seemed to really lead to a big queen resurgence—i remember they reissued one of the volumes of their greatest hits and tacked on BR and called it "classic queen"?

was b-raps a huge hit in the day, too? or some weird deep cut?

yeah xgau has little use for anything too european in general (he's admitted as much) which limits appreciation of metal, queen, abba, daft punk, etc

honest q: why do people give much of a shit abt him then? he sounds lame.

lol it was a massive #1 in the UK december 1975. My folks bought me a night at the opera that xmas. I wasnt even 3 yet. I loved that song apparently.
xp

I remember gushing to Chris Karolidis in grade 10 history what a big deal it was that it made #1 in both the U.K. and the States. I thought my memory was faulty when I checked--it only made it to #9 in the States--but it was #1 in Canada, so that must have been what I meant.

(Also, deep cuts didn't exist in the 1970s. We called them "album tracks" or "those other songs.")

in the uk 'bohemian rhapsody' was ridiculously big, a #1 hit and a couple of years after its release it got song of the half century or something like that from the british recording industry (sgt peppers got album iirc to give you some idea of what type of canon it was already in). it did well elsewhere including the us where it hit #9 in 76, and it got some grammy nominations. reissue did better but part of that might've been changes in radio and chart calculation plus it has literally both of the factors that can lead to an old song suddenly becoming a hit again (death, use in other media). i remember occasionally seeing the video along w/ every other ancient pre-mtv video here and there during the 80s but it's profile wasn't remotely what it became. this makes sense though, these songs weren't that old and 8-10 year old hits don't really have a place on radio. 'we will rock you' and 'we are the champions' had lingered by virtue of being jock jams but i didn't know about 'under pressure' until vanilla ice, and wouldn't really have had any reason to. i'd guess there's a difference there w/ the uk where they reached a level higher than simply very successful rock band.

in fairness to xgau he knew they had something; he just couldn't (allow himself to) get a handle on it.

A Night at the Opera [Elektra, 1975]
This is near enough to the reported mishmash to make me doubt that it sells for what's good about it. Which is that it doesn't actually botch any of a half-dozen arty-to-heavy "eclectic" modes--even something called "Prophet's Song" sounds OK--and achieves a parodic tone often enough to suggest more than meets the ear. Maybe if they come up with a coherent masterwork I'll figure out what that more is. Maybe if they come up with a coherent masterwork they'll figure out what that more is. B-

You have no idea how big Queen were. Way bigger and better known than Led Zeppelin. I never heard any zep on uk daytime radio growing up.

I'm really the only person who knew "Bohemian Rhapsody" from classic rock radio pre-92??

xp yep i never knowingly heard zep until my 20s when i befriended a rock/metal guy. i remember specifically thinking "so that's where queen got their sound."

I had to buy Led Zep IV just to hear this stairway to heaven song people spoke of.
Whole Lotta Love was known purely because a cover version of it was the top of the pops theme tune

metal, for Xgau, clearly represented the quotidian american, midwest/south mill-yer that he resented deeply. rather like a lot of people who left NYC for college for 4 years and then came back for the rest of their lives…

it never fails to amaze me that so many of you guys are in thrall to the likes of Xgau and Marsh, to the point where so many of you cite shit they wrote as if it means a goddamn thing…I'm 43, and the amount of guys on this board who reflexively defend those guys makes me think that that alot of you here just a bit older than me and are weirdly hung-up on the bizarre, self-flattering but very much not self-aware shit those guys have perpetrated for decades… but at least Xgau's wife didn't manage Peter Stampfel…

ha ha al these UK guys who just posted…tell us how old you are, if you dare!

I'm really the only person who knew "Bohemian Rhapsody" from classic rock radio pre-92??

― EveningStar (Sund4r), Saturday, May 17, 2014 8:04 PM (14 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

no, it was def around classic rock stations in metro nyc turn of the 80s, not huge though.

Like "Another one…" did not work on rock radio

this song saturated every kind of radio as far as i recall.

x-post is anyone here really in thrall of Marsh? I did the polls of his stupid list book, but I never detected any love for the man.

i love this one:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8wk9hPubD1Q

Yeah, it was another one I remembered.
xpost re "Another One..."

ha ha al these UK guys who just posted…tell us how old you are, if you dare!

― veronica moser,

41

i'm 42

that is so fuckin' hilarious that UK dudes around my age had to buy a record to hear fuckin "stairway." in the U.S., that song is a fact of life like McDonalds, but the countrymen of the people who made it have to seek it out cuz Morrissey and the NME doesn't like it!

although maybe folks born in the US in 1992 or thereabouts have never heard it.

it never fails to amaze me that so many of you guys are in thrall to the likes of Xgau and Marsh, to the point where so many of you cite shit they wrote as if it means a goddamn thing…I'm 43, and the amount of guys on this board who reflexively defend those guys makes me think that that alot of you here just a bit older than me and are weirdly hung-up on the bizarre, self-flattering but very much not self-aware shit those guys have perpetrated for decades

eh Christgau was a huge influence but like scott said his tastes and mine don't intersect for quite a few things he thought too "British" or "European." But so what? Apart from admiring felicities of style, the point of writers reading writers is often just to follow the course of an argument. Sharing tastes doesn't matter much to me.

xp i live in the us now and it was conversely weird to me to discover classic rock radio and see all these teens into the likes of pink floyd.

to the point where so many of you cite shit they wrote as if it means a goddamn thing

this sorta is a thread about rock critics' attitudes toward queen iirc.

WW reissue of "Bohemian Rhapsody" was so fucking huge in America. Only Vanessa Williams' great "Save the Best For Last" kept it from #1. I always associate spring '92 with those two jams, "I Love Your Smile," and "Jump."

what a great fuckin year

all4 of those songs own

speaking of all4 we also had "All 4 Love" at #1.

For what it's worth, Christgau did come around on Queen when he reviewed something called Barcelona (had this lodged in my memory, had to google "Christgau Mercury"):

I can't deny it because I catch myself grinning--distanced by the years, and with the campy kicks magnified by a heightened awareness of Freddie Mercury's sexuality, the music of Queen has accrued the high gloss of committed kitsch, where that of Journey, say, has assumed the dull shapelessness of utter crap. Although I don't enjoy all of Classic Queen or Queen's Greatest Hits--the material's not quite that deep--they're often funny and they're also pop, oddly reminiscent of top-grade Cheap Trick.

The Cheap Trick lover in me flinches, but there you go.

It's amazing Queen did these kinds of sales in the UK for most of the eighties:

The single reached only the 45th position in the US charts, but reached number 3 in the UK and was certified silver with 200,000+ copies sold

That's for "I Want to Break Free."

as if it means a goddamn thing

As opposed to what? What we say here? They had opinions, we have opinions, some of theirs influenced some of mine.

yeah I don't get veronica moser's position. Critics should resist reading....other critics?

that is so fuckin' hilarious that UK dudes around my age had to buy a record to hear fuckin "stairway." in the U.S., that song is a fact of life like McDonalds, but the countrymen of the people who made it have to seek it out cuz Morrissey and the NME doesn't like it!

although maybe folks born in the US in 1992 or thereabouts have never heard it.

― veronica moser, Saturday, May 17, 2014 7:44 PM Bookmark

I'm an estadounidense and have never heard "Stairway to Heaven" other than of my own volition (and thank god, that song fucking sucks). I've hear Queen all the time tho.