Critics changing music history

I recently read about Herbie Hancock and his Mwandishi phase which was shot down by critics and ignored by the public. And I thought of Bob Dylan and Robert Shelton's review in the New York Times that helped to start Dylan's career. So I wonder: what are famous examples of critics starting or ruining careers, and maybe examples of critics changing the course of music history by pushing or even blocking evolving styles.

 

Thank goodness Stanley Crouch didn't have the kind of influence he probably wished he had had.

 

Jerome Cooper recorded a piece entitled 'The Crouch Opinion' on his Outer and Interactions LP.

 

Definitively, 1989 Sub Pop + British music press = worldwide blowup

Ten myths about grunge, Nirvana and Kurt Cobain

 

Jon Landau's "I've just seen the future of rock n' roll.." sure helped Springsteen. Didn't make him a star, but it helped.

 

Interesting topic.

Often mentioned in this forum, the Beach Boys never really recovered from the critical backlash after the aborted Smile LP. And that was a backlash that hurt deeply their career. Had Smiley Smile been well received (after all, it's not a bad album), a lot of things could have turned differently for the Wilson family.

Modern MPB (that is, modern brazilian popular music) started out as a critical movement first and foremost, with articles published in the sixties by then-struggling composers and free-thinkers like Caetano Veloso, among others, mostly reassessing brazilian popular music through the Bossa Nova "revolution" of João Gilberto in the late fifties. Such critical activity gave birth to the Tropicalia movement most famously (and a while later, the Clube da Esquina) , but there were a number of other developments not quite celebrated as well.

Of course, Caetano turned out to be the most respected and celebrated brazilian composer of the latter half of the century, and a critic darling as well. A lot of those mid-60/70's brazilian composers have had strong connections with the critics that, sooner or later, helped establish their careers.

 

I'm already worried about any standard of evidence in this thread as well as conflation of criticism and coverage.

Did the Times Dylan review "change history"? Did Brit music press (as opposed to the release of Nevermind) drive the neo-punk grunge explosion? Hmm.

All's I'm saying is if we're gonna play let's stay inside the lines.

 

"I saw my rock 'n' roll past flash before my eyes. And I saw something else: I saw rock and roll future and its name is Bruce Springsteen. And on a night when I needed to feel young, he made me feel like I was hearing music for the very first time."
That's the whole quote, from Boston's Real Paper 5/22/74.
I seriously doubt it had a lot to do with Springsteen's trajectory. The Real Paper was pretty obscure and the quote only became legendary when Springsteen started to break big.
But it is a cool quote.

 

Hard to argue that it didn't -- there was more than an ocean between most US underground music and what was gilded as credible/important/groundbreaking in the pages of the NME or Melody Maker at the time. There is no credible argument that following punk in the 70s the British music weeklies' influence on trends (and thereby sales and exposure generally) became an unassailable standard. They had fashioned themselves arbiters of what was important and true in the music underground and had become kingmakers in a very real sense. A we-made-you-and-we-can-break-you sense. And in the 80s kids in the US totally read the English music press for guidance towards what was "cool." Of course it could have been any journalist of Everett True's cohort and the effect would have been more or less the same. And of course Mudhoney et al had to be as good as he thought they were, too. Still that was a timely piece of international coverage that cemented grunge's viability as an underground-going-mainstream phenomenon and I don't see how that can be debated.

 

Smiley Smile was confusing because anyone who'd heard about this brilliant Smile album probably thought this WAS that album. However, rock criticism was in its infancy so none of that would've had an effect on the BB's career. The problem was that Heroes & Villains alienated a lot of fans as a single, then along came an even stranger album.

By the time of Sunflower and Surf's Up, a certain contingent of critics was the biggest support the BB's had. Same went for the Kinks in that era.

 

My understanding was different, but I stand corrected then.

 

I really think that Robert Christgau’s review of a Car Wheels on a Gravel Road in Rolling Stone really helped Lucinda Williams take the next big step.

Didn’t hurt that the album was peerless, but it helped.

 

I thought the performance clip shown featured Keith Jarrett with a hugely joyful smile on his face, but that must be another video.

 

Dick Clark started a lot of careers (Payola)

 

I think ROLLING STONE'S negative reviews of MCCARTNEY and RAM hurt Paul McCartney's credibility in the early 70's.
Eventually the tide has turned. Both albums are now rated quite highly. In fact I now would consider MCCARTNEY to be an overrated album (It should be rated as good, but not great).

 

Certainly Punk, both in the US and the UK, was fuelled by its media coverage. The relationship between the rock press and the musicians was especially symbiotic in the UK.

In the US -- outside of the key cities of New York, L.A., Boston -- it was actually easier to read about Punk than to actually hear it. No way was your radio station going to play it, but you could read about it.

 

I just thought of a big one: Pete Townshend inserted the pinball plot into TOMMY, knowing that a particularly influential critic (whose name escapes me) loved pinball and would give the record a far more sympathetic hearing.

 

Yeah, the whole "Rolling Stone's criticism hurt the Beach Boys" theory doesn't stand up to scrutiny. And as noted, Rolling Stone lavished praise on the Kinks' VGPS and Arthur, but it did not help their sales at all. Conversely, they eviscerated Led Zeppelin I and II, but I doubt that hurt their sales one bit. Rolling Stone's influence on sales was negligible, I think.

 

Early in The Stranglers career, JJ Burnel allegedly punched music journalist Jon Savage. Savage went on to document punk history, and in retaliation for the earlier incident, omits mentioning The Stranglers in his writing.

This is despite The Strangers being one of the more talented and successful bands to exits during the punk heyday.

 

It should be noted that Rolling Stone's review of McCartney is not a negative review, it is a mixed review. On balance, it is quite positive about the music, but critical of the overall statement of the album, and the way it is presented.

 

In the early 70s, Uriah Heep got unreasonably bad reviews where the band were accused that they are just an imitation of Led Zep, what was a nonsense. Though, thank to the fans in Europe at the time, especially former West Germany where Uriah Heep got cult status and survived those critics attacks in Britain.

 

Here's a great look at when Pitchfork was the final say in independent music and would give out 0.0 scores to albums, many of which ruined artists' careers.

What Was It Like When Critics Could Kill? Most Musicians Still Don’t Want to Talk About It.

 

Pretty sure it was Nic Cohn, author of the essential Awopbobaloobobalopbamboom, and I Am The Greatest Says Johnny Angelo, also co-authored Rock Dreams.

 

Good point; another example would be McCartney's 'Ram', which was described in RS as 'representing the nadir in the decomposition of sixties rock so far' by Landau, and yet it was still a commercially successful hit album, with a no.1 US single, and a stay of over 5 months in the US top 10.

 

I agree with the assertion that some critics OVERSTATE the importance of some styles/genres and artists compared to what they really were while overlooking the significance and influence of other artists and styles/genres.

This is probably why the whole 'punk' thing seems bigger in hindsight than it really was in the late 70's.