The Music Press and Why You Shouldn't Trust A Critic

I have been looking through an article listing Rolling Stone Magazine's 100 greatest metal albums:

Rolling Stones Top 100 Metal Albums

The top ten is:

10. Pantera - Vulgar Display of Power (1992)

9. Ozzy Osbourne - Blizzard of Ozz (1980)

8. Megadeth - Peace Sells ... but Who's Buying? (1986)

7. Motörhead - No Remorse (1984)

6. Slayer - Reign in Blood (1986)

5. Black Sabbath - Black Sabbath (1970)

4. Iron Maiden - The Number of the Beast (1982)

3. Judas Priest - British Steel (1980)

2. Metallica - Master of Puppets (1986)

1. Black Sabbath - Paranoid (1970)

Yet Rolling Stone's views of metal when it wasn't a issue-selling, money-printing machine was very different. Here is their review of the #5 metal album of all time from it's date of release:

"Over across the tracks in the industrial side of Cream country lie unskilled laborers like Black Sabbath, which was hyped as a rockin’ ritual celebration of the Satanic mass or some such claptrap, something like England’s answer to Coven. Well, they’re not that bad, but that’s about all the credit you can give them. The whole album is a shuck — despite the murky songtitles and some inane lyrics that sound like Vanilla Fudge paying doggerel tribute to Aleister Crowley, the album has nothing to do with spiritualism, the occult, or anything much except stiff recitations of Cream clichés that sound like the musicians learned them out of a book, grinding on and on with dogged persistence. Vocals are sparse, most of the album being filled with plodding bass lines over which the lead guitar dribbles wooden Claptonisms from the master’s tiredest Cream days. They even have discordant jams with bass and guitar reeling like velocitized speedfreaks all over each other’s musical perimeters yet never quite finding synch — just like Cream! But worse."

A very different view from the one expressed in their top 100 review I think you will agree.

Their review of Paranoid was even more damning and was also extremely bizarre - hardly mentioning the music at all and when they did they criticised lead singer Kip Treavor  who was, in fact, lead singer of Black Widow, not Black Sabbath. In other words a complete hatchet job from a critic who couldn't even be bothered to research his subject a little:

Bizarre Rolling Stone Review of Paranoid

Just goes to show that you can never trust the press and paid critics are full of shit!

How incredibly boring. How does this top 10 help anyone?! Any greatest metal album list that only contains Heavy Metal and Thrash Metal was created by an extremely narrow-minded person that has basically zero knowledge on the subject. And apparently music can only originate from the US or the UK. It's like the rest of the world doesn't exist.

And damn it, Motorhead's No Remorse isn't even an album.

Rant over.

I checked out the rest of the top 100. The first page that shows #100-#51 is quite strong, covering classics from a diverse variety of genres, including some of my favorites and former favorites from bands like Gojira, Lamb of God, Meshuggah, Godflesh, and Opeth. However, the #50-#1 part, not so much. Over there we have two sludgy classics from Neurosis and Mastodon, plus a few for other bands' respective genres, then the rest is just classic heavy metal, standard thrash, the more mainstream alternative metal, and the forbidden glam metal, all mostly in the US and UK! It's as if only The Gateway, The Guardians, and The Pit clans exist and they're only from those two countries. Anyone who just wants the real diverse not-too-mainstream classics, only the #100-#51 part is for you. Let them shine in their slightly underrated light!

The content of the list is fairly irrelevant as any list compiled by a corporate entity means FA to me. If I'm going to read a list of greatest metal albums I would much rather read one compiled by someone who actually gives a shit about metal in the first place - at least it's gonna be honest. The point I was trying to make is that metal was originally derided and scorned, when not just ignored, by the established music commentators. Compare this to the advent of punk rock when everyone in the music press wet themselves over it from the get-go because it was controversial and would sell copies -  which is the only thing that ever matters to these cultural vampires. 

In fact, here in the UK, metal and hard rock (that wasn't The Stooges or the New York Dolls) got even more of a hard time and was mercilessly derided. That is unti the advent of the NWOBHM when suddenly everyone in the music press - surprise, surprise - were smelling money and were suddenly lifelong mealheads. This was all in pre-internet days obviously when the only alternative to these charlatans was our friends and peers who helped each other to form and pollinate their own metal taste and so form bonds within a scene that no amount of corporate bullshit could penetrate.

I guess what I'm trying to say is that I view Metal Academy as very much akin to that clique of friends and peers who helped shape my metal world in the face of outside derision and hostility, as represented not only by the corporate media, but also clickbait-addicted hipsters on other sites (hello RYM) who's sole purpose seems to be to deride metal and metalheads. So let's all keep on doing what we're doing and fuck those assholes who just don't "get it" because we don't need their scorn and we don't need their approval.

Sorry - rant over.