[atlantaprog] An Actual Good-Guy Critic

I should've mentioned this before, I suppose, but I was just inspired to look at this again and thought I'd let this list know.

Glenn McDonald, a free-lance critic from (I believe) Boston, has a Web site called The War Against Silence, which contains about five years' worth of reviews of various albums from various sub-genres. He has the usual rock-crit tastes (post-punk power-pop, "alternative", indie-rock), and he writes in the usual florid (pretentious?) rock-crit style where just about everything "around" the music is discussed, barely touching on the music itself sometimes. But unusually, he *also* has a large place in his heart for progressive rock, metal, and (natch) prog-metal. Here's the man waxing eloquent about Geddy Lee's *My Favorite Headache*, as well as about (would you believe?) Spock's Beard, as well as Enchant and Skyclad.

http://www.furia.com/twas/twas0312.html

Three short samples:

"I think Rush's music appeals to us, those of us who think it represents one possible ideal, in part because it seems so unconcerned with anything outside its own rules and system. Rush never tried to lead or follow anything, and if a tradition has accreted around them, I think of it less as a movement than a coincidence of purposes and aesthetics. However fashions vacillate, somebody always preserves the obdurate classicist notion that art and craftsmanship are by nature complementary, and we should be thankful for this, because otherwise we'd be ill-prepared to rebuild after this rebellion is done, and get ready for the next one."

"Marketing operates on the premise that attention is zero-sum, which means that new movements must *displace* the old ones, thus the chronic oversimplification of cultural history. Punk defeated arena rock, we are taught, and then MTV drove out punk, Nirvana brought it back, and eventually sugary dance-pop beat out complaint-rock, and here we are now. But this is only the way the history looks if you're a Sony executive or a radio programmer."

"If you let yourself outgrow things, you rely on the culture itself progressing, which is not a good bet. So I keep supporting progressive rock, long after it has gone out of fashion, because it embodies a couple critical philosophical tenets. I desperately need to believe that progress is possible, despite abundant evidence that many ostensible steps forward are actually steps back. I need a tradition of constructive social criticism and transformational politics. I need to know that we have not, as a society, forgotten how to write allegories or symphonies, or how to pour our hearts into the most appalling poetry, or how being in a band can be an escape from the tyranny of cool, rather than a tactic for advancing in it."

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