https://tedgioia.substack.com/p/why-did-the-beatles-get-so-many-bad
"When I was in my twenties, I embarked on writing an in-depth history of West
Coast jazz. At that juncture in my life, it was the biggest project I’d ever
tackled. Just gathering the research materials took several years.
There was no Internet back then, and so I had to spend weeks and months in
various libraries going through old newspapers and magazines—sometimes on
microfilm (a cursed format I hope has disappeared from the face of the earth),
and occasionally with physical copies.
At one juncture, I went page-by-page through hundreds of old issues of Downbeat
magazine, the leading American jazz periodical founded back in 1934. And I
couldn’t believe what I was reading. Again and again, the most important jazz
recordings—cherished classics nowadays—were savagely attacked or smugly
dismissed at the time of their initial release.
The opinions not only were wrong-headed, but they repeatedly served up exactly
the
opposite opinion of posterity.
Back in my twenties, I was dumbfounded by this.
I considered music critics as experts, and hoped to learn from them. But now I
saw how often they got things wrong—and not just by a wee bit. They were
completely off the mark.
Nowadays, this doesn’t surprise me at all. I’m painfully aware of all the
compromised agendas at work in reviews—writers trying to please an editor, or
impress other critics, or take a fashionable pose, or curry favor with the
tenure committee, or whatever. But there is also something deeper at play in
these huge historical mistakes in critical judgments, and I want to get to the
bottom of it.
Let’s consider the case of the Beatles."
Via Esther Schindler.
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
