Paul Christensen's Blog - Posts Tagged "rock-and-roll"

Why AC/DC Matters by Anthony Bozza

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


The short answer is - they don’t. In another two generations, rock and roll will be seen as degenerate clown music, as quaint as Victorian music hall or Tin Pan Alley, only funnier.

Rock won’t outlast Bach and Wagner, but someday even Bach and Wagner will be forgotten, perhaps sometime after the death of the sun. For nothing lasts forever except forever (see The House on the Borderland by William Hope Hodgson) as Bon Scott might have agreed, perhaps on his way back from the gonorrhoea clinic.

This entire book seems to have written, in 2009, as a rejoinder to hipsters who take the White Stripes seriously but despise AC/DC as bogan music.

But in 2018, hardly anyone remembers the White Stripes, yet ‘Powerage’ and ‘Back in Black’ are still widely listened to, so who cares what hipsters think?

Hipsters are dumb anyway…they latched onto black metal ten years after it lost its relevance, then pretended it was a rebellion against the ‘right wing church’, when in fact it was a rebellion against the left wing church and PC death metal bands like Napalm Death.

Also, if music critics called Altman and Fine despise AC/DC then it says something in the band’s favour, n’est-ce pas? ; )



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Entertain Us: The Rise and Fall of Alternative Rock in the Nineties by Craig Schuftan

My rating: 2 of 5 stars


The anti-white self-loathing of this author is embarrassing (albeit somewhat comical), and there is no mention of the two most interesting alternative music scenes of the 1990s, namely Black Metal and the various World Serpent-distributed groups.

One wonders if the whole ‘self-loathing proto-SJW grunge’ vs. ‘sex-crazed 80s hair rockers’ thing isn’t somehow reflective of the protestant/catholic divide, which in turn reflects deeper tendencies in the European soul…I say that because most of the grunge singers are Nordic-looking, whereas bands like Bon Jovi and Motley Crue have southern European genetic make up (Vince Neil is half Mexican).

Simplification, but maybe a grain of truth to it; perhaps someone with time could investigate further?



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