Leave Malone Alone

In the current climate of non-stop opinion projection in the age of social media prosumers, brilliant but deadpan fashion models/intellectuals and whatever category this fucking asshole falls into, it’s hard to stake a claim as a professional critic in any facet of pop culture. It really doesn’t seem that long ago when “Everyone’s a critic!” was the cliched refrain of the creative types, before they all drowned a digital flood of hyper-productive amateur art fans. It seems so far away now, but critics used to be able to write critically acclaimed, Pulitzer award winning books, which is funny, because it implies anybody still reads anything.

And then one day, the internet happened, and with it came the slaughter of the musical critics- criticism was so abundant that people got rich by aggregating it to save people time, constantly fueled by the widely available everyperson, spouting opinions about things they barely understand. Everyone’s still a critic; it’s just that now they all have the means to send half baked, grammatically incoherent interpretations of anything to the far corners of the fucking globe, using only two thumbs and last year’s sauce-stained iPhone. Why else would we have Yelp?

So now, the self-described SERIOUS CRITICS have to climb to higher ground to plant their flag above the vox populi, and that apparently means they can’t just criticize the art- it means the only way forward is to haphazardly attach any artist they don’t particularly care for to whatever understanding of art their least favorite generation allegedly has, while appearing as disgusted as possible about the entire thing, the entire time. You can’t just write an article destroying an artists work anymore- where’s the ad money in that? You have to create Frankensteins strawman, and then use a list of 20 dollar words on the end of a crowbar to bash its fucking brains in.

And that’s when we get shit like this- here’s aWashington Post article that tries to decimate not just rapper Post Malone, or his fanbase, but all of their place in the current musical zeigeist. Short version:  Jeff Weiss, a 53 year old man who looks like everyone’s drunken high school vice principle, uses his expertise to attempt to dissect the current genre. This man was paid to say that rap music made by a white 23 year old with face tattoos is “meaningless”, “vacant,” and “the losing difference between appropriation and outright theft”. I bet he was listening to the Chariots of Fire theme when he shat this out.

And Malone isn’t the only one that these blowhards with delusions of enlightenment are trying to put against the wall- here’s Pitchfork using more than a thousand wordsto bitch and moan about how Greta Van Fleet doesn’t emulate Led Zeppelin to the exact standards of Led Zeppelin. (To be fair, an article that surmised every time Pitchfork looked down their noses down at modern music would take lifetimes to read.) And here’s MTV wondering if Lil Yachty is destroying hip hop, diligently writing out the same tired-ass story that people my age have been hearing since Jim Carrey did the same bit, only better, with VanillaIce.

Simply put: Fuck all of this. It’s nothing but the latest iteration of condescending drivel from over-paid ass hats. It’s the self righteous ranting of condescending snobs against the musical taste of 15 year olds. It’s the dull hum made by a bunch of geriatrics in unison- simultaneously using one hand to masturbate to the pornography of narcissism, and using the other to shake a fist and scream “GET OFF MY LAWN” when nobody’s within 100 feet of the house.

You’ve read the headline, friends. You know what’s coming next. To these self important shitbags, I say this: It’s time to give this a rest. Stop it. Stop bitching about the symbolic meaning behind the popularity of modern artists, and fuck right off.

And before you jump into the comments section and light me up, just hear me out for a second, because eviscerating music that’s definitely popular but not particularly intellectual isn’t a new phenomenon. This has happened quite a few times before, and – bear with me - it might be time for everyone to take a second and a deep breath, and evaluate if we really need to do this shit yet again.

Let me prove it. Allow me to present exhibit A: Limp fucking Bizkit.

“The past is never dead. It's not even past.” - William Faulkner

Before they were the punching bags of music critics in the late oughts and early 2010s, before they abandoned by their fans and before they hilariously tried to resurrect their careers by covering The Who, a group of rock-rapping Floridian assholes named Limp Bizkit ran shit. Their first album was the result of a literal car crash- their eccentric and under-rated guitarist, Wes Borland, had recently quit the band because he absolutely hated frontman singer/rapper Fred Durst (something that apparently never changed,) but was convinced to rejoin the band after they wrecked their touring van driving to Los Angeles. 

After the girlfriend of producer Ross Robinson (Korn, At The Drive In, Glassjaw) heard their 3 song demo, she talked Robinson into giving it a listen, and he began working with them on their debut album.

For those too young or who, like me, might have repressed the memories, 3 Dollar Bill, Y’all$, (named after part of a Floridian homophobic slur and a denotation of southern twang, and for some reason a fucking dollar sign) reached #22 on the U.S. charts. The album contained a goofy, why-are-you-screaming cover of George Martin’s “Faith” and a bunch of other songs that sounded exactly fucking like it- including a song called “Counterfeit”, a diss track aimed at a collection of bands that sprouted up in L.B.’s hometown of Jacksonville that were allegedly stealing their sound.

(Two things worth noting: 1. Limp Bizkit is named after something I’m not going to describe in this post but if you’re somehow not sure and you have the stomach for it, you can read about here and 2. their album names, uh, didn’t get much better.)

So why bring up this band, and this embarrassing time in the lives of most men my age? Because even if the aforementioned artists that the diaper fillers won’t shut up about might not have any staying power, Post Malone, Limp Bizkit, Lil Yachty, and whoever is next in this firing squad have some things in common: 

1. They are objectively terrible 

2. They either have or will make all of the money

3. high handed, misguided fuckwads have been spewing out tbeta versions of the same bullshit that Post Malone and the rest get thrown at them since long before whining on the internet was a thing.

Does their music merit negative criticism? Maybe. Sure. I’m not going to spend any time trying to tell people that Significant Other is a timeless classic that holds up, because that’s not the point.

The point is that these artists’ respective 15 minutes of fame isn’t just meaningful, but in many cases, a revelation for their respective audiences.

In towns like the one I grew up in, all we had was the radio, and maybe MTV if it was on the cable channel package your parents paid for. Limp Bizkit’s seemingly infinite popularity existed well before streaming services and YouTube- if you didn’t get your music from what was available at the time, or your older siblings (of which I had none) then you had only a tangential idea of what kind of music was available. It wasn’t like kickass music wasn’t out there, there was simply no way for kids like us to even know what to look for.

Not like today- If you were to tell 13 year old me that one day he’d be able to hear a never-ending stream of songs that sound like his favorite bands just by clicking a button, you would have blown that kids fragile mind. (Although, if we’re being honest, that particular kid wasn’t exactly a genius. More likely than not, he would probably be wearing this T-shirt.)
For many people in that scenario, Limp Bizkit helped bridge the gap. Countless angry 12 year olds and drunk twenty somethings from the south heard Method Man for the first time on Limp Bizkit's  idiotic 1999 single “N 2 Gether Now”- and from there, found out about Wu Tang- I was right there. Most of us gave up on the Bizkit in high school, but the angry suburbanite snot-noses like I was have been listening to everything from Kool G Rap to Logic ever since.

And had it not been for those frantic, chainsaw advocating dipshits, screaming awkwardly in tilted hats and colored contact lenses, I might have never tried to find a lot of the music I love today.

No musician, regardless of quality, exists in a vacuum, born free from influences. And the influences get advertised, one way or the other. Post Malone, a 23 year old moron, will often cover Nirvana at his concerts to people born 15 years after the death of Kurt Cobain. Lil Yachty, for all of his auto-tuned, brain dead droning, gathers cultural relevance (if for no other reason) by constantly feuding with musicians in similar genres of older schools- everyone from Joe Budden to Ice T have bitched about his place in hip hop- and even if TMZ headlines might be the first time his fanbase of teenage girls have ever heard those names, they're tangentially learning about music the same way that we did when we were their age. When people connect with the end result of a stream of influences, as stupid as that blossom could possibly be, they’ll follow the influential roots backwards to the sources. So fuck their music, and maybe fuck them, period, but their legacy of exposure is only able to help

And this has been happening forever. Let me present Exhibit B. The fucking Monkees.

The Monkees were a band created for no other reason than to star in a TV show in the 1960’s. Their first episode came in 1965, and then their careers, technically speaking, fucking exploded. During 1966-67, they sold more records than the Rolling Stones and the Beatles fucking combined. They influenced countless artists, and though there were reasonable critiques about how they essentially ripped off the Beatles, younger fans who didn’t know the names Lennon or Ringo were given a means to find out about them, and some of the best music ever written, and then find what influenced that- Elvis, Chuck Berry, Buddy Holly. And it all stemmed from a shitball TV show created for snot nosed children of the 60’s.

But time is a flat circle, Rustin- and just like today, there were the haughty ass-bags of yesteryear, queasy with indignant rage, ready to decry any movement that didn’t appeal to their caviar sensibilities as a sign of the goddamn apocalypse. While there weren’t enough amateur critics to elevate the ire of professional critics to hate the fans, there were plenty willing to disdain the Monkees. The London Sunday Mirror ran an article calling them "A Disgrace to the Pop World.” They are blackballed as of this writing by the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame because of a 50 year old pissing match with one of the founders ofRolling Stone. You can set a clock to it. If the kids like it, and the elderly first heard their influences, then some arrogant putz will heave himself off his hemorrhoid donut to hide his nostalgia bias behind fake objectivity and gratuitous thesaurus use. 

In conclusion- Listen, critics. This vain, cynical, never-ending circle-jerk (or, if you prefer, this vain, cynical, never-ending game of Limp Biscuit) is not helping anybody. Fucking stop it. If people like something, it's not for you to tell them it's a symptom of a cultural disease, because even if we were going to ignore how bad music can turn people on to great music, it really wasn't that far back that you and your parents were doing the exact same shit. In the words of Mother Theresa, "shut those malfunctioning testicle washers you call your mouths, you judgemental tools."

And if it has to go somewhere, then trust me when I say that there are people in this world that deserve your rage and scorn, and I promise you, most of them don't have any facial tattoos or red dreadlocks.