Worst band ever

Funny, but Morrissey has lost everyone who believed in what he originally stood for.

 

Agreed. Label mates & total music nerds. You could talk to Bobby & Rob Young about anything from traditional folk/sea shanties, to the most recent DJ/ electronica. Still the 2nd album for me. Nobody was doing that & it flopped. I remember opening for them at the Powerhaus at the Angel, I was 22. Small, but sold out. Following year they went huge.

 

I guess with both art and music, there are two factors at play - whether it is objectively obvious that the artist has some skill in what they're doing, and whether you like the piece, which is pretty subjective.

I personally think that Tracey Emin is absolutely horrendous both as an artist and a human being. Apparently she's highly skilled as a draftswoman, but I've yet to see any evidence of it. However, I have no artistic training, so on this I have to defer to people who know a lot more than me. But while I can see the obvious skill in paintings by Salvador Dali or Patrick Cauldfeld, I don't see evidence of similar in Emin's scribbles. I listened to an art critic's appraisal of her bed installation recently, and the interviewer asked, very reasonably, what merit it had as anyone could have arranged those objects. The critic's response was that Emin could have chosen to draw the bed but she didn't, so that gave it more value than if somebody with no drawing skills had created it. I must admit that the answer left me scratching my head. As for letting a kid loose, there's a video somewhere on YouTube where a nine year old girl with no drawing skills whatsoever is given a canvas and some paints, and is told to chuck the different paints on the canvas in any way she sees fit. The painting is then taken to an auction house, where of course several critics declare it to be priceless.

With regards to music, there are a few artists I think of when this question comes up. Rush are objectively very good, in so far as their abilities as musicians go, both individually and collectively. As for their songs - some of them I think are absolutely brilliant, but far more of them range from dull to completely unlistenable. At the other end of the scale, none of Bob Dylan, Lou Reed and Leonard Cohen has a particularly good singing voice. However, they are considered to be three of the greatest songwriters who ever lived. I'm not really sure where I'm going with this, so I'll leave you with this video where the sheer pretentiousness of art critics is shown up for what it really is.

 

Wet Wet Wet

 

Fu#king Coldplay.

 

Haha I love Range Life but alway wondered what the beef was there , so uncharacteristic of Malkmus to say something like that. I am a huge Pavement fan but I'm sad to admit that I like some of the album Mellon Collie's melodies and overblown pomposity. Also he played with David Pajo (do you know him?) who is one of my all-time heroes in another ridiculous power pop pompous band called Zwan

 

Me too. I Saw them at Leeds festival around the time they were doing Swastika Eyes... They were great