Kill Your Idols: The Overrated Album/Band/Author/Book/Video Game thread

[Max Ernst]

With apologies to Jim Derogatis for aping his title and concept, this is a thread where you share which piece or art, of if it makes you more comfortable, ‘entertainment’, consistently receives accolades it does not deserve. Perhaps time hasn’t been as kind to it as people may think. Or perhaps proponents are simply neck-deep in nostalgia, and lack the humility to admit that something they hold very dear sucks. However, if you are like me, sometimes it just feels like you are snorting crazy powder because you cannot understand why people love a particular piece of art with such intensity.

Before I get the ball rolling, I am going to be clear that I am not just going to pick on any piece of popular entertainment. Commercially driven entertainment, which is entertainment that seeks to reach the broadest possible audience in order to profit those who create it, are often insipid and nauseating. There are exceptions, of course, but for the sake of simplicity, I am going to just tackle critical darlings. Movies, games, books and albums that top “best-ever” lists will be in my particular line of fire, but of course you are free to tear apart whatever you wish.

Also, if any of you cretins say Citizen Kane, I will lose my shit.

Overrated Album: The Beatles - Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band

I love The Beatles. This is not an anti-Beatles post. However, this is consistently ranked as their best record, and I couldn’t disagree more. If anyone took the time to go track-by-track and judge every track by its merits, you will see that it’s actually a bit of a misstep from the band. Firstly, it’s not their best record- that honour goes to Revolver, which synthesises psychedelic exploration and melodic pop better than anything else they have ever done. Secondly, there are a buttload of shitty tracks on this record.

While the album opens strong with its title track, ‘With a Little Help from My Friends’ is the first sign that this isn’t an A-Grade Beatles record. Notably, it’s very cruel to get your personable but not exceptionally talented drummer to sing a song about how he would struggle to survive without his friends. The song has that bullshit nursery rhyme tone that plagues this album and a lot of McCartney’s future work. ‘Getting Better’, ‘When I’m Sixty-Four’, ‘She’s Leaving Home’ and ‘Fixing a Hole’ are utterly forgettable, and if you do remember them, it could be because they sound like childish sing songs as opposed to listenable pop music.

That is not to leave Lennon off the hook, here. Many of his songs sound undercooked and lack anything tangible to hold on to as a listener. ‘Good Morning Good Morning’ is his worst song on the record, but ‘Being for the Benefit of Mr. Kite’, much like the album in general, relies on its neat concept rather than anything from its own merits. The song that coincidentally initialises as ‘LSD’ is a solid track, but it cannot support the album on its own.

Strangely, the best song on the record ‘A Day in the Life’, might be the best Beatles song ever recorded. It has everything that is great about the band: the willingness to experiment, the clash of musical styles, the wonderful dynamic between Lennon’s hazy wails and McCartney’s jolly hooks… it sounds like a band that were trying to blow minds. They succeeded.

This album has a wonderful concept, was extremely ambitious and culturally important, and sounds like a band free to do what they please. However, in the end, there isn’t that much worth listening to here. Sorry.

Overrated Book: Jack Keroac’s On the Road

This book is a great example of an author failing his obligation as a story teller: Keroac simply does not properly explore the relevant dimensions of his subject matter. On the Road glorifies a free life without commitments, without the grind, without a plan, and to live life one step at a time to maximise how much you can see or do. However, it is horrendously irresponsible, ignoring emotional inconveniences and creating motivation without a source.

Firstly, it is a travel book where you don’t see anything. For a book about travel, with characters that enthuse about the open road, there is nothing to see as a reader. While Sal Paradise bounces between city to city with feverish drive, the locations themselves lack any sort of defining character. As a reader, we cannot understand his enthusiasm about being in Denver because we can’t see how it is any different to California. For a book about locations and cultures, On the Road’s backdrop is incredibly lifeless.

Secondly, the hardships of travel are not fully expressed. Sal often goes hungry, sleeps in public and feels despondent as he feels like he is a ship without a rudder. Yet, Keroac brisks past these emotions, as if they are minor inconveniences to living on the open road, and therefore not worth detailing properly. While the book dedicates pages to how exhilarating it is to sit in a pick-up truck in the middle of the nowhere, severe hunger pains only merit a single line. Have you ever gone 24 hours without food? It fucking sucks. You would complain about it a lot. Keroac doesn’t think so. It’s like reading a book on the joys of binge drinking without any mention of hangovers.

Also, Keroac has an awkward, stilted writing style. His prose continuously manages to circle around his particular points without ever getting there. While some could argue that this ties in with the theme of the text, as the characters are simply drifting to avoid getting at their real problems, I think that is giving Keroac too much credit.

I was going to write why Grease is such a terrible film, but I just don’t have the energy after that. Maybe later.

[brkl]

I don't see the point of this thread if we can't shit on Citizen Kane!

[melmer]

Two and a half men is terrible! (am i doing this right)

[melmer]

I was going to write why Grease is such a terrible film, but I just don’t have the energy after that. Maybe later.

[Roderick]

This thread has amazing potential to just be bitching about something you dislike out of a particular cultural hangup. The whole thing about 'overrated' is that you are bothered by what other people think about something, not the inherent value of it. I mean, of course your beef is the notion that the thing is not deserving of accolades based on its artistic flaws, but even then it's a kneejerk reaction about what other people think. And that's just generally always a bad decision.

I try so hard not let such things skew my perspective, but sometimes it is totally not preventable. Case in point; Adventure Time. It took me about 5-8 episodes to appreciate it, especially because I had seen so many people raving about it. My expectations were so high that the show really had to struggle and shine to appeal to me. If I had heard nothing about it, the odds are I would've been hooked with the first episode.

I'm telling you, other people's opinions on things are awful and should be avoided at all costs.

Now go read my goddamn film review blog!

[Max Ernst]

Honestly, I just love it when people take 'sacred' works and write a thoughtful counter-narrative that totally makes me reconsider something I have taken for granted. This whole thread is inspired by a wonderful critique of Kendrick Lamar's Good Kid, M.A.A.D City, and I honestly cannot hear the album the same way. Good criticism can totally change the way you interpret a work, and I was hoping it was going to happen here in some form.

That was my intent, anyway.

[osmosisch]

Attempting to reduce people's enjoyment of a particular thing is not something I can get behind.

[Max Ernst]

I assure you, that wasn't my intent. I was hoping for a strong back and forth rather than a shit-fest.

[osmosisch]

In that case the title and concept would appear to be misleading. Do I understand correctly that your intent is to ask 'what masterpiece/classic do you believe has sides to it that should be discussed more but aren't?'

[Max Ernst]

I went for snappy over nuance and now I have endless shame.

[osmosisch]

I'll say there are some widely-hailed classics I just absolutely could not find the value of when I tried cracking them on my own. The most shameful are Finnegan's Wake and Gravity's Rainbow, neither of which I could get through. Reading the words on each page just became such an unutterable chore that I eventually gave up.

That's hardly the type of enlightened criticism you appear to be looking for, but there it is.

[Orv]

Honestly, I just love it when people take 'sacred' works and write a thoughtful counter-narrative that totally makes me reconsider something I have taken for granted. This whole thread is inspired by a wonderful critique of Kendrick Lamar's Good Kid, M.A.A.D City, and I honestly cannot hear the album the same way. Good criticism can totally change the way you interpret a work, and I was hoping it was going to happen here in some form.

That was my intent, anyway.

See I don't want my interpretation of Sgt. Pepper changed, you're a monster.

[ThunderPeel2001]

Argh. I wrote a whole missive about how you've missed the point in both cases, isolating them from the time of their creation, but Chrome crashed, and I can't be bothered to type it all again.

Bottom line, both were revolutionary for their time. You can't take a piece of art out of its context and expect to be able to fully appreciate it. (On the Road was about the feeling that society didn't have a place for you -- something that was felt by lot of people in the post wars years: They didn't want the white picket fence dream, and neither did the generation that followed (see the sixties)),

[Codicier]

Bottom line, both were revolutionary for their time. You can't take a piece of art out of its context and expect to be able to fully appreciate it. (On the Road was about the feeling that society didn't have a place for you -- something that was felt by lot of people in the post wars years: They didn't want the white picket fence dream, and neither did the generation that followed (see the sixties)),

I tend to agree with you here, but in some ways isn't that itself a argument against them? not that they are overrated, but that they aren't (as) relevant any more, and that it's impossible for anyone to fully recapture the context that would allow them to fully understand why they were important?

Edit: Perhaps in some ways Sean's Monkey Island story was a great example of a classic work that got a enormously positive reaction from people who have no connection to it's context. So It's probably a case of remember why your heroes were your heroes in the first place.

[ThunderPeel2001]

I don't think it's possible to fully appreciate most art without knowing the context in which it was created. Does that diminish the author's achievements? Does it mean it doesn't deserve to be well regarded? Not in my opinion.

It's interesting because, in a wider sense, I guess there's two ways to react to "everyone else likes this but me": One is, "everyone else is wrong"! The other (and where I tend to fall) is, "How can I learn to appreciate what everyone else is appreciating about it?". To me, "good taste" is not just about having an opinion on something, it's about having a sophisticated palate.

[Ben X]

You can't take a piece of art out of its context and expect to be able to fully appreciate it.

Just like Half Life!

[ThunderPeel2001]

Just like Half Life!

Absolutely! The closest I've ever come to being able to appreciate that game is when you told me it was made by an untested team - a real underdog story. Instead, when I first played it, I came from PC Gamer's angle that it was "the most interactive FPS ever, with an incredible storyline!". (It's hard to consider Half-Life's story as "incredible" when you've grown knowing LucasArts games.) I digress!

[Ben X]

I don't know if I ever got round to saying this, but it's absolutely not the story that people rate in the HL games, it's the storytelling. The actual plot is paper-thin ("a man fights an alien invasion at a science facility/a dictatorship in a dystopia"), but this is actually a smart decision because it allows the immersive atmosphere, characters and background story details to be shown not told, using loads of incidental details (paper-clippings, break-rooms) and brilliantly-staged comedic/dramatic vignettes (a man comforting his partner, a scientist killing a headcrab with a chair only to be jumped by another, unnoticed one, mid-celebration), plus the commitment to never breaking the first-person view and hardly ever freezing the character in place to let a conversation play out. This kind of stuff is pretty standard now (which is probably why some people don't realise it's this that HL is praised for, as opposed to the storyline), but it was really fresh when the HL games came out, and is probably what PC Gamer meant!

Interestingly, another FPS, SiN, also took a step forward in FPS storytelling (eg fully interactive/hackable yet optional ATMs, army guys rappelling down through a skylight), but it came out very close to HL and got eclipsed and almost forgotten.

I digress also!

[ThunderPeel2001]

That's a very good point. I don't think I've ever realised that before, although it seems very obvious now that you point it out. I wish I could find the original reviews from the time. The closest I could find was this from EDGE. The review opens:

Half-Life is the PC game of the year, without question. It’s a game that PC owners can be proud of – as the epitome of all that is great about their chosen system – in the same way that N64 owners rightly point to GoldenEye as evidence of their own good taste. In fact, if the whole enterprise wasn’t going to set you back a grand, this game alone would be reason enough to own one. Few games induce such messianic fervour, but Half-Life is worthy because it transcends genre-defined boundaries of appeal, dissolving formula fatigue by provoking and preying upon the most primal human emotions to create an experience that is at once exciting, scary, startling and funny.

And concludes:

Half-Life is a technical and artistic masterpiece. It delivers on so many levels that criticism seems churlish. Hardcore players could probably carve it up in a few days, but this is a game to be cherished. Wreathed in atmosphere, drenched with imagination, mined with surprise, Half-Life will devastate all who touch it.

With reviews like that, is it any wonder my expectations were through the roof?

Edit: All I could find of PC Gamer's review was this: This is The Big One, and it's even better than we could've hoped.

[Ben X]

Heh, that's EDGE for you..!

[ThunderPeel2001]

Heh, that's EDGE for you..!

I always thought they were pretty tame compared to PC Gamer. Apparently not! I wish I could find that review. (Or was it PC Zone...? Hmm.)

[Thyroid]

I love Stephen King, and I find his books captivating.

I did not, however, enjoy The Dead Zone, and I think it's overrated.

[syntheticgerbil]

Pixar, Disney, Star Wars, Hayao Miyazaki, whatever. These are the things where people get argumentative with me when I don't see them as highest tier entertainment, even though I can appreciate sections or select movies.

[TheLastBaron]

Pixar, Disney, Star Wars, Hayao Miyazaki, whatever. These are the things where people get argumentative with me when I don't see them as highest tier entertainment, even though I can appreciate sections or select movies.

Do you mean this in that you just don't enjoy Pixar movies, or that relative to other animated movies you don't think Pixar movies are in the top tier?

[syntheticgerbil]

A little of both. I also don't really like the animation acting style nor the overdone storylines. I despised Up. Monsters Inc. and Wall-E have their moments, but I really like Ratatouille though and used to like Toy Story a lot when I was younger, but in general they just don't do for me.