Quote:
Originally Posted by starrynight
Again, 'figurehead' of a genre, like earlier you mentioned them being king, it just sounds hyped to me. The genre itself I guess got a push from some influential magazines at the time and they would use someone as the prime example of the genre as the genuises to exemplify it. Other bands did do good shoegage before the Loveless album, I would argue with fewer banal melodies often as well. As I said before I don't mind if some people really like them, but if we are talking about some objective place in history I think questions can definitely be asked. And it can take quite a long time for things to be questioned if something is really big at the time (with critics, not simply in a popular sense) as received opinions can be passed down with the weight of the years behind them, they are the things that people listen to first.
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Well, we can agree to disagree.
Critics can be wrong, of course. The fact that 20 years later it's still (in most quarters) heralded as the best album to come out of the shoegaze scene, speaks volumes for its quality.
Loveless was a definitive moment in the shoegaze genre. For most people, it blew anything released prior in the genre out of the water. Ask almost all the shoegaze bands themselves and they'll tell you that. What better "objective" evidence can you get, than testaments from Slowdive, the Telescopes, Chapterhouse, Ride, Swervedriver, Lush and many more. Surely the bands in the scene are the best placed to make statements about it? I've seen this in the Creation documentary. The fact this album is still revered by critics is nothing to do with 20 years of critic-after-critic hyping it up. It's revered because it's a brilliant and groundbreaking album - whether you or others like it or not. That's the prevailing opinion, and it's one which I fully endorse.
PS - If you don't believe it's groundbreaking/unique/original, please feel free to point me in the direction of something released before Loveless that has that immense, swirling, crushing guitar sound -- I would love to hear it!