Supergroup (music) - Criticism

Criticism

In 1974, a Time magazine article entitled "Return of a Supergroup" quipped that the supergroup was a "potent but short-lived rock phenomenon" which was an "amalgam formed by the talented malcontents of other bands." The article acknowledged that groups such as Cream and Blind Faith "played enormous arenas and made megabucks, and sometimes megamusic", with the performances "fueled by dueling egos." However, while this "musical infighting built up the excitement...it also made breakups inevitable."

Chris DeVille's 2008 article "Super or blooper?", which is subtitled "Supergroups: So much promise, so often squandered", notes that "when well-known rockers get together in new configurations, they're guaranteed lots of attention, but these ego summits rarely bear fruit as fresh as what made these guys famous in the first place." DeVille praises supergroups such as Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young; Emerson, Lake & Palmer; Fantômas (a post-Faith No More supergroup); and Velvet Revolver. However, he rates a number of other projects as "bloopers", including Blind Faith, the country and western supergroup The Highwaymen (who were a supergroup specifically of the Outlaw Country subgenre of country music and included Johnny Cash, Waylon Jennings, Willie Nelson and Kris Kristofferson; The Traveling Wilburys (the Wilburys were seriously affected by the death of member Roy Orbison shortly after releasing their first album); Audioslave; Zwan; Eyes Adrift; and The Good, the Bad & the Queen.

Read more about this topic:  Supergroup (music)

Famous quotes containing the word criticism:

    “It is the will of God that we must have critics, and missionaries, and Congressmen, and humorists, and we must bear the burden. Meantime, I seem to have been drifting into criticism myself. But that is nothing. At the worst, criticism is nothing more than a crime, and I am not unused to that.”
    —Mark Twain [Samuel Langhorne Clemens] (1835–1910)

    “It is ... pathetic to observe the complete lack of imagination on the part of certain employers and men and women of the upper-income levels, equally devoid of experience, equally glib with their criticism ... directed against workers, labor leaders, and other villains and personal devils who are the objects of their dart-throwing. Who doesn’t know the wealthy woman who fulminates against the “idle” workers who just won’t get out and hunt jobs?”
    —Mary Barnett Gilson (1877–?)

    “Cubism had been an analysis of the object and an attempt to put it before us in its totality; both as analysis and as synthesis, it was a criticism of appearance. Surrealism transmuted the object, and suddenly a canvas became an apparition: a new figuration, a real transfiguration.”
    —Octavio Paz (b. 1914)