Ram | Page 5 | Fab Forum | The Beatles Bible

^^ Thanks for putting Ram into context, Ben. It’s interesting reading reviews of the past, and this one is particularly insightful of the times. While the reviewer pretty much lambastes the album, I find that in 1971 he made observations that people make nowadays make about music in general and Paul and The Beatles in particular: that groups nowadays are often little more than a collection of solo artists or that the whole of The Beatles was better than the sum of the parts, for instance.

I find this paragraph in particularly interesting:

The odd thing about it is that within the context of the Beatles, Paul’s talents were beyond question. He was perhaps the most influential white bass player of the late Sixties, the only one of the Beatles with a keenly developed personal instrumental style. He was also the group’s best melodist, and he surely had the best voice.

Von Bontee said

More thought-provoking Landau goodness:

“Traditionally there have been three types of Negro musicians in pop music. The first consists of artists who either for aesthetic or financial reasons have chosen to sever their ties with specifically Negro music and instead work in the general field of pop. Ritchie Havens, as an exponent of the contemporary urban ballad in the Ochs, Dylan, Paxton tradition, and Jimi Hendrix, as an exponent of freaking, are good examples. The second class consists of performers who are still working in one of the basic Negro musical forms but who seek to alter their approach enough to make it appealing to a large part of the white audience. Motown is the ideal example, but someone like Lou Rawls also falls into this category. Finally there is the hard core: performers who won’t or can’t assimilate, and therefore just continue to do their thing.”

So to sum up: apparently all of black “pop” music is primarily defined by how “white” it is; and apparently Havens’ blues roots and Hendrix’ blues/soul/jazz elements don’t exist; and in this entire universe of black music there are exactly THREE types of musicians! You know, just like how there are only three types of bird – ones that are big, ones that are small, and ones that are bigger than the small ones, yet not as large the bigger ones. Expert analysis, that.

LOL. Dear lord, that was… execrable. And is that from the ’70s? If so, who was still using Negro, especially in print?

parlance

I always liked Greil Marcus, though! He had interesting insights and nice turns of phrase and a great sense of humour, qualities which I rarely encountered in Landau’s stuff.

EDIT: Parlance, that piece was from 1967 or early ’68, so “Negro” was still pretty much the standard terminology, although “Black” was becoming hip. (Which Landau certainly wasn’t!)