Not Really. But a casual perusal in the internet reveals that, along with Disney, the RIAA and M$ are the biggest targets for hate. It would be so much easier if Microsoft would buy all the old major labels, and Disney, so people could pour their pseudomystical hatred onto one simple target.
Just as strange is the net folk’s irrational exuberance for Google. They sure do love their former-search-engine-in-the-process-of-acquiring-and-researching-itself-into-a-PC-yahoo. As if Google wasn’t a company at all, but a big friendly cloud of milky teets. MMM.
Maybe after M$ buys the major labels and Disney, Google can buy M$ and we can love all our operating systems, search engines, theme parks, cartoons, and moo-sick in one big lovin’ teetfest.
Lester Bangs was an infommercial. He was not a ‘critic’.
The first rule of pop journalism – wide ranging, incendiary statements make good copy. This is not a rule of criticism. Lester was a cheap sensationalist with a talent for descriptive adjectives. His ‘reviews’ were entertaining but hardly ‘criticism’. So why do we give hacks like Lester so much credence? Why do people care what they think. anyway?
The main problem I have with music critics is that they tend to fall back on non-musical ideas to judge work. This is what they mean by ‘context’. One thing they do is look at works by other artists that precede or come after it, and within that brief context they place things in order of importance of influence, largely based in style alone, as if there is some technological progress in musical style. This technological view in regards to music makes no sense. Theres no such thing – is Mozart better than Bach? Theres Just change. All of that context becomes essentially meaningless very rapidly, and thirty years down the road hardly exists at all.
That mythology of progress is one of the primary ways in which new products are sold to us. I dont think it matters at all in terms of objective criticism (a work can be judged based solely on interior evidence in relation to abstract, mutable standards). Although I’m like a lot of people, I like novelty, I’m just a little bit backward in thinking good works show innate merit.
It seems to me that musicians often have the best insight into music and what makes something good. Makes sense right? Often, the better the musician, the better the critical capability – you have to listen to and evaluate music in order to progress in your own music. if they live and breathe music, and work with it all day, might not they understand it better than jounalists?
Listen to Lester’s ‘Album’. 
He was not a musician.
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