Oooh; what he did there, I see it! 1992, you see, that’s when the Crowes were last culturally relevant, when they last had big hits on the charts. If your songs aren’t in the Top Ten Most Tweeted, why would you even want to go on living?
Oh, A.V. Club. That’s just so…so…you.
I come neither to praise nor bury the Black Crowes. I’m just somewhat perplexed by the way in which “relevance” has become so prominent in arguments over taste (and trust me, dismissing an artist for perceived irrelevance is a constant theme at the A.V. Club, where noting “This artist has unsurprisingly declined in popularity over the years!” is an endless source of amusement), when I would have assumed it to be the commonest of sense that relevance is just another word for “fashionable”, and neither word tells you anything about the integrity or lasting value of art. Mostly, though, I’m just struck by the laziness, if anything, the way in which a writer for a pop-culture geek site with pretensions of critical respectability, when he has nothing else to say yet feels compelled to say it, falls back on the reflexive sneer, the defensive irony. God forbid anyone get the impression that he might be reporting on this little bit of music news in earnest, as if he or anyone else might actually care!
Freddie was right about these people; their recurring nightmare is that one day, the music will stop and they’ll be the ones left standing without a seat, and everyone else will point and laugh uproariously at them, and they’ll look down and see that they’re naked — naked in the sense that everyone can see exactly what cheesy music and films they like and what they only pretend to hate, and as they stand there trembling, wishing for a blanket of jaded detachment to cover up with, they’ll hear someone say the words that cut them to the bone: “Ohmigawd, how completely uncool!” What a sad, perpetually adolescent way to go through life.