Michigan retro hard-rock band Greta Van Fleet have become a flashpoint of sorts, a referendum on guitar-driven rock music and its waning relevance in today’s culture. The conversation reached a fever pitch today, when Pitchfork posted its front-page review of the band’s debut album Anthem of the Peaceful Army. To say it was not a positive review would be an understatement—Pitchfork gave the album a 1.6 out of 10. Yeouch.
To Pitchfork’s credit, it’s a very funny review, written by the site’s senior editor Jeremy D. Larson and filled with plums like these:
Greta Van Fleet sound like they did weed exactly once, called the cops, and tried to record a Led Zeppelin album before they arrested themselves.
The singer, the wretched and caterwauling third brother, Josh, is in dangly feather earrings and vinyl pants, like he was dressed by a problematic Santa Fe palm-reader with a gift certificate to Chico’s.
And at least Zeppelin knew to separate their sweet-lady-I’m-horny songs from their howling-about-literary-fantasy songs. Hilariously, Greta Van Fleet combine them into one on “The Cold Wind,” where the narrator (who is dying) begs his “sweet mama” to take the family ox (I guess) to town to sell it, when, mid-ox-transaction, this happens: “The Yankee peddler bargains with you on his way/Whoa sweet mama’s gotten herself a new dress.”
That Zeppelin comparison has dogged Greta Van Fleet since day one; in my live review of their recent Portland show I noted how unavoidable the comparisons are.
But when Larson writes, “They make music that sounds exactly like Led Zeppelin and demand very little other than forgetting how good Led Zeppelin often were,” he’s perhaps forgetting how Zeppelin were infamously lambasted by critics when they first came onto the scene. Rolling Stone, who now possibly devote five percent of their content to Zeppelin retrospective listicles, gave 1969’s Led Zeppelin an outright pan, unfavorably comparing it to Jeff Beck’s groundbreaking Truth. Rock critic John Mendelsohn critiques its “weak, unimaginative songs,” and describes “a driving (albeit monotonous) guitar-dominated background for Plant’s strained and unconvincing shouting.” It’s virtually the same criticism leveled against Greta Van Fleet, nearly 50 years later.
In his piece on Led Zeppelin II, Mendelsohn ups the humor and delivers one of the all-time great snarky reviews.
Hey, man, I take it all back! This is one fucking heavyweight of the album! OK — I’ll concede that until you’ve listened to the album eight hundred times, as I have, it seems as if it’s just one especially heavy song extended over the space of two whole sides…. And who can deny that Jimmy Page is the absolute number-one heaviest white blues guitarist between 5’4″ and 5’8″ in the world??
Mendelsohn, a legendary critic who deserves mention alongside Lester Bangs (even if just for his influential championing of the Kinks during their most obscure period in the late ’60s and early ’70s), might have been proven wrong by history—Led Zeppelin became massively popular, defining the sound of mainstream rock in the early ’70s more than any other band I can think of.
And I think Larson and Pitchfork will similarly be proven wrong by Greta Van Fleet’s mammoth success. Anthem of the Peaceful Army is already the number one album on iTunes, and at the show I went to, kids were going nuts for these guys. As derivative and “uncool” as their sound is, it’s one people are starving for, even in 2018. Which raises the unanswerable question: Should critics have a solid understanding of what audiences want, and maybe even a genuine appreciation for what’s popular—and does a work’s widespread popularity automatically mean it has artistic value? It’s a question that led to the “rockist” debate of the past dozen years or so, and I’d say music criticism has evolved significantly in light of that conversation. Could the pendulum have swung to the other side, where decidedly rockist-friendly bands are now the critical pariahs that so-called lightweight pop stars used to be?
I can’t answer that question. All I can say is that Pitchfork’s review of Greta Van Fleet—a band I don’t have any real affection for—is both incredibly entertaining and filled with a bunch of cheap shots. It’s probably Pitchfork’s most widely read review in quite some time, of course, so it’s a win for them. Is it a win for listeners, though? And will it change anyone’s mind about the band, or does its performative, back-of-the-classroom sass only exist inside an internet echo chamber?