I checked out Darkness and E Street Shuffle on George’s recommendation and liked them both. George hated Born to Run, but it’s probably still the best Bruce album. I have a lot of respect for Bruce, I’d totally see one of his shows if I had a chance at a decent price. but ultimately I dont feel much drive to explore his deep cuts or go all that deep into his discog. His hits are mostly enough for me.

I don’t think it’s offhand to think the Arcade Fire would have gotten a really huge score though, he absolutely GUSHED over Funeral.

Oh they probably would have been scored highly, I just think its silly that he seemed to have had the angle that they were the only modern artist to deserve being praised that much. With every other (relatively) modern act he reviewed them like he was arguing against their cultural and critical reputation and needed to take them down a peg, like how dare they praise this modern artist who is clearly not on the level of the 60s and 70 greats. But Arcade fire apparently deserved all the praise, even though AF had more critical smoke blown up their ass than just about anybody from that era.

it simply amounted to whether or not he hated the band’s vocalist

that makes it even funnier cus Win Butler is a terrible singer.
For the record I dont hate AF. I went though a Funeral phase back when that came out like just about everybody did. But I dont think they hold up super great these days and there are loads of other bands I find more interesting and would rather listen to.

So his readers were giving him shit for the post-2000 reviews?

Well I certainly would at least lol. I did always appreciate when he would find modern acts I’d never heard of though. Like I really enjoyed Adebisi Shank and wouldnt have found them if it hadn’t been for his reviews (just learned that they’re reuniting, that’s cool. looking forward to their new stuff).
I also think that he didnt want to acknowledge hip-hop and the more modern music he talked about the more glaring it became that he was avoiding the genre as much as possible. (the beastie boys were a glaring omission in his alphabetical reviews).
I just pulled open the OS site and saw skimming his introduction he wrote this: “Sadly, this means that in the current incarnation of the site I shall not be covering any modern music (something that I quite diligently tried to do on the 2009-2020 blog, but which ultimately contributed to my depression” and then he links to his 20th anniversary “where the hell is music going” essay. Which I’ll be honest I dont feel like spending the time to read to glean further insight at the moment.