♪LIFE IS A DANCE♪ · @teralex42
10th Jul 2014 from TwitLonger
A Glambert's letter to LA Times:
Ré: last week’s horrific sham of a review
by Mikael Wood
I place extreme faith in critics. (Of course, I come from Chicago where they are darn good.) I realize allowance must be made for variances of opinion. But when everyone is funneling out of the movie theater declaring “That’s the best movie I ever saw!” at the same time a critic is declaring “it should never have been made”, there is definitely something very wrong.
Likewise, last week, Mikael Wood wrote an unforgivable line, “Queen is dead . . . let’s keep it that way.” Mean-spirited and so obviously contrary to fact due to the nearly half million (including Europe) concert goers who have screamed their lungs out at the end of each concert, begging that it not end. 99% of all reviews so far have been not just positive, but effusively so. The fact that Adam Lambert’s hometown paper has been the only one to offer such a nasty review is diabolical. SHAME ON YOU!
What follows here is evidence that this was a grossly biased piece. While Wood made a number of positive comments, they were all placed under the darkest overhanging cloud of negativity possible. The review was like a two-page backhanded compliment.
He mentioned Taylor’s singing was subpar in his one solo, but no comment at all on what everyone went there for! Namely, two hours of virtuoso drumming, including the phenomenal “drum battle”. We had a gorgeous forest that awed, but all Mikael Wood saw was a tiny broken limb.
Then, Brian May, top member of all-time guitarist elites – who absolutely blew everyone away, both young and old – received not one word of praise from this guy. After the first energetic hour, the “dreary sequence” he mentions was one of immense nostalgia for Queen fans, yet this guy wrote that the show was a “disappointment” because it lacked nostalgia! Was Wood even there?
Next we move from his disgusting and completely erroneous age bias to – yep – I’m going to play the homophobic card here. Why did he refer to “the peacocking Lambert” in one of the first lines? Yes, he peacocked for Killer Queen because the lyrics called for it. No mention of Adam’s hard rock biker presentation or his fun “Elvis” take on A Crazy Little Thing Called Love (which had Priscilla Presley’s approval as she was there and later tweeted her adoration of Adam).
He says Adam sounded great, but so did Freddie, so no need to present this show now. Where does this line of logic take us? Mozart and Beethoven sounded great, so no need to reproduce their music today.
Adam’s performances were dynamic, fun, and ethereally beautiful as per the requirements of each song. He did a brilliant job of up-dating the presentation. The show could not have been a more perfect balance of past and present. A “pale imitation” of shows from the past? Seriously, was Mr. Wood really there?
Most egregious of all, Wood wrote that, though Adam sang the first part of Bohemian Rhapsody, they chose to present the middle chorus by screening the original music video (again a piece of nostalgia, Mr. Wood) and that this was “a humiliating demotion” for Adam. Queen originally recorded that over a hundred times, taping each of their own voices individually again, and again, in order to duplicate a full chorus of many voices. How was Adam going to do that?! Queen NEVER performed this part live for this reason. My god, the level of ignorance here astounds!
Finally – and so petty – he wrote that the spectacle “merely met a reasonable level of expectation.” Well, unlike as with most concerts of today which have no substance beyond spectacle, people did not go to the Queen / Adam Lambert concert for spectacle. They did not even expect it. (There was virtually none during their European tour.) In fact, they were surprised and wowed by the spectacle. But it was not needed. When you have the greatest rock band of all time and the greatest known male singer, spectacle is a far distant afterthought.