On YouTube you’ll find a series of videos by Andy Edwards, usually under clickbait titles - Ten Music Artists that Ruined Music, or Ten Worst Albums, etc. I discovered Andy by taking the clickbait one time and thereafter became a fan.
Andy Edwards is hard to explain or easily categorize. He’s a noteworthy drummer who’s played with Robert Plant’s Priory of Brion, the prog bands Neo and Frost, the folk/rock Quill, has been a studio drummer as well as producer. His personal taste in music runs to prog, jazz and hard rock.
As a vlogger on YouTube, he’s a strange amalgam of encyclopedic music critic/analyst and ranting cranky guy, existentialist philosopher and social critic combined with a free associative style of humor that riffs on whatever happens to occur to him while he’s in the process of dismantling, say, Kanye West, or Cher. Or Van Morrison, his avowed nemesis. I personally find it one of the most hilarious things on YouTube. Think a more caustic Robin Williams dressing down Motley Crue.
Or in the video, linked here Ten Worst Songs (in history)
At the end of this video, Edwards goes off on Morrison’s “Brown Eyed Girl” in a surreal existential free fall into oblivion where he is recounting or imagining a wedding reception where the everybody is up on the dance floor happily dancing to “Brown Eyed Girl” while he sits in the corner drunk blackly brooding on the bleakness of existence and this whole riff is somehow completely true and liberating and hilarious all at once. I don’t know of anyone else who’s doing what he’s doing in a music critic video. Where else do you get deep musical historical knowledge and understanding alongside an almost Hunter S. Thompson scathing diatribe.
A lot of people probably hate him. I think he’s the best, most refreshing video talking, or ranting, head, out there.
He’s also got lots of videos where he reverentially praises the music he likes, with extensive musical theory behind it, say, Miles Davis or John McLaughlin or King Crimson. And when he talks about hard rock, or prog rock, or other stuff he likes, he waxes purely poetic, his takes are often the final ones for me.
See what you think.
To bad about Van being a royal prick to Andy. And Robert Plant giving him Astral Weeks as an example of Van's brilliance. I'll say it again. We named our only son Van. And I really, really don't like Astral Weeks and the top 40 stuff. I love Wavelength thru No Guru, No Method, No Teacher. Imagine how I felt the first time I saw him go off on Van. Now I just find it funny.