Source link : https://las-vegas-news.com/7-albums-rolling-stone-panned-that-are-now-considered-genre-defining/
Critics get it wrong sometimes. That’s not a scandal, it’s just the nature of writing about something new before anyone has had time to sit with it. Rolling Stone has been reviewing records since 1967, and across those decades a handful of albums that critics dismissed on arrival went on to reshape entire genres, leaving the original reviews looking almost quaint by comparison.
What follows are seven records that got savaged, shrugged at, or flatly misunderstood by Rolling Stone’s writers, only to become foundational texts for hard rock, heavy metal, grunge, and beyond. Reading the old reviews next to the albums’ current reputations is a strange kind of time travel.
Led Zeppelin – Led Zeppelin (1969)
When Led Zeppelin’s debut landed in March 1969, a 21-year-old critic named John Mendelsohn tore into it for Rolling Stone. He wrote that the album offered little the Jeff Beck Group hadn’t already said better, and that the excesses of Beck’s Truth album were fully on display in Zeppelin’s version. Mendelsohn went further, calling Jimmy Page a very limited producer and a writer of weak, unimaginative songs, adding that the record suffered from Page having produced and written most of it himself.
History did not agree. Later Rolling Stone writing described Jimmy Page’s guitar pouncing from the speakers with menace and John Bonham’s kick drum swinging with anvil force, concluding that…
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Author : Matthias Binder
Publish date : 2026-07-16 05:49:00
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