The best line about Styx was when their manager was interviewed for “Behind the Music” and remembered a reviewer who compared them to a parking lot full of whale vomit. The manager said something like “if they compared us to a small amount of whale vomit then I wouldn’t have been upset”.
There actually was a band called Ambergris (ca. 1970) whose ad campaign boasted “Ambergris is whale puke!”
IMO, music first and foremost is supposed to sound good. But for some people, rock-n-roll has to be all about rebellion. So bands that make music that’s a bit more sophisticated than a load of angry punk are “whale vomit” and so on.
I think Styx managed to strike the right balance between all the elements that make up good pop music and usually avoided the blatant pretentiousness that Pink Floyd and Yes often succumbed to.
I like Styx with Larry Gowan a lot better than with that douche DDY. Of course I’m a LG fan anyway so I might be a bit biased, but hey…
It was actually some other whale’s vomit. The police said it was best left unsolved. You see, you can’t really dust for whale vomit.
Just curious, and maybe this isn’t the right place to pose this question (sorry, I’m a newb), but is it any less pompous to manufacture a double concept album about a boy and a video game arcade?
Wait.
What?
What?!
This is a thing that happened? Lawrence “… but you can call me Larry” Gowan sung lead for Styx?
/mind blown
This must have happened sometime after I was listening to CanCon adult contemporary radio stations against my will (thanks Dad), I imagine. And looking at wikipedia, yup, it was, and he’s still with them, my God.
Not if the music itself isn’t pompous, I’d say.
Understood.
Some message boards that use VBulletin have a 'This" function, which lists all users that agree with a post.
This.
Rebellion, or obvious “blues influence”.
The least the OP could have done is warn us that the link to the Rolling Stone review contained an image of that hideous Styx album cover, one of the most repulsive rock album covers of all time.
Worse yet, I regularly run across it when searching through stacks of LPs in used record stores, and between that album cover and the one of a naked Barbra Streisand and Kris Kristofferson, you could generate several parking lots full of whale vomit.
I detest Styx, but:
This? It’s an image of an woman’s head with moai earring, times 3. What’s so offensive/hideous about it?
Over the top pomposity was sorta the intent. IIRC, Townsend said a pinball playing messiah was the dumbest sort of messiah he could think of.
Hey, if she’s your dream woman, my apologies. :dubious:
Do you seriously vomit if you see someone from the neck up over the age of 22?
It’s not the age. She looks like a less-attractive version of Mrs. Robinson who’s glaring as if she just smelled a whole parking lot full of whale vomit. 
Thanks for this thread; it allows me to confess my love for Light Up.
Well, sure, she does look pretty pissed off, I get that vibe. But hideous? And fer chrissakes, that’s nowhere in the same league – or planet! - as naked Kristofferson.
The chain of posts in this thread are why I didn’t really take a position on Styx in the OP - merely pointed out the dissonance between the original article and the helpfully-linked-to, slamming review.
Arguments for the soul of rock typically breakdown quickly. Lester Bangs needed a better editor - well, and to get a life - but some of his passions and frustrations were insightful. Styx brought a level of commercial theatre and spectacle to big rock and sold a lot of vinyl. I don’t listen to them much, but I don’t feel viscerally invested in hating them the way I might’ve as a junior in high school…
…but I still find RS innocently offering up Bangs’ review within a little fanboy touring update to be…impish. 