This is the thread where you ask for help in parsing one of Robert Christgau's sentences.

Ok, I'm ASSUMING that was supposed to be enunciation. If he genuinely meant pronunication than replace "(he even enunciates!)" with "(roger, 4-9er we got a bogey gibba gabba)".

He even has the gall to call himself "The Dean of American Rock Critics" for Chrissake! What possible reason could you ever have for reading him?

I'm a fan of his capsule reviews (70s and 80s ones especially) but his cryptic one-liners in the Consumer Guide's honorable mention section often leave me puzzled. Like with these two Luna albums:

The Days of Our Nights:
"Still a casualty of capitalism--not downsized, but privatized"

Romantica:
"in which schemes replace dreams and shadows on the wall head for a fall"

That said, I mean I've found some good records just from browsing the consumer guides. But I prefer Meltzer as a rock writer, whatever that means, at least Meltzer seems to have some kind of spirit, he's not pompous. When he describes Christgau and Marcus as "good Boy Scouts, good New Deal Democrats," I have to laugh.

I'm gonna have to go back and look at that Nas review--the sentence seems so screwed up, did the poster quote it correctly? Also, does anyone here know about Christgau's latest pick-to-click, Mr. Lif? What's that all about?

I wouldn't mind describing *myself* that way, only I never was a boy scout -- the scouts had a whole homoerotic vibe that creeped the fuck out of me when I was five.

That's just condescending crap; who does Meltzer imagine himself to be, Rosa Luxembourg?

Like Michael, I would take the latter part of that "insult" as a compliment. (Like the Maoist who tried to injure me in high school by yelling, "You're a liberal!")

This thread is really interesting. I'm curious to know what people make of any of the other 324,786 un-parseable Christgau sentences.

Because it's not easily comprehensible?

(Xgau to VV intern: "excuse me, can you get me a cup of coffee -- er, and while you're downstairs, can you pick up some random science?")

Thanks o. nate, your explanation makes more sense.

I'm not knocking him Amateurist by the way--just so you know--I'm actually a fan. My point, never expressed, is that I'll take the un-aprseable, confusing Christgau over the excessively lingo-ized one (whether of the academy or of the "street") anyday.

I wouldn't mind describing *myself* that way

Welll...la-de-da, I keep forgetting that being "good, caring New Deal Democrats, good Boy Scouts, and far more telling, good boys" (Meltzer's "condescending" words to two writers who certainly deserve nothing but good, caring New Deal Democrat careful words, right?) means not having a sense of humor.

"Like most culture wags laureate, what they are...is pious outsiders..." as R.M. says...how about you two laying off being so pious yourselves, what personal connection do you guys have to the two writers anyway? I mean, he writes that way because he is a B.S. and N.D.D. in the worst possible senses of those terms--we're not talking three-day hikes or helping little old ladies across the street, or the WPA, here, we're talking about a pompous old man who thinks that rationalizing and explaining Rock and Roll is gonna keep him young--that's Meltzer's point and I happen to agree with it.

Was does this have to do with the New Deal, or the Democrats?

Um, they're *metaphors*...for a "public-service" critical mindset, as opposed to, by implication, a truly fuck-shit-up rock and roll mindset. Maybe a bogus argument, but pretending not to recognize a metaphor when you see it doesn't help you prove it to be bogus.

I wasn't playing naive, my grandparents were actual New Deal Democrats so I thought perhaps Meltzer was speaking literally, at least in part.

Tom, when you're talking about the media venues that Christgau and Marcus write for, then P.C. and establishment become more or less identical.

Probably, Edd, something close to the relationship you have to Meltzer--as readers, as fans, as critics of...whatever. What kind of relationship do you propose readers have to writers?

I still think "they ain't rock and roll" is kind of a bogus argument. But he's not saying "they're P.C." P.C. is one of those overused terms like pretentious and ironic that shouldn't be used unless definitely appropriate.

wait, so WHY do people think the "is" should be "are" again?? sorry, but "back-in-the-day" is a SINGULAR noun. makes perfect sense to me. and anybody who thinks "even has some pronunciation in it" should be "he even enunciates" is clearly a useless literalist born without a fucking sense of humor, and should stick to *entertainment weekly*.

also. re meltzer. at least christgau and marcus don't think that music died in 1970 (when meltzer got too lazy for it), you know?

well, yeah, i can see now how the singular form of "to be" is wrong. thanks, mr. perry. but i still don't understand why people have trouble understand what the sentence MEANS. i mean, do people really think christgau is less comprehensible, than, say, most people reviewing records on the web? or posting on ILM, for that matter? i mean, isn't the fact that he doesn't write exactly like everybody else out there, and maybe that it takes a little work on the part of the reader to get his point sometimes, a GOOD thing? it seems like people complaining about him just wanna be SPOONFED, or something...i mean, he's a WRITER. so you have to learn his LANGUAGE, you know? how does that make him any different than, say, Meltzer in The Aesthetics of Rock??? Or Sterling Clover? Or Mark Sinker? Or [fill in the blank]?

oops, I meant "understanding", not that second "understand". (and i meant "you fucking nitpickers," not "people". okay, maybe i didn't.)

What does this mean?

they signed to atlantic, made a more metal record, don't say anything deep, and don't belt out the lyrics, but he likes it more than if they were belting shallow lyrics or whispering deep ones. like, duh.

Bjork, Vespertine
I liked this a lot better once I heard how it was entirely about sex, which since it often buries its pulse took a while. Sex, not fucking. I'm nervous so you'd better pet me awhile sex. Lick the backs of my knees sex. OK, where my buttcheeks join my thighs sex. I'm still a little jumpy so you'd better pet me some more sex. How many different ways can we open our mouths together sex. We came 20 minutes ago and have Sunday morning ahead of us sex. Or, if fucking, tantric--the one where you don't move and let vaginal peristalsis do the work (yeah sure). The atmospherics, glitch techno, harps, glockenspiels, and shades of Hilmar Om Hilmarsson float free sometimes, and when she gets all soprano on your ass you could accuse her of spirituality. But with somebody this freaky you could get used to that. English lyrics provided, most of them dirty if you want. A-

By objectifying her?

The "yeah sure" is kind of funny, though.

Oranges and Lemons [Geffen, 1989]
Compulsive formalists can't fabricate meaning--by which I mean nothing deeper than extrinsic interest--without a frame (cf. Skylarking, even the Dukes of Stratosfear). The only concept discernible on this hour-long double-LP is CD. Def Leppard got there first. B-

How is CD a concept? And how did Def Leppard get there first? And where is there?

"Their earlier albums had some concept, and this doesn't, unless you count the fact that it's an hour long, something they're only doing because, thanks to CD, they can get away with. Unfortunately, Def Leppard beat them to that trick."

in 1989 it sure could be -- extreme length; overemphasis on improved sound quality possibilities (a la early '60s "hi-fi" albums); etc.

>And how did Def Leppard get there first?<

Hysteria came out in what, 1987? 1988?

>And where is there?<

there.

ps - also thanks olga

These days we can just start ILM threads on any given sentence of course which solves that problem.

It's pretty smug for somebody to basically just offer "His Two Cents and Nuthin' but" on an album ever weak, but for those who ARE saturated with info on most albums, myself included, he can be very entertaining.

However, I'll note that this year I've felt a lot his A's were totally on the pipe, rather than OTM (can we make OTP a new abbreviation). The Transplants being the latest.

the literalism and reduced horizons - from the implications of "consumer guide" on down - seem pretty typical of this place these days.

Transplants? On initial listen, it sounded like weak loops and a guy barking on top of it. I was hopefully since I figured Rancid raps would sound like the verse to "Time Bomb" or something. I wanna hear it again but it was pretty ungainly. Plus I don't WANT people to sing about being materialist criminals when they're NOT them. Real rappers are bad enough these days. Unless it's like, really smart and funny. Which it didn't seem to be.

Sheesh, you guys, he's using "back-in-the-day" as a noun...as in old-style...that old bastard...the back-in-the-day is recommended to them...where's Strunk and White when you need 'em?

I don't think Meltzer's problem with Christgau and Marcus has anything to do with "PC" or that back-in-the-day (adj.) stuff...he just thinks they don't understand that being a bad boy is the right of rock journalists, just as it is the right of some guy in the New York Dolls. There's some rather blatant personal animus in there too, which grumpy old Meltzer doesn't hide...I mean, I would be grumpy too if an editor called me up and told me, "Get out your thesaurus, it's word choice time," as R.M. asserts R.C. did (in "A Whore Just Like the Rest"). But yeah, he does think rock ended with the first Moby Grape album or something.

I don't capitalize rock and roll...that was, you know, a joke...although I had the misfortune to spend a couple of months in Cincinnati, Ohio once and was appalled to see that, in the alternative weekly there, the music editor capitalized EVERY SINGLE possible permutation of "genre"--Jazz Rock, Folk Rock, Singer Songwriter, Classic Pop, Blues, Blues Rock, Emo, Alternative Rock, Grunge, Harmolodic Pop, Post-Big-Star-Power Pop, Power Pop...

I think that the end result of this is that Xgau should get a new editor, like MEEEEEEE.

I was thinking about this last night, about how deceptive album grades can be compared to whatever private connection the reviewer has with the record. I was listening to a CD, and I said to myself "This is a three-star record if I've ever heard one. It's nice in no particularly spectacular way, it's pretty but not terribly original or statement-making, and it's doomed for a life in cut-out bins all the world over. And yet, I like it. A lot. I can't stop listening to it. But I'd be lying if I were to grade it and give it more than three stars."

Oooh... you claim you don't like rock critics and you use the word "angst." I renounce my crush on you. :-(

As much as I love Ol' Meltz, that imitation is spot-on.

I don't understand your comment (Christ, I'm sorry I ever mentioned Meltzer to this crowd, by the way...)

about the incorrect use of "is" in the sentence

"Surrounding outtakes that were just outtakes is back-in-the-day recommended to Tim and Missy (even has some pronunciation in it) and four autobiographical pieces."

Am I missing something here? Chriss-gow is saying "Surrounding outtakes that were just outtakes is old-style stuff recommended to Tim and Missy." How is this incorrect?

I think the major problem is that I would like to become more engaged with the sort of music Christgau reviews, but I'm simply not at the moment. Perhaps this is why so much of his writing is lost on me. It's my loss, I suppose.

Bit of both. I mean, I appreciate the universally grokked understanding of the star system (even though grades are horribly inflated in venues like Rolling Stone). I know what "3 stars" means and I'm comfortable with the definition, although I'd just as soon use "3 stars" as a descriptive tool to get across the feel of a record, the place it occupies in the music world, etc. As a rating in and of itself, though, it's faulty. It doesn't tell me much about the record's intangible qualities.

Surrounding [X] is [Y] and [Z]. But "[Y] and [Z]" is a plural construction. The only way to make it non-plural is the chop the sentence up like this:

Surrounding [outtakes that were just outtakes] is [back-in-the-day] recommended to ([Tim and Missy (even has some pronunciation in it)] and [four autobiographical pieces]).

Surrounding [X] is [Y] recommended to ([Z] and [W]). But recommending [X] to [W] doesn't make sense. And if you take [W] out of the compound prepositional phrase, you're right back at the plural problem.

God help me, I am a grammar bore.

Surrounding outtakes that were just outtakes and four autobiographical pieces is back-in-the-day recommended to Tim and Missy (even has some pronunciation in it).

well, this depends how many "stars" three is on a scale of. but if you like it a *lot* and can't stop listening to it, jody, why do you think how "important" it is otherwise even matters? a good record is a record you LIKE. PERIOD. not acnowledging THAT would be lying.

All of it (the bulk of it in the abstract) is recommended to Missy and Tim. If he'd enumerated each component, piece by piece, then he would've said, "Surrounding outtakes are echo, use of dialect humor, fast talking, loops, more loops, simulated orgasms and gunshots, and samples from both Silkworm and Ennio Morricone, all of which are recommended to..." But that's not what he said. Plus, he's only recommending "back-in-the-day" to Missy and Tim not "four autobiographical pieces."

This is naive. There are thousands of different shades to what "good" means. It's never as simple as merely "liking" something.

Also, I didn't use the word "important." My interest isn't in the album's importance writ large, it's in its function as a thing to buy, a thing to consume, a thing that sits among other things in record stores and (abstractly) in magazine pages and on my shelf when I need a thing to reach for.

Shut up, Dan.

Emphasis more on the "it's this thing" than any of the buy/consume rhetoric here.

= it's pretty, but it's not important.

as if prettiness, in and of itself, can't sometimes be enough.

British critics, in contrast, were skinny opportunists who listened once, rewrote the press release, added some sneer about class, then sold your record down the Record and Tape Exchange at Notting Hill Gate.

and who the hell in america calls their elders "sir"?

and if american critics are so stuck on the past, how come it was the british guys who thought oasis were important?

though obviously it's true that american rock critics never sell promo CDs; can't argue with you there.

OK. On one hand, prettiness is enough -- i.e. "I like it because it's pretty" is valid praise. On the other hand, lots of records are "pretty," so no, it's not enough; it's too reductive. In this case, the record's averageness is one of its defining characteristics. When I listen to records, the first thing I think is "Well, what is this? What little niche does it occupy in the grand snapshot? How can I pin this down, understand it, come to terms with it?" And I can say "This is a forgettable, unremarkable album that came out in 1997; I see it in one out of every nine cut-out bins I visit; the music is sort of amateurishly played and not that well-written, but there's something to it that strikes a particular chord with me and strongly evokes an interesting time in indie rock. And this is the type of record I'll pull out in six months when I'm bored with all my other CDs and I'm idly scanning the shelf for a disc I haven't heard in a while and should probably listen to more." So... not a 5-star record, but it's just as essential if you need a record that serves the function of a good 3-star record.

They don't! I didn't say that! The words I used were examples of why a record might be canonized.

BEST POSTS EVER!

I feel mingled admiration and dismay about a figure like Christgau. In Britain we just don't have this kind of literary-humanist lifelong rock critic at all, just as we don't have literary-humanist rock stars like Lou Reed, who starts his career studying with Delmore Schwartz and collaborating with Andy Warhol, and ends it adapting Poe and making respectable distortion on his guitar, distortion with tradition behind it. Instead, in Britain, we have rock stars like Bryan Ferry who studies with Richard Hamilton but then becomes a 'gent', and we have critics like Paul Morley, who start by writing about rock but then move on to 'serious' reviews in the Sunday Papers and BBC 2, and who would feel a bit snubbed by commissions to review pop records.

Literary humanist dignity is great in theory. Especially if you're getting on yourself. But it's... cracker barrel. 'Better with age' is generally a lie.

And Paul M was reviewing records really quite recently - also his TV appearances have mostly been on BBC1/C4 clip shows lately.

http://www.neumu.com/needledrops/

Is Christgau implying that he is speaking to Missy in her own language? Is there a further implication that the pseudo-slang he concocts here is a kind of lingua franca for all Americans, a condensation of their aspiration to be undifferentiated? Is it, therefore, a synthetic subculture which has as its purpose the destruction of actual subcultures? (How could Christgau twist this speech around to discussion of Matmos or Kid 606 without it sounding stilted, synthetic, inapt, universalist? Maybe be does it, and gets away with it, I don't know. Maybe he speaks to Matmos in their own language too when required?)

Good luck!

'it's a typically American logical inversion for the actual elites (Christgau, JLo) to be seen as populist and the actual marginals (Sherburne, Matmos) to be seen as elitist.'

(Substitute 'Momus' for 'Matmos'.)

'I don't want to make too much of Heaton's common touch. Yet from Randy Newman's liberal elitism to Stephin Merritt's and Momus's Nick Currie's takes on camp, most practitioners of this strategy like to pretend they're putting something over.'

And again this celebration of the faux-low central over the supposedly-elitist marginals, queens and intellectuals! The 'dean' really doesn't like us! He hangs with Missy, you see!

Why should Momus read him when he can just listen to his rap records?

*look it up

This is a common tack with American academia - the embrace/analysis/validation of street-slang or pop-culture trash or whatever: in a backwards way, it's meant to give the academics populist credibility (eg: "look how down with Joe Punchclock I am!") I don't think European academia operates in quite this way, correct me if I'm wrong... HOWEVER, anyone with half a brain could easily see that pop-culture (ex: Missy) *is* worth taking seriously because it *is* actually very rich material that affects an awful lot of people, it's larger social impact requires that it not be ignored or looked down on.

'The most overrated band in new-wave Britain... Back in the good old days we had a word for this kind of thing--pretentious... the definitive art-twit. We hate you you little smarty.'

Gosh!

By the way, I LOVE Missy Elliot. I just don't like deans of journalism who think they can give her advice.

'In a subculture that credits DJ Spooky's ridiculous spiels, David Toop qualifies as a master sage.'

Interesting. He's not afraid to denounce (as I also do) Spooky's pretentiousness. Being intellectual / pretentious (elitist vice) apparently trumps being black (populist virtue). The word 'subculture' is frowned upon, seen as a place of fickle judgements and exaggerated esteem for lesser (yet more pretentious) talents.

Actually I associate subcultures with 'places where worth is not defined in dollars and university tenure'.

I have no idea at all if this matters, but just a side note -- I figure if I was ten years younger (or whatever) a lot of hip-hop's words and thoughts would be in the way I talk and write, but it isn't, and if I included it in my writing I'd think I was using it in an overtly clunky, dropped-dead-into-things approach. Sorta the way Charlton Heston says "You go, girl" in the introduction to Disney's Hercules (yeah, not the best film in the world, but at least Gerald Scarfe tried). Such are the ways of slang and generations...er, yo, I guess.

The reaction to this totally underscores Shakey Mo's point:

'While there are class divisions in America, we cling to the idea that those divisions don't exist - and if you assert that they do indeed exist, you're guilty of CLASS WARFARE!'

Now I will be accused of RACE WARFARE! How exciting! No, how tedious.

Is there a further implication that the pseudo-slang he concocts here is a kind of lingua franca for all Americans, a condensation of their aspiration to be undifferentiated? Is it, therefore, a synthetic subculture which has as its purpose the destruction of actual subcultures?

Christgau, like many 'white hipsters' (but not, apparently, Ned) has adopted what he thinks is some sort of black slang, like using 'back in the day' as a noun. In fact it's not much different from Gershwin writing 'Porgy and Bess', which is why I think a critic like Sherburne is much less, yes, pretentious.

Exactly. The worst kind of pretension, the pretension of elites to populism.

Which is different from racism. I don't think Christgau's being racist (maybe just kind of clumsy). And I don't think you are either. I mean DJ Spooky *is* black - this is part of his identity and it is part of the larger cultural dialogue that surrounds him. Nothing wrong with that.

However, the pretension of elites to populism could totally be levelled at *you*, Momus - insofar as most Americans would equate your use of the "Queen's English" and your intellectual interests with elitism, while you seem to think that you're a marginal/populist (correct me if I'm wrong). No one answered my question as to why being marginal = populist btw.

I'd say I'm a marginal pluralist! I kind of like the idea of there being no lingua franca, no centre, just a rotating smorgasbord of cultures, none privileged. But I acknowledge that I may have a European view of this rather than an American one. My understanding of the American situation is that everyone has a dual identity -- as a minority member / immigrant on the marginal side and as an American on the populist side. So there can be a common culture which touches everyone, which is 'the American universal'. (To a lesser extent, in the hegemonic period of the American Empire, all world citizens are also Americans in this sense: they have an 'inner American' ready to be invoked by entertainment products and other ideology, but not ready to vote in the US elections or share the US standard of living.)

The question then is 'What does it mean when 'the American universal' becomes the culture of one -- and only one -- of the American minorities, for instance African Americans?' What happens when those people take on that iconic, paradigmatic role? Clearly they 'deserve' it: their creativity (as well as more dubious attributes like their 'suffering' and consequent 'soul') entitle them to recognition. But what are the effects on true pluralism? What happens when -- as is now the case -- Hispanics become a more poor and more numerous subclass in the US population, and yet are not allowed any totemic significance, any claim to 'soul', any shout outs or Christgau appropriations? Surely it would be better to recognise pluralism and stop this denigration of marginals?

But, as I say, it's your country. Perhaps I don't understand it. I'm not an American. Although I have one in me... somewhere...

That's exactly what I was saying! That race, as a possible signifier in Spooky's case of 'universality', got totally trumped by 'intellect / pretension' as a signifier of 'marginality / elitism'!

Some people.

Also, were the aristocracy a marginal elite?

The problem with Christgau is that his forays into the Top 40 often seem strained. People identify Xgau and his taste towards the fringe much more than they do the mainstream. The guy can't just pick up a Budweiser and expect everyone to think he's suddenly a credible member of the masses. He's not. But it certainly doesn't disqualify his perspective, any more than, say, a European who's never lived anywhere close to Compton commenting on Public Enemy. It's plausible that someone who isn't familiar with some genre can bring a more interesting perspective than someone already familiar with one (hence, the bewilderingly effusive praise for The Streets.)

Oh, and DJ Spooky has long been horribly overrated, despite whatever skin color he has.

-- jess (dubplatestyl...), February 6th, 2003.

This is my new favourite Jess post. Especially in the context of him talking about fawning fanboys.

I did find an interesting quote on his website, though, about how he sees criticism in relation to music-making:

'Dylan and Lou Reed and many others have [aged] brilliantly if not always consistently. And so have some critics, myself included--it's easier for us, of course, because criticism requires second-level creativity while making music is first-level.'

haha momus's defence of "proper" english = exactly the opposite of his defence of matthew barney and breach with convention in film

(meltzer's attack on marcus and xgau was that they WEREN'T academics, despite their writing tone)

At the time the thinking was that these people who are writing about rock were gonna springboard into being cultural commissars, because they had other interests, and that they were gonna use that as a launchpad. People really thought Christgau was gonna be an intellectual broker. They thought Willis was gonna be a–I don’t know, Simone de Beauvoir or something. What happened was, all of them became sort of self-styled intellectuals. They were really better when they were just journalists. - James Wolcott

Later, I found the quote on RC's site which says he considers crit 'second level' and music-making 'first level'. So it's all consistent. Barney can be allowed ambiguity because it's art. Christgau can't because even he doesn't think his crit is art. CF Kenan Hebert's point at the beginning of the thread that 'It means he's more poet than rock critic. That's not a compliment, since he aspires to be a rock critic.'

re "resistance": yeah i shd have said "apparent resistance"

so wolcott's position is what (apart from his usual have-it-both-ways posturing)? that they should have written books or they should have stayed journalists? basically he's saying haha i got to write for vanity fair and ellen willis didn't

...OR DO I? (Since I admitted upthread that reading him for the first time made me picture a 'lair of hobbit-like scribes'...)

(Despite his novel, JW is still a superb critic, I think - his LRB demolition of Rick Moody being a case in point)

Nirvana: nevermind. This is great < / sarcasm > haha. A++ in the sense of D --. In fact so D-- it's B!! ;-) A back-in-the-day front-of-the-bus triumph of a disaster. *You'll* "love" it of course (but hey, you KNOW what I think of you...) Pah (as we here at Guilty Pleasure Central say). DO YOU SEE?!!

RANDY NEWMAN: 'Home Town Hero' Despite semi-kvetchable LA psychobabble tropes, Newman's chops were always too knowing to eightball and egged the overthird surf-X crowd (eight letters).

*I dunno how "chops" can be "knowing"
* overthird = over-thirty?
* egged = encouraged?
*surf-X = "people who surf and take ecstasy" or "people who surf and listen to X" or is X surf-rock? (They are from L.A.)
* no clue about "eight letters"

Scary how well this quote applies to Xgau.

RC says: 'As a writer, I'm notoriously slow. CG capsules are generally worked, worked, and reworked, which is one reason their syntax is so dense. On the other hand, I'm always trying to catch ideas or conceits or free associations on the fly as I listen, and have been known to drink a midnight beer to get one flowing.'

Trying to steal my thunder!

Gallileo, Gallileo,
Gallileo, Gallileo,
Gallileo Figaro - magnifico

'I think there's no more important issue in rock criticism than the one you suggest--the idea that popular means bad not only is hell on good criticism, it's a perversion of why and how rock criticism started. As with the novel, where a similar mindset leads arbiters to conclude that Walter Abish is more important than Bruce Sterling, what makes all but the most abstract subcultural rock work descends from the same kind of formal grounding that made Chuck Berry popular almost half a century ago. Yet the opposite is a working assumption of most young critics, especially the more adventurous ones, adventurous and smart being far from the same thing.'

a European who's never lived anywhere close to Compton commenting on Public Enemy.

but that's not the same thing as saying therefore "universal = good"

(it is an impressively bad example)

'What makes all but the most incomprehensible, underground journalism work descends from the same kind of formal grounding that made The New York Times popular over a century ago.'

He's not slighting subcultures at all. I think what he's upset about is the desire to keep things within a subculture, to deny them from a larger audience in some sort of elitist preservation ("These poor folx can't truly appreciate my art!").

I lived in Memphis, one crazy town, for a decade, and I heard black people using "back in the day" all the time. It's obviously not a piece of new slang. But only someone like Christgau would use it as a noun. It's a matter of taste whether you find this insufferable or a clever use of the people's English to achieve "compression" in the prose style. Compression being some kind of populist strategy for Christgau, who's writing for the pop fan on the go...gotta get it into eighty words.

I'm not sure I get why it is so unseemly to use slang from other so-called "minorities" or subcultures...I mean, what's wrong with a "shout out" used by a trucker? Don't we all live together here? So all those old rockabillies down in West Tennessee picking up on black slang, that was OK because they were just rednecks, but now we know better and we have to be careful? Doesn't this get back to the whole thing about "pious outsiders"? Christgau is your typical New Yorker, he thinks he can command all this stuff that comes at him and he's somehow above it (OK, that's a cheap shot at New York, where I've also lived, but there's some truth there) but he has to keep on using it to keep his dick hard so to speak. So, he's got to use this colloquial language in a way that no living person would think of, in everyday speech. He would defend it as a writerly appropriation of living speech, that's what rock and roll and popular music and popular culture is all about. Isn't there some grain of truth in that view, something good? Before, you had Dwight MacDonald and all those guys, frumping (can I use this as a verb, do you think?) on about high and low, what a total drag (old slang, that OK?). Hard enough for any writer to get an appropriate tone going and when you're talking about something as...polyglot? insane? perhaps even, to use an old-fashioned turn, without any discernible standards, a big fuckin' mess?...it gets even more difficult. I mean, let's all just go back to Europe and rulebook and some nice, easy standards, forget about Tom Wolfe's America.... (joke)...

(put it another way: you're not actually reading that phrase properly -> "abstract subcultural" isn't a diss, it's a description, distinguishing music that works for conventional inherited reasons (most of it) from music which works for other non-inherited reasons)

(something tells me that now is the time when i should re-enact my "no more arguing with people who hide behind ridiculous pseudonyms" which effectively takes care of the entire internet.)

that is what xgau is saying there (he doesn't even have to be endorsing the idea that similar principles underlie yrs and bowies music, just that throwing out such a link simply by a perusal of chart placings is bad thinking and listening, which it is)

this is not an anti-margin argument, it's an anti kneejerk anti-pop argument

Actually I don't think compression is populist. I think it's, if anything, elitist, but it's populist-elitist (in the same way sport is; that classically American fudge of 'anybody could be the president, even if only one is'.

I'm not sure I get why it is so unseemly to use slang from other so-called "minorities" or subcultures...

Oh, I agree, it's totally the essence of pop music (and it's why the point Jess quotes about Europeans who've never been near Compton is silly), but it does set people up to be called 'pretentious', and for pratfalls.

Yeah, this kinda stuck in my craw too. What does Compton have to do with Public Enemy? (And what does this mis-association say about the ability of Europeans to understand rap?) Essentially understanding a foreign culture just a matter of learning the culture's diction/language/frame of reference - something which is definitely possible. Should we go back to the "Pasty white people listening to rap - hilarious!" thread?

You're right, I realise that, but he is putting the value 'popular' above the value 'subcultural' in his writings, from what I've seen of them. And this is typical ghetto masochism. It's like when the Democrats have to prove they're extra-tough on crime.

Say it with me one more time: IT'S THE NAME OF A SONG HE'S REFERRING TO.

Infolding / compression kicks away the reader's ladder then offers a dangling rope or labyrinth thread in its place. If it's not in the service of poetic ambiguity (and I think I was coming round to the idea that in Christgau's case -- midnight beer and all -- it might be) t's inherently obfuscatory or authoritarian, in that it increases your dependence on the author as authoritative guide, Pied Piper, etc. No matter how difficult he makes it, you have to follow his twisted logic, deal with the obstacles and clues he drops.

I was taught that populism is clear and didactic -- it actually provides all the footnotes, stairs, ladders etc the reader may need, depending on the level of his/her development. I learned that not just from Sir Ernest Gowers and George Orwell, but from Smash Hits, the pop publication I was closest to when I lived in Britain. Smash Hits house style was always to explain any reference, even if it made the article longer or less elegant. Anybody can give the explanation required, it doesn't have to be the 'authoritative yet cryptic critic-poet'. This 'Smash Hits style' is more populist but, of course, a lot less fun, and less arty, than compression/infolding.

I'll let the modest / honest Christgau refute that himself:

'As for my limitations, they're public and they're legion. Metal, art-rock, bluegrass, gospel, Irish folk, fusion jazz (arghh)--all prejudices I'm prepared to defend and in most cases already have, but prejudices nevertheless. I pretty much lost reggae with dancehall; my acquaintance with most techno is a nodding one (zzzz); I've never really liked salsa...  Oh yeah--classical music. Did I mention classical music?'

the CG started in '69. Blender/Q/et al came after

HOYT AXTON: My Griffin Is Gone (Columbia) Hoyt Axton, who can't sing, has written two good songs, "The Pusher" and "On the Natural." The latter is on this record, produced by Alex Hassilev, who can't produce. D PLUS

The new sounds didn't hurt either (we're not talking a capella singles here -- though admittedly not instrumentals either ;-)).

also, i think overlooking the possible parodic elements in xgau's recent approach, like yancey has just brought up, is shortsightend in the extreme.

considering that black culture has pretty much been the bellwether of American pop music for, oh, let's say a century now (though it's longer), how is it "cliched, accommodated and corporatised," exactly? what exactly is he fudging or hiding? and as much as I love Philip Sherburne, do you honestly believe that the dance music he (and I) writes about, whose audience is shrinking by the day, is "actually in a valid and vital subculture"? valid, sure, but vital? Sherburne himself wrote a terrific column about said audience shrinkage and its effects on him as a journalist (http://www.neumu.com/needledrops/data/00061_needledrops.shtml). or are you just doing the "young = valid" thing?

(Jess, I really hate being called Mike, OK?)

"But it certainly doesn't disqualify his perspective, any more than, say, a European who's never lived anywhere close to Compton commenting on Public Enemy."

I'm not sure why this would stick in anyone's craw, but maybe I need to be more clear:

In other words, lack of membership to a group does not preclude a qualified perspective on that respective group. Xgau can comment on the proles even if he isn't one. Mike Skinner can talk about Compton even if he isn't one. I can have a reasoned perspective on breast feeding even though I can't lactate.

'Here it might be objected that the Go-Betweens can't be said to spread their net wide--they're very subcultural. But...'

'None of this is likely to attract ecstatics or malcontents, I know, but...'

There are 11 more of these 'they're subcultural losers, but...' constructions.

'Even her praise of Godard?calling Breathless "a frightening little chase comedy"?smells of the populist's condescension. Bad movies are simply entertainments that don't "work" (a lazy phrase Kael resorted to more than any other critic); good or great movies are entertainments that do.

Which is the core of American film criticism, before and after Kael.'

yeah, I meant NWA the first time.

But the comments I referred to looked beyond that (one comment in particular noted the mis-association.)

(I think if I could keep my two year old away from the computer I might be able to think straight.)

NYC Ghosts and Flowers [Interscope, 2000]
Maybe the trauma of guitar loss jolted them past songform, or maybe they're acting out with David Geffen gone bye-bye. Either way this impressionistic poetry-with-postrock is the most avant-sounding of their DGC-etc. product, and either way its avant parts are more listenable-nay, beautiful-than anything on Washing Machine if not A Thousand Leaves. Songform guy that I am, it put me off at first. But heard refracting the dusk on the Taconic Parkway or spattering through the rain on Second Avenue, its refusal to distinguish between abrasive and tender or man-made and natural is a compelling argument for their continuing to do whatever they damn well feel like. A

Songform isn't populist?

No it's not. Here he is:

'Songform guy that I am, it put me off at first.'

Damn, Jody got there first!

I guess he's got to find otherness in the mainstream, because he isn't getting any in his normal diet, from the normal sources. It's perverse, though. Why turn to Neil Young when you could get otherness in Soft Pink Truth?

The question is, are these universalist, populist critics, as the VV said of Kael, the last of their kind? Is there a unitary, explicable America any more, a place where you can take popular taste and make intelligent arguments about why it's actually good? Will the future contain these great explicator-critics who can talk smartly about dumb mainstream products, or will it all fragement: multiscreen cinemas, 1000 cable channels, the internet, nothing 'in the centre' any more?

'Cause he doesn't consider otherness for otherness' sake a real asset? (not saying that's what SPT is, but that seems to be the implication of yr post)

They're certainly not the last of their kind as far as that angle of criticism is concerned, but to be widely held as barometers of taste? It's a pointless question, because I don't think Xgau or Kael were ever held in a God-like esteem in "unitary, explicable America," partially because they wrote for the Village Voice and the New Yorker, publications that are labeled as elitist by reputation, if not by content too.

Will the future contain these great explicator-critics who can talk smartly about dumb mainstream products, or will it all fragement: multiscreen cinemas, 1000 cable channels, the internet, nothing 'in the centre' any more?

Sure it will. But will they matter in some sort of large, cultural way? I don't think so. The only critic that has a bonafide mainstream identity is Roger Ebert, and it certainly could be argued that he satisfies at least some of the qualifications that you offer. But I think he's the sole exception, a holdover from a time when criticism had more widespread value (which I don't think it has much of anymore).

Amateurist, why aren't they American critics? I certainly had a strong sense, even while living in the UK, that British critics were very British. Maybe that's one of my foibles, I'm always aware that there are other ways of doing things, and that awareness usually makes me pack my trunk at some point and leave. The more I do that, the more I seem to stereotype, because, damn it, different nations do do things in different ways. In Japan, for instance, nobody actually prints reviews at all. They announce a record, but nobody would ever pass an opinion, especially not a bad one. It would upset the advertising-for-coverage cartel arrangements, and also be considered impolite. Hence no Japanese Kael or Christgau.

Momus: because many of the "critics" (some of them academic) that I read, on both music and film, are actively engaged in a community of enthusiasts which crosses national boundaries. Perhaps there is something uniquely American about David Bordwell's writing, for example, but it would do it a disservice to identify it as American Criticism. But perhaps I just haven't read enough English Criticism to perceive the obvious (?) differences.

There are rock critics at magazines like Rockin' On Japan. But they do promo-puff. If a label buys a certain amount of advertising, they expect a certain amount of positive coverage. You therefore get critics twisting to say something suitably vague and pleasant about a record you sense they don't always like. For instance, a famous woman reviewer spent a lot of time talking, with apparent distaste, about my song 'Coming In A Girl's Mouth', but ended up saying that my obsession with oral sex did women too much honour! It didn't sound very sincere.

ARGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGH!!!! FUCK FUCK FUCK!! FUCK HILBURN AND THE HORSE HE RODE IN ON AND ALL HIS GODDAMN TOADIES!

Thank you.

More here:
http://www.suntimes.com/index/ebert.html

Well, it's part of the project of Post-Modernism, isn't it? It more or less is pomo. There are no 'culprits' except the rise of consumer society and the collapse of Modernism's mandarin austerity.

Perhaps this tradition is not as strong in the UK, or Europe, or Japan

It's way stronger! Japan, as Takashi Murakami has pointed out, 'is the future. Because there's no art or religion here, just entertainment and popular culture'. And the UK is not far behind.

So perhaps that's part of the reflexive backlash against the "arty", because it doesn't fit in with the program.

Sure. But we 'arty elitists' are preparing 'the next thing', because PoMo will not last forever, and people are already bored with endless pop culture. The kind of rock that Christgau promotes (timeless Chuck Berry) died, it seems to me, in the 70s.

More wishful thinking, Momus.

Actually that prescription sounds rather awful to me.

(And for maybe the first time ever I started reading into a standard-issue No One Agrees With Momus 200-post debate and thinking "actually Momus sort of has a point!")

I KNOW it's the name of the song...

Kael: I used to love her, but then...I grew up...
but the great thing about her that you have to respect is where she's coming from--metaphorically and literally--i.e., the American west. Somewhere in her collected works she talks about the democratic, inclusive aspect of the American west that Easterners don't get...which, in my experience having both visited and lived in the west, is totally true...so, OK, her west is maybe small-town California (later, San Francisco, I think). What she did--I don't want to be reductive and say ALL she did, but I wouldn't really argue with you if you said it--is reclaim some turf from the eastern-U.S. critics, the ones who found "Bonnie and Clyde" distasteful. And I think that's pretty significant, and certainly it explains her distaste for the art film and her championing of such masterpieces as "Used Cars" and the remake of "Invasion of the Body Snatchers," set in S.F. right about the time the Reagan era kicked in. Both of which are good movies, very enjoyable, and I think she liked them and maybe wanted to rub the New Yorker reader's nose in them because she felt like the average N.Y. reader was maybe a bit unaware of the poetry or at least the prose implicit in all that raunchy American material (that sounds like bad Kael). And they did and do need their noses rubbed in it, now more than ever.

Similarly, X-Gauw has always felt it necessary to rub his audience's nose in the same kind of stuff...so soul music instead of progressive rock, Al Green instead of Magazine, Monk instead of Medeski, Martin and Wood. All of which are choices I happen to agree with it, but then I also like Pavement and Sonic Youth (the latter to a point, they're actually one of the most boring yet good groups on the planet). He was writing about "Love Train" and Dolly Parton at a time when those artists weren't taken very seriously by anyone outside their audiences, most of whom weren't writing criticism. I'm in my thirties, I enjoy all sorts of stuff, but at the same time I enjoy Chuck Berry or Chris Kenner a lot more than I do the Strokes or the Oblivions or most of the newfangled stuff that passes for music these days...but I'm not going to sit here and tell you I think it's necessarily more authentic or that something else is then superfluous or derivative, that's my big problem with Dave Marsh and all those Detroit-populist critics, they think they have a lock on what's real and they don't.

I'm reading some of Xgau's Random A-Lists and it seems that he's fond of finding the populist element in high art (rather than the other way around). I'm not 100 percent sure how I feel about this -- it's great that he can see beauty and songform in otherwise difficult music, but he still discards the less beautiful and songformy extremes, which are often (though not always) the point of those works. It's like enjoying a hip-hop song simply because it has a rock sample in it and then saying "well, I still hate rap, but this is okay. Except for the rapping."

This should read:

"We 'liberal ironists' are already bored with 'the next thing,' because PoMo is either still with us or never existed at all, and people are preparing endless pop culture. The kind of "death-of-x" paradigms that Nick Currie promotes (an endless series of annhilating revolutions) died, it seems to me, in the 80s."

The idea that Xgau ever promoted "timeless Chuck Berry" is hallucinatorily wrong.

That's why it's 'counter-intuitive' for me to see him dissing me (and other 'smarty pants') at the Voice, which I think of as very much 'my kind of paper'. But I guess it's much more interesting for him to align himself with a widespanning public (even one that doesn't read him) and explain it to his little audience than to connect (as the Other Music newsletter does) Typical Village Voice Choice Record X with Its Ideal Consumer , Village Voice Reader Y.

That feels like some sort of credo to me. It's essentialist (this is the essence of rock), it's populist, it's deeply conservative.

Blount is back! Blount, I do not call myself a populist.

(Substitute 'Momus' for 'Matmos'.)

-- Momus (nic...), Yesterday 3:25 PM.

This is just the usual mythopoeic myopic masochistic bluster, the kind that comes from people who live most of their lives in DC or NY but claim to be in touch with the spirit of the west / south, the kind which means that every president has to claim to come from Texas despite being Ivy League. Its British equivalent is Julie Burchill going on about how working class she is, despite being a media professional on 100k. It's exactly the same as Xgau hating most indie-avant, yet writing for an indie-avant paper.

Okay, I see your confusion. Although everyone loves to say I'm binary, the model proposed in that statement is 3D. It has an elite-populist axis (think of that as high-low) and a central-marginal axis (think of that as inner-outer).

So I'm saying 'it's a typically American logical inversion for central Christgau to be seen as low ('down with the people') and marginal Momus to be seen as high ('elitist'), when in fact central Christgau is high and marginal Momus is low.

But low and marginal is not the same as populist, and won't be until there is true pluralism. What we think of as 'being down with the people' means, in fact, being up with a chosen elite of 'the people', the iconic 'American universal', -- Chuck Berry, Oprah, certain sports heroes, etc -- and not the variety of people I see daily living in my working class urban area and riding the subway. (Which, in NY, was Chinese, the Hassidim, etc -- people not in Xgau's 'populist' purview.)

Which if we really think about it might be sort of hard to do: if we ignore the perceived listeners and just look at the product, surely an Eminem record is in its own way much more "elitist" than any given slice of marginal post-rock?

Huh? That is Christgau-like in its opacity, explain please!

I didn't respond to this post earlier, but I'm using the old-fashioned definition of high art here - ie., the one that was prevalent up to mid-20th century, but which seems mostly embarrassing now. By this definition, nothing that Christgau reviews would be considered high art, unless he's done some classical reviews that I'm not aware of.

seems not too far off from some of the things i've seen momus bang on about.

Unless of course 'the people' are Hassidim, Chinese, etc -- all in subcultures.

And I'm sure there are Chinese Americans who look in the mirror and are surprised to see a Chinese face, because the America of the media and of conditioning is still so far from the America of the street.

Look at Xgau's list of 'blind spots'. He really makes no apology. (I didn't put in the bit about Hindi singing, where he says he can't take more than 'a few cuts', despite knowing the soprano voice thing 'is good'.) He doesn't need to, because he's an iconic populist, a universalist, a unifier, a politician, a myth-endorser, not a champion of actually-existing pluralism and diversity. This is what that 'When will the US get over Italy and Ireland' thread was about too.

(also haha the nyrb kael obit — actually a review of a rerelease of her reviews — argued that she wz the vanguard POST-MODERNIST in american criticism)

(however since no two ppl in the world agree what this term means that is no solid argument either way)

claim that disliked indie or avant garde films is easily provable nonsense: but she also shared xgau's belief that "it is popular = it is worthless garbage" is stupid thinking... oddly enough, you have to actually watch the film and judge yr own response to it!!

If you were writing about just about any place in America except Manhattan...

DAFT PUNK Discovery
(Virgin) These guys are so French I want to force-feed them and cut out their livers. Young moderns who've made the Detroit-Berlin adjustment may find their squelchy synth sounds humanistic; young moderns whose asses sport parallel ports may dance till they crash. But Yank fun is much less spirituel, so that God bless America, "One More Time" is merely an annoying novelty stateside. The way our butts plug in, there are better beats on the damn Jadakiss CD. C PLUS

He so doesn't get Post-Modernism, which, if I were his boss, would have led me to sack him in 1982.

***

These guys are so French I want to force-feed them and cut out their livers.

That's an inexplicable statement.

No! It's a part of modern America! I'm not just talking about Manhattan! What about California, or Chicago... there is no monolithic America outside the US media, where you see the same 10 actors incarnating every story on earth! The real place is multiracial, not transitional! Which makes the job of being a critic-gatekeeper 'covering all bases' impossible! So why can't Xgau just write for Voice readers about Voice-reader-friendly acts? Because he's more ambitious than that! Because, like Saul Bellow writing 'The Dean's December' he damn well wants to paint a picture which looks like it's got the whole of America in it, just like George Bush does when he gives a speech. If only people would be more modest and realistic! If only Bush would say 'I can't speak for anyone except me and Dick and Donald, and we want to invade...'

Of course not, but it sure ain't Burnt Prairie, Illinois or Sioux Falls, South Dakota, that's for damn sure!

uh, why isn't Nas a Voice-reader-friendly act?

momus, i repeat, HAVE YOU READ THE VOICE RECENTLY

Mark, what would you say if Momus's argument were that Christgau understands the "popular not necessarily garbage" point so well that he's forgotten certain things about how "unpopular" musics are meant to work? This is the part of Momus's argument that I'm somewhat swayed by, and I think he did a reasonable job of pointing up even Christgau's ummm reverse-indie-guilt about it: in the instances where he's championing something that's designed to work on a small/"elite" scale he explains why it's worthwhile anyway, which means engaging with the work not really in the way it's meant to be engaged with (right?).

I only read Jerry Saltz in the art section, who's brilliant.

I do not consider the Voice a reliable source of music information. This thread has educated me a lot about Christgau, who I knew almost nothing about.

momus - have you ever been to America (besides touring, and besides California and Chicago)?

Lived in Manhattan 2 years, leaving 2002. Toured just about every nook and cranny, drove 15,000 miles around the whole continent last summer. I never tour without also snooping and looking.

Yeah, I mean, go tell the native tribes out on the New Mexico and Arizona pueblos that their America isn't real enough for them.

kael was definitely much better — fairer and more vivid — at explaining out how "unpopular" films (that she liked) work: at getting inside the piece's own rhythm etc etc

but like i said far far up-thread, one of the things abt being an editor is you get to hire OTHER people to explain-explore the stuff you don't get: no one gets "everything"

80% of America lives in urban/suburban areas! Small towns are continually used to evoke "America" all out of proportion with there actual demographic significance! (Is this not Momu's point re: Reagan/Bush/Bush?)

Anyways, I think we're basically agreeing here. America has many faces.

Jess, "engaging on its own terms" is, to be just down and simplistic about it, basically the same complaint that people here used to make when Pitchfork reviewed dance records. I think it's about a million times more tenable to hold "marginal" things to "popular" standards (on some level it's just filtering what's "good" under the standard of "what people usually like"), but at this point its disingenuous to call them out just for being marginal, rather than accepting that even the people making them intend them to function on a marginal level and looking at them that way.

Momus - "I drove through Kansas once, I know all about America. I believe they had one of those MickDonalds - how you say?"

His project is, in his terms, radically democratic, because by sifting and finding the good stuff he takes the power out of the hands of marketmen and labels and puts it IN the hands of the consumer, who he can direct to the good stuff.

Momus sez "but wait! this is also a hegemony! and his language excludes those he seeks to reach!"

But Xgau knows that we can't achieve any sort of understanding of music if critics don't at least duke it out between claims of universal truth -- his is A counter-hegemony and seeks to totalize like all hegemonies do, but it is only ONE OF MANY.

Further, Xgau knows that this is a guide for consumers, not "everyone" and so expects engagement from his readers -- they have to work to understand, but then in democracy is only for voters, and they have to work to understand the issues there too.

To place it Momus's bush analogy:

Because, like Saul Bellow writing 'The Dean's December' he damn well wants to paint a picture which looks like it's got the whole of America in it, just like George Bush does when he gives a speech. If only people would be more modest and realistic! If only Bush would say 'I can't speak for anyone except me and Dick and Donald, and we want to invade...'

Momus wants Bush to abandon his totalizing hegemonic aims. Xgau would like to present an alternate conception of the world to struggle against that of Bush.

Hence my points about central and low and etc. If the low don't like it there, they can't remain marginal -- they need to get together and reach some common worldview which allows them to organize and constitute themselves as the new hegemony.

He speaks to all this actually, quite nicely, in his rockcritics interview:

http://www.rockcritics.com/Rbt_Cxgau_1_Online_Exchange_AUGust_2002.html

and Firth explains perhaps even better in his essay:

http://www.robertchristgau.com/xg/bk-fest/frith.php

Why not? They might be interested in the formal experiment of the three different mixes.

Colin Firth explains it better!

Absolutely. Being a universalist in an increasingly targeted world (where was Xgau when marketing and the internet totally changed every mediaform? He was right there at his universalist helm, like he'd always been!) makes less and less sense, needs greater and greater syntactical twisting to hold. Which perhaps explains an increasingly opaque prose style. (It can't be space restraints, he's the editor! It must be because, like a baseball player running for 27 balls, he wants to catch it all just to maintain some sense of his own centrality -- like me on this thread, hur hur!)

I love that Momus sniffs 'I only read the art section of the Voice' and then protests being called an elitist!

That's not elitism, it's targeting my interests!

jesus, i've been keeping my mouth shut for a while, but dammit, this is so fucking stupid!!!! have you guys actually READ any xgau A-lists/dean's-lists lately? THE GUY LIKES MORE UNPOPULAR STUFF THAN POPULAR STUFF, AND HE ALWAYS HAS (though he'd call the stuff he likes "semipopular", of course, and yes he DID invent that term -- it's one of his most creative ideas ever, probably.) Among his top 50 albums of 2001 were, let's see here: moldy peaches, manu chao, tricky, the coup, orlando cachaito lopez, old 97s, atmosphere, rachid taha, nils petter molvaer, de la soul, black box recorder, *Tea in Marrakech, lucinda williams, hakim, buck 65, the new pornographers, baba maal, haiku d'etat, drive-by truckers, chief stephen osita osadebe and his nigerian soundmakers, leonard cohen, sama mapangala & orchestra, clem snide, high life allstars, new order, buddy guy, *Rough Guide to Indoneseia, lightning bolt, perniece brothers, taraf de haidouks, *Select Cuts from Blood And Fire Chapter Two, kirsty macchol, maria muldar, kmd, le tigre, shaver, *Mush Filmstrip (Frame 1), and orchestre veve. That's more or less 37 hardly-gold records out of 50. (the others: bob dylan, pink, white stripes {who were still just an indie band at the time}, blink 182, strokes, ghostface killah, st. lunatics, shakira, babyface, michael jackson, strokes, willie nelson, alicia keys.) (actually, maybe new order sold more last year than st. lunatics or ghostface or michael or willie; who cares.) anyway. where does this idea that he prefers "popular" musics come from??? seems to me momus is just whining because Xgau (apparentely) DOESN'T LIKE MOMUS. so the fact that he likes plenty of artists LESS popular than momus just isn't important, i guess.

I agree with this. What I can never understand is whether Christgau is admitting to being a dilettante vis-a-vis the various African, Latin, other "world" musics he covers every now and then (his "authoritative" stylings might suggest otherwise) or whether he actually views these musical cultures as marginal to, or orbiting around, a perceived central musical culture which he had helped to define. I know he'd deny the latter (I suspect he would), but what is the impression you get from his prose?

snobbish dandies: bryan ferry, bob dylan ("if i could only make records for myself i'd make charley patton records," etc etc.), d'angelo...

add Prince to that snobbish dandy list

Nabisco: at this point its disingenuous to call them out just for being marginal, rather than accepting that even the people making them intend them to function on a marginal level and looking at them that way.

That is also my grouse with Simon Reynolds attacking 'indietronica'. This music functions as fileswap, smallrun, mp3 etc -- the only thing giving it pompous universal claims is your (SR's) pompous universalist dismissal of said (unmade) claims!

But surely a flamenco or rai record in Christgau's yr-end roundup is an effective novelty, for he doesn't evidence a longstanding interest in the full breadth of music from those cultures, and the music usually comes to him by means of some American or English tastemaker reissuing the material (although I should say it is nice to see that he is reviewing Africa-only releases of late). None of this is a bad thing.

"To form a style, go get the Village Voice, study the music reviews carefully--especially any by Robert Christgau--and then do exactly the opposite of what he does. (side rant: The "dean" of rock criticism my ass. He's the dean of willfully obscure, pseudo-hipster, beat-poetry knockoffs.)"

xgau's africa love is pretty long-standing (at least since the early 80s), but i do take your meaning: in all actuality this merely supports momus in that xgau's unavoidable air of tokenism via one rai or flamenco record has him supporting a subculture (although not one that features "cute-formalism" or laptops.)

Momus: Christgau is lame because he does not understand me (or even bother to listen to me really)
ILM: You are lame because you do not understand Christgau (or even bother to read him really)
Momus: B-b-but he doesn't understand POSTMODERNISM and IRISH FOLK MUSIC and MOMUS! Why should I bother with him?
ILM: Why do we bother with you, Momus?
Momus: Look, I don't know ALL the answers.

By the way, I'm as susceptible to personality cult critics as anyone (my favourite critic, a man totally dominating my current music taste, is a Frenchman called Bastien Gallet). Just not Xgau.

Ha ha ha! Funny, this thread touched all those points left to its own devices! Intersubjectivity with 'industry lackey' going on!

moving with michaelangelo's last point, isn't it kind of instructive to view xgau's work from a macro point of view, as a "life's work" at this point? he's probably the only critic of his generation still publishing regularly in his "natural habitat", no?

(Matmos: Neumu pays in the best of all currencies: that of a job well done!!!)

This argument elides the difference between "popular" and "populist". It's not unpopular stuff that Christgau dislikes, it's stuff that is intentionally unpopular, i.e. elitist. What Christgau doesn't like is when he gets the sense that the artist thinks he's too good for the mainstream audience. The issue of whether or not it actually sells is of much lower importance.

Goddamn the section of this thread re: Pauline Kael makes me wanna tear my eyes out. At least with Christgau people are basing their condescending opinions on more than just one line that wasn't particularly indicative of the entire review. Though that line, re: "Breatless" is representative of her annoying-if-you-love-the-movie, but totally rewarding ability to treat a movie AS a movie - definitely an influence on Christgau, rather than a subculture's sacred text - and therefore uncriticizable). I love the fact that she'll mention a single hackneyed or uninspired scene in a movie that she otherwise feels is near perfect.

well, if an artist thinks he's "too good for the mainstream audience," another word for that artist might be "moron."

but since moldy peaches, tricky, the coup, atmosphere, nils petter molvaer, black box recorder, buck 65, leonard cohen, clem snide, lightning bolt, perniece brothers, le tigre, and *Mush Filmstrip (maybe shaver, too -- not sure about all those african bands) are basically all artfucks, and hardly aiming for a mainstream audience, so in fact they could all probably be classified as "intentionally unpopular," your hypothesis is still horseshit, i'm afraid.

For heaven's sake, who creates 'intentionally unpopular ie elitist' work? Who goes out of their way to alienate a public or a critic? You make the work you want to make, and you get the audience you get. You kind of hope a critic will listen to the record as a self-contained imaginative world, not as a deliberate snubbing of an audience you hadn't even thought about not reaching!

I took him as (initially) just saying that he found the VV critical perspective - for which RC is a useful metonym - strange and kind of old-fashioned. And that's just the way I felt when I read all these guys! The British equivalent would be imagining a situation where Ian McDonald was the editor of the NME!

miccio on xgau:>>his Streets reviews was FILLED with negative statements, but he still gave it an A-. Wtf? ... If he's not gonna corroborate his grade, why put it? Also, when somebody says "this sucks but it's good" I usually assume their full of shit and that they're just giving it a thumb-up to tow the line<<

so basically, anthony, what you like about pauline kael is more or less the same thing you DON'T like about christgau. weird....

Yr. confusing yourself because Xgau said (in passing mind you) that what makes most *rock* work is on the same formal grounding as Berry -- you will note that Xgau reviews many things which are not rock at all, nor pop for that matter.

Also you confuse "formal grounding" with "qualities". Arguing that all figure-skaters skate on an ice-rink doesn't mean there's only one way to be a good figure-skater.

how boring and spoon-fed! why don't we just convert to the model Momus mentioned about Japanese fan-mags, that advertising = nice coverage? (duh, Matos--because it happens covertly in just about every fucking magazine you can think of)

Another tired platitude. In what sense are American Top 40 radio, MTV, etc., NOT about fashion and schism and whim and provisionality??

i continue to think this HAS to be factored into his overall aesthetic: and that any position he has honed for himself is wound into enablement of the hubbub of argufying voices he is also nurturing

A "Dean" is the head of a department, for Momus and other possibly clueless brits. I had missed this myself until sinkah's post, what it means I mean.

Deans aren't supposed to pick sides but to arbitrate and collect talent and steer towards important places to investigate.

Though Christgau is definitely in my top five fave critics, I'd LOVE to be on Double Secret Probation.

You are being very patronising over what to me is quite an uncontroversial point: American Rock Criticism looks kind of nuts to Brits who are not used to genuflecting to venerable old "scribes" who have spent their working lives grading pop records!

Ha ha ha!

heh, jerry should you really be talking about patronising (originally spelled: patrinizing)? i suspect i shouldn't mention the comments i've heard - from a number of sources in a number of different contexts - by american writers on english rock crit. (obv i'm more Influenced by english crits than amurrican ones.)

Pop criticism as Dad Rock!

well, since robert christgau graduated through punk/new pop -- he was writing about the sex pistols and ramones and television and the vibrators and dictators in 1976/77/78, then about abc and a flock of seagulls and culture club and soft cell and adam ant in 1980/81/82 -- it must be "completely alien" to him, too, then, right?

"Xgau calling himself 'the dean' is self-affectionate self-parody for precisely the 'genteel authoritarianism' he knows must underlie his long tenure as gatekeeper of the Voice."

makes no sense at all and I let it pass coz I just let it lie at dean=academic poobah (i.e. a "chair").

But a dean has a different role -- he isn't a gatekeeper of ROCK, but of ROCK CRITICS.

Just like a dean of english isn't a gatekeeper of THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE but rather ENGLISH PROFESSORS.

Deans don't have genteel authoritarianism (a very BRITISH concept) but rather are administrative paper-pushers with a guiding vision.

get the distinction?

Maybe this is what momus meant; but humanist continuum doesn't have to equal Chuck Berry, and I think the humanist continuum is pretty nicely sustained in the work of the Mekons or Pavement. This notion that punk was a break in the humanist continuum strikes me as simplistic.

I like Kael--to get back to a comment by Anthony Miccio a little up the thread--but she really had this problem of being too reductive; "Citizen Kane" might be a monstrous outgrowth of '30s comedy or the newspaper-picture genre, sure, but she was saying that because she was uncomfortable with or contemptuous of the standard line that it was about Time, a deep American expressionist work of art...and it's the same with Christgau or any critic over 35 you can name, you become so immersed in the history of the art in question that you become impatient with anyone who claims that this is something new...cf. Meltzer's rather ridiculous assertion that Sonic Youth was "indebted to blues licks that predated its existence by 70 years." As if "blues licks" were the essence of the blues, by the way...

maybe momus valorizes howard devoto above all other newpunkwavapoppas = he does not understand "humanist continuum" (this is not a bad thing, mind you: i valorize devoto too.)

they were great => kane is therefore EVEN BETTER THAN YOU FIRST THOUGHT!!

(or why music sucks)

(or actually the aesthetics of rock: ie US rock-crit had its reformation BEFORE its whatever it is came before the reformation)

He scrabbles around, really ever not getting it, but handing out straight B grades over 20 years.

'Why are they so amateur? Is it punk?'
'They're arty lefties doing poetry and avant drones'
'Oh, it sounds like Hawkwind!'
'Yank guitarist Brix E. Smith will husband Mark E.'s feckless avant-gardishness'
'The A sides collection is the only one any normal person need own'
'Are they still there?'

(Throughout there's this disparaging tone about Smith's artiness, as if Xgau is just waiting for him to drop the schtick and be normal. So he totally misses the point of The Fall.)

jess agrees w. me (jess, agree w. me)

this is important

(The playing field is leveled.)

'seemed allergic to politics, and often ignored a film's political context... In review after review, a film is merely something either well done or botched, whose highest purpose is distraction and amusement. Nowhere in Kael do you find the idea that cinema connects with the real world on any level; nowhere do movies mean anything outside of themselves. Nowhere in Kael do you find the idea that cinema connects with the real world on any level; nowhere do movies mean anything outside of themselves.'

Just as Kael on Godard fails to gauge the formal influence of a political event like the Vietnam war, Christgau on The Fall focuses obsessively on the artiness of the Fall as if it somehow stopped him from considering what their records are actually about. He comments on the tempo of 'Rowche Rumble' but not the fact that it's about drug company Hoffman LaRoche, he notes that Smith is 'interested in the kind of stuff you want intelligent-style punks to be interested in' but doesn't say anything about 'Prole Art Threat', he describes 'your attention flagging as their momentum gives way to, well, poetry readings--roughly accompanied, as usual'.

It's the kind of non-criticism you would have expected in the Edwardian era, when theatre critics were looking for a 'well-made play'. There's a pragmatism which is, finally, rather insane, a focus on irrelevant details and a constant nagging worry, just out of view but finally blocking everything else, of 'how will this play in Des Moines?'

(Yes, the first thing I contribute to a Xgau thread has NOTHING TO DO WITH HIM. But hey, that Daft Punk review irks me because how does sounding like late '80s Chicago house = French to the point of violence?)

this has to be the most serpentine and self-oblating ironical strategy ever undertaken by Homo Criticus

it's on one of the streets threads somewhere

half-assedness possibly comes into it

i wz going to say "but matos the fall are total ass oh wait" but the moment is gone

(but then, so do the wu-tang clan)

perhaps it's clever

("deer park" = the "at street level" one)

o.nate--my impression is that he really doesn't like the highfalutin aura that surrounds poetry readings even if he does like poetry or words in themselves. I think the key here is that "poetry readings" /= poetry in itself. anyway, wouldn't that be "pseudo-lowbrow" instead of "pseudo-middlebrow"? from what I can tell, middlebrows love poetry readings. (then again I probably am a middlebrow myself and don't like poetry readings too much myself so there you go.)

also, cut one "myself" from the last sentence

XGAU: As critics kvell, skeptics

READER: Skeptics are in the review already, at word 4!

eye their p.c. quotient:

Aha, a charge of political correctness is levelled!

a black rapper with white adoptive parents and Asian American DJ

But this is his race, not his politics?

who subsumes his racial analysis in an explicitly antihomophobic, antixenophobic leftism and allies himself with the Piss Christ and the Dead Kennedys.

Okay, enter Franti's politics.

And for sure

There's that concession-to-critique figure again

a few of the ideas are pat or simplistic

So being left wing, he's conceding to imaginary band-foe, is a vice, equated with being pat and simplistic?

and a few of the metaphors flat or anticlimactic ("politics is merely the decoy of perception"? wha?).

Concedes there are poor lyrics.

But

Aha, he will defend band!

if Michael Franti is no Linton Kwesi Johnson,

He again concedes, unexpectedly, knocking Franti back further into the enemy's grasp. But what's coming next?

neither was LKJ at 25

Ah, he pulls the rug out from under LKJ after using LKJ to pull the rug out from under Franti! Brilliant! It's just endless, like a toppling house of cards!

. His wordslinging isn't quite Chuck D.,

Franti is falling lower and lower!

subject of the ballsy imitation/tribute/parody/critique "Hypocrisy Is the Greatest Luxury," but his intellectual grasp thrusts him immediately into pop's front rank

He's not very talented, but he's clever! Good! Let's hope it's going to be important to be clever all the way to the end of the review!

--I'd put money on his thought quicker than Michael Stipe's or Michelle Shocked's, not to mention Richard Thompson's or Black Francis's.

And those are all people we like because they're clever, aren't they? Thinkers we bank on. (Except they've all been demoted, right now, by Franti, who is cleverer.)

And then there's the DJ that isn't--with crucial help from Consolidated's Mark Pistel, industrial percussionist Rono Tse is a one-man hip hop band. He creates more music than he samples,

Being a DJ, then, is bad. But Rono isn't one, because he 'creates'. Phew, that's okay then. Rono's alright, despite being a DJ.

stretching Bomb Squad parameters to carry the tracks whenever Franti falters.

Franti falters! Uh oh!

I'd like to think the two could penetrate right to hip hop's fragmented core.

Hip hop is not very healthy either, then?

But if they never achieve full cultural resonance

Uh oh, they're too clever to reach the masses, then?

, their art will have to suffice. And it will.

So the inherent pleasures of the record will have to be a substitute for 'cultural resonance'? Somehow, Xgau manages to make saying 'This is a good record' sound like such a hollow victory.

you're being pat and simplistic! what kind of a fucking leap of logic is it from "a few of the ideas" to "all of the left wing"?

"And then there's the DJ that isn't--with crucial help from Consolidated's Mark Pistel, industrial percussionist Rono Tse is a one-man hip hop band. He creates more music than he samples,"
Being a DJ, then, is bad. But Rono isn't one, because he 'creates'. Phew, that's okay then. Rono's alright, despite being a DJ.

again, your ignorance of Christgau's work hobbles your attempts at parsing it. he was a very early fan of DJ-ism and sampling, though he draws the line at some of the more elaborate recent turntablist stuff (I don't, but that's another thread)

So the inherent pleasures of the record will have to be a substitute for 'cultural resonance'? Somehow, Xgau manages to make saying 'This is a good record' sound like such a hollow victory.

yes, I agree with you here--and in fact most of that analysis was spot-on. which is why this is frustrating, Momus--you jump way too far conclusions-wise and assumption that he's aesthetically conservate despite not actually knowing to what degree, so let's just go all the way out.

(for compromise, read "failure" at least in someones eyes.)

o. nate--I've gotten both highfalutin and non-highfalutin auras from poetry readings myself, but maybe he's assuming things about them that either he shouldn't (because they're not true) or that are outdated (because they're not true anymore). this is an area where maybe his pseudo-lowbrowness comes into play, so points to you, then

Momus, I think you're already playing his analyst, and hahaha, but really. he's said himself in interviews and in pieces of writing that he sets up dichotomies and argues back and forth between them in print because he changes his mind so often and keeps trying to see/hear/understand things from every conceivable viewpoint. this hamstrings him at times--a lot of times--by giving what he says a push-me-pull-you aspect that turns people off: his sentences twist around themselves constantly, as you pointed out in the DHOH parse. thing is, when he's good, which is more often than you might think, he can really kick your ass as a reader, which ultimately is the job he sets out to do as a writer. (as a critic the job is something else.)

let's beat some dick!

we beat momus at the FORMAL level of the argument, that's the thing to tell our children

momus you somehow (i dont know how) neglected this as the crux of his actual disappointment with the eagles:

"The Eagles are the ultimate in California dreaming, a fantasy of fulfillment that has been made real only in the hip upper-middle-class suburbs of Marin County and the Los Angeles canyons. The Beach Boys sang about something similar a decade ago, but they also reminded us that happiness and material things are far from unconnected. The Eagles put that truth aside and pay only lip service to the struggle that real fulfillment involves. Even the Beach Boys learned that in the end our welfare and the welfare of others are bound together. We all tried to forge a humane generation and ultimately fell back exhausted. Retreat was only natural. But any prophet who tells you not to try and understand is setting you up for a swindle. "

Meanwhile, he's not making a case for the Eagles being crap because their music is vapid and too-proficient. But we shouldn't expect him to anticipate punk, still four years away.

(Hums... mumbles... 'It feels so empty without me...')

In Leadon and Meisner's "Earlybird" the square title character, who "spends his time denyin'/ That he's got no time for flyin'/ In the breeze," is compared to a hipper bird: "High up on his own/ The eagle flies alone./ He is free." Later, the singer sets up an implicit comparison between himself and the eagles: "Y' know it makes me feel so fine and set my mind at ease/ To know that I don't harm a soul in doin' what I please."

This comparison is a little confusing, of course. The eagle roams the sky not in search of freedom and fresh air but in search of prey, which is why he is such an apt symbol of American imperial power. Although I doubt that the group intended the martial resonances of its name--that would be dangerous, image-wise--the Eagles definitely do espouse a new, hedonistic brand of American individualism. The youth counterculture of the sixties always had a certain eccentric frontier quality to it, with the understanding that frontier life was cooperative as well as individualistic. But the stress of mass cooperation eventually bummed everyone out--it was just too heavy, y'know?--so the new alternative man goes it alone. As the refrain of "Take It Easy" advises: "Lighten up while you still can,/ Don't even try to understand,/ Find a place to make your stand/ And take it easy."

Actually, the protagonist of "Take It Easy" doesn't plan to make his stand alone. He craves female companionship--but please, no one who will stone him or own him or bewitch him or tie him down or let him down or do anything much but chug all night. After all, "she can't teach you any way/ That you don't already know." That line comes from a song that in a less male-chauvinist context might seem as thoughtful a representation of the ethic of sexual autonomy as Joni Mitchell's "All I Want" but is here reduced to the hippest of hip come-ons. There is more wisdom about the real give and take of sexual relationships in most of the silly romantic ditties of the early sixties than there is on the Eagles' entire album. In the end these eagles fly alone with a vengeance.

Good night!

& o. nate -- an "A-" isn't faint praise & I don't think that Xgau uses a "techinique" to keep Hiphoprisy's fans at bay coz he doesn't really care about them. His whole point is the pretense to abiter rathern than polemicist, which is what makes his eagles diss so entertaining, how he can take even his own disgust and hold it at a distance and turn it around and examine it.

& Momus the key is that Xgau is complaining that the Eagles didn't *examine* the defeat but fell back unthinkingly. "any prophet who..." etc.

But thanks, Amateurist, for doing it more successfully (at least until it became the thread wherein we defend Christgau against an individual intransigent - admittedly raising some interesting questions, but not what the thread was supposed to be about).

As for Citizen Kane, she really liked it: why else would she spend 80 pages talking about it? It may have been very unfair to Welles re: the authorship of the screenplay, but ultimately I think the piece did a lot more for my appreciation of the film than any shot-by-shot dissection would have. (It's baffling that Kael gets so much flack for that essay; go read James Agee and Manny Farber and they're REALLY rude about Kane.)

"'La Chinoise' is a satire of new political youth, but a satire from within, based on observation, and a satire that loves its targets more than it loves anything else - that, perhaps, can see beauty and hope only in its targets. But not much hope. In a section toward the end, the movie goes outside comedy. Godard introduces Francis Jeanson, an older man with political experience, a humane radical who connects. Jeanson tries to explain to Veronique that her terrorist actions will not have the consequences she envisions. She describes her tactics for closing the universities, and, gently but persistently, he raises the question 'What next?' There is no question whose side Godard is on - that of the revolutionary children - but in showing their styles of action and of thought he has used his doubts, and his fears for them. Though his purpose is didactic, the movie is so playful and quick-witted and affectionate that it's possible - indeed, likely - that audiences will be confused about Godard's 'attitude.' ... As a movie-maker, Godard is almost incredibly intransigent. At this point, it would be easy for him to court popularity with the young audience (which is the only audience he has ever had, and he has had little of that one) by making his revolutionaries romantic, like the gangster in 'Breathless.' ... But he does not invest the political activists of 'La Chinoise' with glamour or mystery, or even passion. His romantic heroes or heroines were old-fashioned enough to believe in people, and hence to be victimized; the members of Veronique's group believe love is impossible, and for them it is. Godard does just what will be hardest to take: he makes them infantile and funny - victims of Pop culture. And though he likes them because they are ready to convert their slogans into action, because they want to do something, the movie asks, 'And after you've closed the universities, what next?'"

I'm sorry, but that just sounds like the guy on the 'Colin Powell reports to the UN' thread who said 'Bush doesn't have to explain his invasion rationale in a way the average Joe can understand, he's just too busy!'

Kael on 'La Chinoise' sounds a lot better than Christgau on The Fall, who was just lame and talked about, really, nothing (as other posters acknowledge). (By the way I used to read a lot of Kael, and own her complete reviews. But my books are in storage in NY, so I was quoting from essays on the net about Kael rather than Kael herself.)

''What I mean by schism etc is that US rockcrit lacks that defining moment when Burchill/Parsons/Baker/Morley/whoever nailed the theses to the door. You never had a reformation :)''

And that's what...a good thing? In what way? And burchill/parsons latest stuff is far more terrible than anything I've read by xgau here.

(no mention of penman (who i really really like)).

heh...has a thread on a UK crit has got 600+ posts?

Yes it's a good thing because our old 60s sagacious pieties were destabilized (maybe we have never destabilized our punkah pieties... and that is our tragedy - that generation of writers still lord it across the media). When I referred to a humanist continuum earlier, it's less to do with any systematic body of thought than it is the sheer continuing reified presence! Think of John Peel or Jules Holland - how irritating they are. Peel's presence has practically qualified bloodyminded noise as an English heritage industry... he renders the avant cosier by his very patronage. And Holland on 'Later...' jamming away with Beck or Mr Dynamite, steadily insinuating that everything new or surprising is really just a tributary of that Old Man Blues River which just keeps rollin... And I still find it incredible that someone like Ian MacDonald is still given any credence in Uncut, delivering his reviews like tablets straight from the mount. That faux-Olympian detachment from someone who's seen it all before. And it's that kind of infuriating dogged, schoolmasterly persistence which is the opposite of what pop is all about to me (from my Nik Cohn, Paul Morley, Chris Roberts position). [Funnily enough, I think the greatest living English (language) writer is David Thomson, whose greatest work, 'the Biographical Dictionary of Film', is, on the face of it, not too dissimilar to one of RC's doorstop collections of Consumer Guides. But consider the playful, Borgesian, adventurous, moody, quality of Thomson's prose... and then imagine how it would be betrayed if he gave every actor a high school grade at the end of each capsule!]

2) 'Almost famous' is a parodic representation of all this, the flame of rock criticism passed down the generations to young Cameron Crowe, and even Lester B becomes a kindly avuncular cheerleader, supporting the march of The Grand Tradition. You might say it's a huge misrepresentation, but can we imagine such a film being made about British pop journalist?! Compare this to '24hourpartypeople' where popthought is pompous, theoretical, buffoonlike, practical, inspirational, whimsical, impractical and finally embodied as absolutely central to the key moments of our popculture over the last twenty years.

3) I was thinking of that founding mythic image of ILx, the robot and the dinosaur. And it occurred to me that it represented a kind of deep structure of Ilx as it has turned out... I suspect that Mark S has a kind of Crusader Complex. He likes to identify a threat - the dragon, the 120 ft lizard - and then go riding off as champion with his band of feisty Markettes to vanquish it with his pitiless robot logic. Guilt is presumed, it's just a matter of forcing through the prosecution. His manifesto at the The Wire was 'have fun starting arguments', but I think, in practice, it's a more a neurosis about the need to win fights and play to an audience. There's a gracelessness and hostility and patronising polemic to a lot of these threads (mostly from the Markettes, it must be said); an ideal criticism should be infinitely attentive and thoughtful, I think, and a lot of the attacks here have all the subtlety of Steven Gerrard approaching Gary Naysmith in a Merseyside derby.

4) And why is the dragon always one of the usual suspects? I was thinking about Mark S and Momus, wondering why they generated such energy through their arguments. And I came to the conclusion that they are actually perfect opposites as writers [and their continual banging up against each other is really a desire to merge/achieve synthesis? :) ].

Momus's fault is that he is too elegant, marshalling the facts to meet the pleasing contours of the form of his argument/idée fixée - and if this means form takes precedence over fact, well so be it. Whereas Mark S, is a kind of gonzoid journalist of ideas, suffers from a lack of form. I sometimes get the impression that he would be unable to leave a note for the milkman without first bringing the entire contents of his head to bear on essaying an history of pasteurisation, an overview of cows in ancient mythologies, a study of the symbolism of milk in the first few Captain Beefheart lps, then a critique of the tetrapak design, and so on. There's a lack of focus such that content overflows... even, ultimately, beyond the bounds of language (hence the evermorecompressed shorthand allowing the ease of expression but betraying the possibility of comprehension).

James Brown!

Though I can see why he doesn't like xgau, actually and does manage to make good points.

''Whereas Mark S, is a kind of gonzoid journalist of ideas, suffers from a lack of form.''

hehehe...You have a point here that when he goes beyond review form and into full blown pieces he does, shall we say, push at form. But in record reviewing form he is excellent tho'. His MIMEO review, for instance, was v v good.

Jerry- As to the ans to my question I don't quite understand what yr getting at, there isn't a straight ans but you are OTM as far as peel/holland/macdonald (his review of coltrane's 'last concert' was really unforgivable). But I'm sure if I print this off and read it again I'll geddit (but i won't print this off).

UK criticism might as well be as good as Japan's actually. The thing there isn't gonna be too much writing on 'ideas', not many thinkpieces of the kind that you got in the 'old days'(and of course reviews are down to 50-100 words in most mags).

Can anyone explain how or WHY he decided to change his simple grading system after the 80s? Instead of just letter grades for the past 13 uears there have been asterik/star reviews too..

How do albums with *, **, or *** stars, or even HMs (honorable mentions), fit into the letter grading scale of A+, A, A-, B+, B, B-, C_, C, C-, D+, D, D- and dud ? And why did he decide to make everything so much more complicated? The 70s guide is so user friendly compared to the 90s...

And how did that Guns and Roses album get an E ?

He explains it himself on his site I think that the * thing was a great idea- so a *** Old 97's record would be a great, great buy if you're into Alt Country but dispensable if you're not (as opposed to an A+ Old 97's record, which might appeal to music fans who usually wouldn't give a fuck about alt country)

Mark Sinker's backup Motown singers?

the Markettes: Mark!

Ike: You're God-damned right

*awaits mark s w/flaregun

I think this is 'our' tragedy for sure. The most successful British rock writer though is Nick Hornby, who is also one of the people who has most moved away from the punkah pieties - a not-totally-backwards move, at that.

re piety-breaking qualities: by that logic everyone who isn't one of the mountaintoppers is breaking the pieties. I'm not arguing w/the logic, mind you, it's basically correct. just that having just read the book I'm in no mood to credit Hornby w/much of anything. ah well.

I'm not sure what he's saying abput 'rockcrit'. The distinction drawn between Almost Famous and 24HPP is particularly obscure. The fact that I've seen neither film is not, I think, the prime reason for this.

Also, unlike the Nipper, I don't dislike Jools Holland. I would rather hear him play blues piano than listen to many of the other people he invites onto his programme.

NAS
The Lost Tapes
(Columbia)
Remember that posthumous outtakes CD Bad Boy attributed to Biggie? No? Good then - it was foul, not just ill shit but stupid ill shit. These finalized versions of tracks fans have long bootlegged is the opposite. Where the ex-dealer thought it wise to conceal his brutishness, the fake thug thought it wise to conceal his sensitivity. Surrounding outtakes that were just outtakes is back-in-the-day recommended to Tim and Missy (even has some pronunciation in it) and four autobiographical pieces. The two about his parents are juicier than the mother love gushing from God's Son. The Afrocentric pep song is so much deeper than the mawkish, misinformed new "I Can" that you believe he might yet get politics. And "Drunk by Myself" describes his alcoholism. Pass what Courvoisier? B PLUS

When I have trouble with Christgau, it's usually because he's being too vague, not too dense. Now I don't find the vagueness a problem in the first several sentences. In a longer review you might want him to give examples of the brutishness and sensitivity, or tell us what's juicy in the parent songs; but "brutishness" and "sensitivity" carry enough mood in themselves. "Juicy" actually puzzles me, because I can't tell if he means that the songs are richer for their extra juice or that they're too wet, though I'd bet on the former. And I think he needed at least one place where he gives us some meat, a glimpse of something specific that Nas actually does; and maybe the autobiogs were the place for this - or, perhaps, the place would be in the midst of the puzzling sentence that started this thread. That sentence is a botch no matter how I try to read it. Last week, first time through I read "back-in-the-day" as an adjective that modifies "surrounding outtakes that were just outtakes" (yes, surrounding outtakes with outtakes is so back in the day), then when I tripped I tried it as an adverb that modifies recommended ("back-in-the-day recommended" meaning roughly "back in the day I would have recommended that Tim and Missy surround outtakes that were just outtakes"?), then I gave up. It didn't occur to me that "back-in-the-day" could be a noun, since I don't generally think of outtakes being surrounded by back in the days, or tomorrows, or ancient Romes, or anything of the sort. Even learning now that "Back In The Day" cross-references a song title, I still see nothing to signal me that it's a noun, except that eventually, with your help, I see that that's the only way to get a sentence out of this. And Dan is right of course, the verb form needs to be "are." So understanding that back-in-the-day is a noun, and recasting this as "Surrounding outtakes that were just outtakes are back-in-the-day that is recommended to Tim and Missy (even has some pronunciation in it) and four autobiographical pieces," I still don't get a lot out of this sentence. "Back-in-the-day" just doesn't evoke enough specifics (back in which day, and what did it sound like?), and here I think it's Christgau's job to give them rather than mine to guess them. Maybe add the sort of specifics that Edd wrote (echoes, gunshots), even if Bob has to get rid of the Tim and Missy cross ref, which isn't very important. Christgau was so enamored of the double meaning of "back-in-the-day" that he let it distract him from what he was trying to do. But now that I reflect on this, adding more specifics to the sentence would overshadow what I think he is trying to do, which is this: First, he makes a contrast to Biggie, which establishes the superiority of Nas's outtakes (and that the outtakes have value, since outtakes often don't), identifies a path not taken, identifies a generic persona ("thug") that Nas and others in his milieu are working with, and says how Nas works it ("the fake thug thought it wise to conceal his sensitivity"). Then, near the end of the paragraph, Xgau makes a contrast to similar-but-less-successful Nas songs, in which the sensitivity is done naked and results in glop - and this contrast suggests why Nas was aesthetically wise in masking his sensitivity. So the review has a strong structure, with a payoff at the end, though I wish the payoff had been more vivid. Powerful nonetheless, more powerful the more I look at it. And the back-in-Tim-n-Missy-day sentence should have been more workmanlike and less ambitious.