Do you ever read one of Christgau's reviews and go, What the hell is he talking about?

I have no idea what you mean by "out of left field." Care to elaborate?

Metal and Shells [PVC, 1985]
When what the Brits call pop isn't popular, it's usually rock and roll chamber music if it's any good at all. This U.S. debut, a best-of that highlights the soulful ache in the vocals and the quirky opacities in the lyrics and does what it can for a modest tune sense, honors that suspect notion. It's not stylized, and not static either, but it's pretty subtle, and its half-finished edges and kinetic lyricism are best appreciated in tranquility if not repose. Where it can be expected to unfold for quite a while. A-

Maybe he thinks if he writes incomprehensibly enough people won't figure out that he doesn't really have anything to say.

Lou Reed, The Blue Mask

After this becomes a cult classic, in a week or so, noncultists are gonna start complaining. "My Dedalus to your Bloom/Was such a perfect wit"? And then bringing in "perfect" again for a rhyme? What kind of "spirit of pure poetry" is that? One that honors the way people really talk. Never has Lou sounded more Ginsbergian, more let-it-all-hang-out than on this, his most controlled, plainspoken, deeply felt, and uninhibited album. Even his unnecessarily ideological heterosexuality is more an expression of mood than a statement of policy; he sounds glad to be alive, so that horror and pain become occasions for courage and eloquence as well as bitterness and sarcasm. Every song comes at the world from a slightly different angle, and every one makes the others stronger. Reed's voice--precise, conversational, stirring whether offhand or inspirational--sings his love of language itself, with Fernando Saunders's bass articulating his tenderness and the guitars of Robert Quine and Reed himself slashing out with an anger he understands better all the time.

Right now I'm digging Wussy from his latest Consumer Guide. The Dean does it again.

This is classic Christgau syntax: not technically wrong, but batshit insane nonetheless. It takes you two-three reads to realize that "honors that suspect notion" connects back to "this U.S. debut" ACROSS the entire pile-up of stray mini-thoughts in the middle. The first time I read it, I thought "honors" was a plural noun and "suspect" was a verb!

Really? But those are things that would make me seek out the album. I want to hear what Ginsbergian Lou Reed sounds like, hell, just to see if I agree or not. I think Christgau's got a great turn of phrase, and density's just part of his style. It's not a bad thing. He just wants to make you work for it. Obtuse is Heidegger. Christgau's clear as a bell comparitively.

xpost...or what Gypsy said.

It took me one read and less than two seconds to get the referent, and it never occurred to me that suspect was a verb.

Antithesis?

A little prolix, maybe, but very sane, if you ask me. And I really suspect Christgau's prose has a lot to do with writing to strict word limits. I've written exhibit copy before and when you need to fit everything you want to say into 100 words or less, you'll happily bend the fuck out of syntax.

That said, Gypsy is OTM. RC's often too clever by half and I frequently disagree with him (but what I like is I can usually tell when I'll disagree with him), but he isn't unintelligble.

Yes!

I don't think people are necessarily talking about "difficulty" in the sense of "big words."

1. Xgau can be syntactically jumbled (as noted, this may be because of word limits and format). For example, the first sentence is arguably run-on and has a comma splice (especially if you're American). A semi-colon would be more appropriate, or a conjunction that makes clear that the two parts of the sentence are in some sort of opposition. While we're at it, we could put in a comma before "any good at all," and maybe reverse the order of the last phrase to let the emphasis fall where it should. So: "When what the Brits call pop isn't popular; instead, if it's any good at all, it's usually rock and roll chamber music." In general, Xgau underuses conjuctions that can help position his sentences in relation to each other.

2. Further, Xgau sometimes becomes obtuse because his choice of verbs are unintuitive. For example, in the second sentence, saying that a "debut album" "highlights the soulful ache" is odd to my ears. Not wrong, but odd. I think that an album can have soulful vocals, but we don't normally say that an album highlights something that is part of it.

3. But the biggest "difficulty" of the above paragraph probably comes from the way Xgau sets up oppositons that aren't immediately obvious. Yes, it's "clear" that he means for "stylized" and "static" to be opposed to "subtle," "kinetic" and "half-finished." Some of those oppositions make sense ("static" vs "kinetic") but others, not so much (how is "subtle" and "stylized" opposed, or are they not meant to be?). Xgau confuses the oppositions further by the use of the conjunction "but." He's saying that the album is NOT stylized nor static -- so it IS subtle and kinetic, right? But his use of "but" makes it sound garbled, and makes the opposition even less obvious.

Just sayin', is all.

With Christgau, even the simplest concepts get tangled and bent. To wit: "What the noisemakers proved is that Lydon's (not to mention McLaren's) exultant contempt for their supposed incompetence--even in this era of good feeling, the story circulates that two decades' worth of accrued skills compelled them to practice being 'bad'--is mean, defensive bushwa." You're constantly backpedaling, shaking the meaning loose from the knotty chain, scraping the meat off of an alien bone structure that's as dense and spindly as a dead, curled-up tarantula. It's unnecessary. Some would even say it's bad writing. (I'm waiting for a bolt of lightning to crash through the heavens and strike me dead.) Bad writing. Real crap.

(enough of this ^ plz, thx)

While the latter is certainly possible, it's seldom worthwhile.

"This U.S. debut, a best-of that highlights the soulful ache in the vocals and the quirky opacities in the lyrics and does what it can for a modest tune sense, honors that suspect notion."

i suspect he didn't read it a second time, and who edits this? fire him..

I read somewhere - I think an interview on rockcritics.com - that Chuck Eddy edits Christgau's stuff. I do not know if this is true or not...

Okay, I looked it up and he does:

Steven:   Do you edit Christgau's music stuff?
Chuck:   Yeah, almost all of it.
Steven:   You do?
Chuck:   Yeah, I edit both the "Rock & Roll &" column and the "Consumer Guide."

http://www.rockcritics.com/interview/chuckeddy.html

This is even more ungrammatical than Christgau's original! The part before the semi-colon needs to be an independent clause in order for the use of the semi-colon to be correct (ie., you seem to be overlooking the "when" at the beginning - the same mistake I made when I first read the sentence (which, by the way, I'm still not 100% sure I understand, even though I think I am now parsing it correctly)).

Sometimes I think this board is like an entire OG Star Trek civilization that based itself on a left-behind copy of the Consumer Guide.

Anyhow, don't really understand the Xgau cult, but I haven't spent enough time with him to really develop a strong opinion.

wow. where to find, please?

On Metal and Shells
by R. Christgau

When what the Brits
call pop
isn't popular,
it's usually rock and roll chamber music
if it's any good at all.

This U.S. debut,
a best-of that highlights
the soulful ache in the vocals
and the quirky opacities in the lyrics
and does what it can for a modest tune sense,
honors that suspect notion.

It's not stylized,
and not static either,
but it's pretty subtle,

and its half-finished edges
and kinetic lyricism
are best appreciated in tranquility
if not repose.

Where it can be expected to unfold for quite a while.

That review reads a lot better in the poetry format, with all the whitespace. My eyes have been opened.

The "suspect notion" is a sly nod to Stiff Little Fingers "Suspect Device."

It's in her book Love Trouble which every American should own.

http://slacktivist.typepad.com/slacktivist/2003/12/rmn_holiday_box.html

A final point will be that if you're interested in Christgau's ideas but find his writing difficult (and his ideas incomplete), then your contribution to a thread like this will be more interesting than if you have no interest in the man or his ideas.

(Btw, I find Christgau maddening because he doesn't take his ideas as far as he should, or clarify them when he needs to, but I wouldn't find him maddening if I didn't think he had incipient ideas worth thinking through.)

My beef w/ Christgau is similar to Kogan's - his near-mystical vagueness. When his observations don't resonate they read like someone enjoying the pleasant tones of his own voice. When his ideas don't hold up I feel like I've just used the record review section of the newspaper as a Word Jumble substitute; mental excercise without the benefit of revelation. When they do, well, it's why he's worth reading at all.

Susan OTM re: the cult. Question Christgau and some people react like you're doodling cartoons of the prophet Mohammed.

I wish this was true – it's a good line.

Please post so I can convert to free verse.

New Order, Low-Life
Where once they determined to keep all affect out of their music, now they determine to put some in. Any dance-trance outfit that can lead off its Quincy Jones debut with an oblique "Love Me Do" quote has its heart (or a reasonable facsimile thereof) in the right place, so one doesn't want to quibble. But inserting affect isn't the same as actually feeling something, and it isn't the same as expressing (or even simulating) a feeling, either. B+

Where once they determined
to keep all affect out of their music,
now they determine to put some in.

Any dance-trance outfit
that can lead off its Quincy Jones debut
with an oblique "Love Me Do" quote

has its heart
(or a reasonable facsimile thereof)
in the right place,

so one doesn't want to quibble.
But inserting affect
isn't the same as actually feeling something,

and it isn't the same as
expressing (or even simulating)
a feeling, either.

"Main Entry: 1af·fect
Pronunciation: 'a-"fekt
Function: noun
Etymology: Middle English, from Latin affectus, from afficere
1 obsolete : FEELING, AFFECTION
2 : the conscious subjective aspect of an emotion considered apart from bodily changes"

He's basically saying that once they studiously avoiding displays of emotion. Now they seem to be trying to inject some, but Christgau's not buying it.

i thought this was an example of how they insert the affect. how can they have their "heart in the right place" with it and yet its not meaningful. heart in the right place is weird. it seems like he's contradicting himself, but he's just using heart in the right place as their intentions were right...ok but isn't the problem the intentions. NEVERMIND! i'm probabaly lagging behind :(

and susan, i think heart in the right place just means, he's sympathetic to their effort even if he thinks they're not quite up to it.

1. Feeling or emotion, especially as manifested by facial expression or body language: “The soldiers seen on television had been carefully chosen for blandness of affect” (Norman Mailer).
2. To put on a false show of; simulate: affected a British accent.
3. To have or show a liking for: affects dramatic clothes.
4. Archaic. To fancy; love.
5. To tend to by nature; tend to assume: a substance that affects crystalline form.
6. To imitate; copy: “Spenser, in affecting the ancients, writ no language” (Ben Jonson).

None of these connote sincerity, but rather a simulation of it. Christgau's saying that they're tring to inject emotion thru AFFECTING it by way of an implied increase in musical sophistication, and that the resultant EFFECT is actually one of insincerity.

xxxpost

I don't think that is quite right either though, because later on he says that "inserting affect isn't the same as ... expressing (or even simulating) a feeling". In other words, Christgau is agnostic on the question of whether the feelings are real or simulated - that's not the issue. The issue is a subtle distinction between "feeling" and "affect" - which is perhaps that "affect" is more cerebral, ie., it leaves out the body.

I actually think that's one of his strongest reviews, in that each sentence is a restatement of his reading of the album's weakness.

Quoting one's self may be gauche, but sounds like everybody's still guessing.

Yes, Christgau's clear as a bell, quite easy to catch the gist. No extra effort required.

xpost, agreed about verb forms as well, it's interesting how affect can encompass both a total lack of sincerity and its opposite.

If Christgau had given one concrete example of what he thought was evidence of "affect" in Low-Life we'd know, but that would violate his oath of vagueness.

xpost

That's the verb form again. It's not paricularly recent - it dates back to at least 1661. What may be more recent, as I state above, is the corruption of the noun form by the verb form.

I'll stick to my original interpretation, which is based on the theory that Christgau is using the Webster's definition I quoted first.

Many compliments/insults have been hurled at Bernard Sumner, but being 'affected" is a new one.

Feeling or emotion, especially as manifested by facial expression or body language: “The soldiers seen on television had been carefully chosen for blandness of affect” (Norman Mailer)

Cf common terms like "Seasonal Affective Disorder" -- a seasonal disorder of the, umm, affect.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affect

It's interesting to contrast the various technical uses of the term. In psychology, it means the external signifiers of emotion (ie., the sense that Mailer used). In philosophy and neuroscience and artificial intelligence, it refers to the internal mental experience of emotion (ie., the sense referred to in the Webster's definition). Since Christgau uses it in a fairly context-free setting, it's hard to know which sense he means.

xpost

xpost

http://www.goldsmiths.ac.uk/csisp/PDF/deluze_spinoza_affect.pdf

If anyone can make heads or tails of this, please to summarize.

Substitute "emotion" and that seems relatively clear: "Sounding emotional on your record isn't the same thing as actually having emotions, and it isn't the same as expressing (or even simulating) emotions, either." It works even better if you plug in a specific emotion, like anger.

But I'll admit to not following what he's getting at with the "simulating" part. If you took it out, the whole sentence would read like he's saying New Order are simulating emotion -- i.e., "acting like you have feelings doesn't mean you have them, or that you're expressing them to me." By putting that "simulating" in parens, it's like he's trying to indicate that it even goes a little beyond that, that he has some little distinction in mind beyond what the sentence can tell you. And that's something that gets a bit Talmudic and annoying. If he doesn't have the space to unpack some really small distinction, it's easy to wish he hadn't mentioned it, cause trying to figure it out can be awfully distracting. It's like mentioning a joke but not offering the punch line -- it makes you think, sure, and pretty deeply, but sometimes you'd just rather they'd let it pass.

If the sentimental fallacy
of good American rock and roll
is roots,

the sentimental fallacy
of good British rock and roll
is amateurism.

Not that these veterans
distinguished themselves
from themselves

before Yank guitarist Brix E. Smith
righted husband Mark E.'s
feckless avant-gardishness.

Still, what they've
arrived at now is
cunningly sloppy,
minimally catchy
Hawkwind/Stooges

with each three-chord
drone long enough
to make an avant-gardish statement
but stopping short
of actual boredom.

And yeah,
it beats roots
by me.

With its technological mastery
and its conventional wisdom
once-removed,
this is a kitsch masterpiece--

taken too seriously by definition,
but not without charm.

It may sell on sheer aural sensationalism,
but the studio effects
do transmute David Gilmour's guitar solos
into something more
than they were when he played them.

Its taped speech fragments
may be old hat,
but for once they cohere
musically.

And if its pessimism is received,
that doesn't make the ideas untrue--

there are even times,
especially when Dick Parry's saxophone
undercuts the electronic pomp,
when this record brings its cliches to life,
which is what pop is supposed to do,

even the kind with delusions of grandeur.

while I dig that you're saying "that's how it seems," the real-life truth is that he'll talk music with you all day - passionately, irasciably yes, but with a refreshing sense that it somehow matters: no matter what, you know he's never gonna resort to "oh, well if that's what you're into" or similarly nutless tropes

I totally do not understand how anything in that New Order review is less than crystal-clear and OTM

xpost-should we still not email him?

Newman's truisms
always concise
never confessional
are his own

Speaking through
recognizable
American
grotesques
he comments here on
the generation gap
(doomed)
incendiary violence
(fucked up, but sexy)
male and female
(he identifies with the males)
(most of whom are losers)
(and weirdos)
racism
(he's against it)
(but he knows its seductive power)
and alienation

He's for it

Newman's music
counterposes
his indolent drawl
the voice of a Jewish kid from L.A.
who grew up on Fats Domino
against an array
of instrumental settings
that on this record
range
from rock
to bottleneck
to various shades of jazz

And because his lyrics
abjure metaphor
and his music recalls commonplaces with-
out repeating them
he can get away with
the kind of calculated effects that
destroy
more straightforward meaning-mongers

A perfect album

Isn't 'inserting' affect refering to the aforementioned allusion to Love Me Do, and, I would think, to some of the samples on Blue Monday, etc. (that *was* on the US version of the album wasn't it?)

which isn't the same as actually conveying an connect with whatever affect was inserted, nor is it the same as expressing your own emotion (or even convincingly simulating it, which would be fine enough).

The Singles 1969-1973 [A&M, 1973]
The combination of Karen Carpenter's ductile, dispassionate contralto and Richard Carpenter's meticulous studio technique is admittedly more musical than the clatter of voices and silverware in a cafeteria, but it's just as impervious to criticism. That is, the duo's success is essentially statistical: I'll tell you that I very much like "We've Only Just Begun" and detest "Sing," but those aren't so much aesthetic judgments as points on a graph. C+

Hysteria [Mercury, 1987]
You know about the music, and if you don't think you'll like it you won't: impeccable pop metal of no discernible content, it will inspire active interest only in AOR programmers and the several million addicts of the genre. In short, it's product--but as product, significant, because it's product for the CD age. Stuck with over an hour of material after four years (after all, could twelve songs be any shorter?), they elected to put it all on one disc because as technocrats they instinctively conceive for formats that can accommodate an hour of music: cassettes, which now outsell vinyl discs, and CDs, which outdollar them. The cassette sound is a little too dim, as commercial cassette sound usually is, and though I sometimes find myself preferring the depth of the vinyl once I've turned my amp up to six or seven, the clarity of the CD gets more and more decisive as the needle approaches the outgroove. I mean, I have trouble perceiving these guys as human beings under ideal circumstances. Not docked a notch because at least they didn't pad it into a double. C

(These are better than some others I could have quoted.) Ultimately, I sometimes kind of wonder why he even bothers reviewing albums in these genres if that's all he ever has to say. (Because people like me keep reading, obv.) I find him very frustrating on 70s and 80s rock for essentially this reason. He just seems to not care for certain large genres and reviews them anyway, saying little of interest and to my eyes applying different standards to them than he does to the mass produced pop music he actually likes.

What, for example, does this actually say?:

Silent Alarm [Vice, 2005]
Benetton boys adrift on Tony Blair's morass of neoliberal compromise ("Helicopter," "Pioneer").

On the other hand I think he got at a potentially fundamental problem with Branca here:

The Ascension [99, 1981]
Okay, so he makes hot "experimental" ("serious") ("classical") ("new") music. What we wanna know is whether it's cool rock and roll ("rock"). Not by me. It's great sonically, with ringing overtones that remind me of a carillon or the Byrds, but the beat's overstated and the sense of structure (i.e. climax) mired in nineteenth-century corn. This can be endearing in Pete Townshend or Bruce Springsteen (maybe even opera), but it sounds weak-minded in an artist of such otherwise austere means. B

Kaiser Chiefs
Employment [Universal, 2005]
Provincial lads make a go of Tony Blair's morass of neoliberal compromise ("Saturday Night," "Born to Be a Dancer"). *

1) He's the Peter Gammons of music criticism

2) The idea of "Def Leopard as technocrats" is comedy of a very high order.

That's exactly how I view Bloc Party! (and I like them)

The combination of Karen Carpenters
ductile, dispassionate contralto
and Richard Carpenter's meticulous

studio technique is admittedly more
musical than the clatter
of voices and silverware
in a cafeteria, but

it's just as impervious to criticism
That is.

The duo's success is
essentially statistical:

I'll tell you that
I very much like "We've Only
Just Begun" and detest "Sing,"

but those aren't so much
aesthetic judgments as points on a graph.

The combination
of Karen Carpenter's ductile, dispassionate contralto
and Richard Carpenter's meticulous studio technique

is admittedly more musical
than the clatter of voices and silverware in a cafeteria,

but it's just as impervious to criticism.

That is,

the duo's success is essentially statistical:

I'll tell you that I very much like "We've Only Just Begun"
and detest "Sing,"

but

those aren't so much aesthetic judgments

as points on a graph.

In which Chuck Cleaver—Ass Ponys, you remember, they still play out around Cincinnati—joins unknown Lisa Walker, multi-instrumentalist Mark Messerly, and amateur drummer Dawn Burman for 11 three-minute songs, all about perfect, one after the other after the other. Small, but about perfect, with Walker handling the human detail and Cleaver tossing off metaphors—a sideshow horse, a shunt to drain the fear from his brain. It's an ideal partnership—vocally and lyrically, Walker grounds the old guy and he lifts her. The band sound is more Velvets than Burritos, yet country still. It's as if they've reduced all of white Ohio to an articulated drone, unlocked a silo or warehouse of hummable tunes, and worked out the harmonies.

Just wondering - should we turn this into a rolling Xgau thread so we don't do it all over again when the next CG comes out?

http://images.villagevoice.com/issues/0543/ann-xgau.jpg

On Hysteria
by R. Christgau

You know about the music,
and if you don't think you'll like it
you won't:

impeccable pop metal
of no discernible content,
it will inspire active interest
only in AOR programmers
and the several million addicts
of the genre.

In short,
it's product--
but as product, significant,
because it's product for the CD age.

Stuck with over an hour of material
after four years
(after all, could twelve songs be any shorter?),
they elected to put it all on one disc
because as technocrats
they instinctively conceive for formats
that can accommodate an hour of music:
cassettes, which now outsell vinyl discs,
and CDs, which outdollar them.

The cassette sound
is a little too dim,
as commercial cassette sound usually is,
and though I sometimes
find myself preferring
the depth of the vinyl
once I've turned my amp up
to six or seven,

the clarity of the CD
gets more and more decisive
as the needle approaches
the outgroove.

I mean,
I have trouble perceiving these guys
as human beings
under ideal circumstances.

Not docked a notch
because at least they didn't
pad it into a double.

Okay,
so he makes hot
"experimental"
("serious") ("classical") ("new")
music.

What we wanna know
is whether it's cool
rock and roll
("rock").

Not by me.

It's great sonically,
with ringing overtones
that remind me of a carillon
or the Byrds,

but the beat's overstated
and the sense of structure
(i.e. climax)
mired in nineteenth-century
corn.

This can be endearing
in Pete Townshend
or Bruce Springsteen
(maybe even opera),

but it sounds weak-minded
in an artist of such otherwise
austere means.

which isn't the same as actually conveying an emotional connect with whatever affect was inserted, nor is it the same as expressing your own emotion (or even convincingly simulating it, which would be fine enough).

Thanks, slb, I think that's probably the best explanation I've read about what Christgau could possibly be on about in that New Order review. I think that's probably what he meant. New Order are neither expressing nor simulating an emotion (because that would mean suggesting that they themselves are experiencing the emotion) - rather they are presenting an emotion to us as a scientist might present a bacterium on a slide - something for our dispassionate and objective perusal.

Melding classic reggae and
Miami booty-bass,
Muddy Waters harp and
Schoolly-D scratch,
cocktail vibes and
sacred quartet.

The Native Tongue beatmaster
turned gravedigging heretic

assembles
"senseless skitstyle material"
by

"a motley crew of ill
characters and cronies
from around the way who
resemble a P-Funk on crack

(wait, P-Funk was on crack)"

into a disturbing laff
riot whose dramaturgy is

more musical than De La Soul's songs.

There's even a sweet-chorused
romantic ballad about
rape and homicide

two of each
but don't worry--
they're only a dream,

with a fake Viennese
muttering eager encouragement
in the background.

Unlike most punk lifers,
they've always yukked it up,
accepted outsiders,
and thought about

their feelings.

So I was pleased
rather than surprised
to learn that they'd
made their politics explicit.

Their attacks on religion
and hater hating
are right on

And why shouldn't
the guy who reads Zinn
and Chomsky
and then votes Nader
be confused?

Concomitantly
I was disappointed
rather than surprised
to find that the songs
about their personal world
are deeper than those
about our political one.

So
I'm glad quadriplegic Nubs
gets her impolitic two minutes.

And
my hopes for all humanity
leap

when a boy and girl
fall in love over the vinyl
they both own.

These 15 songs
are Muslim
like Philip Roth
is Jewish
irreverently, idiosyncratically, and to the marrow

Their North African provenance
means their sense of Islam is at least
unorthodox
and often
cosmopolitan/European

and so, of course, does their pop provenance

East-West instrument mixing
is standard
mystical intensity
a hook
Women
hold their own

Some of these professional entertainers
are seekers after the catchy tune
others folkloric types
who sound authentic to us and impure to adepts
and as many come from Paris or Barcelona
as from Cairo or Marrakech

You wouldn't think to listen
that they're all championing a cultural tendency under attack
But Islamists hate them as much as they hate us

if not more.

-- Thomas Tallis (tallis4...), February 8th, 2006 6:20 PM.

I'd agree, but its posting was followed by a host of ostensibly intelligent people debating its meaning at great length, a course of events which unfortunately renders your allegation specious.

This makes for a marvelous near-haiku in its own right, worthy of contemplation and bearing multiple meanings.

They both own.

I was going to let someone else suggest it first

http://www.robertchristgau.com/xg/rock/dylan-05.php

that's what I got anyhow - I don't think he's driving at a HUGE point, just doing rock history, which I rather enjoy

Björk, Debut
Placebo, Without You I'm nothing
Blonde Redhead has one Neither and nothing else reviewed.
Blur, The Great Escape
NIN, Broken
Offspring, Smash
Pulp; His n Hers !!
Smashing Pumpkins, Mellon collie and Adore
Weezer
practically everything from Tori Amos, etc..

I guess it comes down to being interested enough in what he has to say to be disappointed when he doesn't say it.

It tells you about his tastes but I don't know if it is that valuable in and of itself to know what his tastes are. The really dismissive reviews doesn't offer any insight or perspective into the music or its reception (which the Branca review does offer, for a counterexample). They don't critically engage wit the music. There's rarely any effort to understand why millions of people might have liked and like Def Leppard or Jethro Tull even though they left Christgau cold, beyond the hint that maybe they're just not as smart as Christgau.

I was reading Chuck's comments on Nirvana in Accidental Evolution and this strikes me as a really interesting engagement with music towards which he's ambivalent:

The first time I heard of Leonard Cohen was when I noticed a poetry book by him on my father's shelf a few days after the funeral. Maybe part of my aversion to Nirvana, and maybe even to dark depressing sounds in general (and their glib chicness in "alternative" circles) is owed in part to me shielding myself from emotions I'd rather not think about. Sometimes listening to Nirvana basically creeps me out. They hit too close to home...

We really need a rolling Xgau thread - it is hard to keep track of them all...

I dislike or am indifferent to every one of these records except Bjork's.

But you raise a good point, richardk: why is he so quick to dismiss these albums? Here's the short album: too much fucking music to absorb in one year, let alone a lifetime.

Van Halen [Warner Bros., 1978]
For some reason Warners wants us to know that this is the biggest bar band in the San Fernando Valley. This doesn't mean much--all new bands are bar bands, unless they're Boston. The term becomes honorific when the music belongs in a bar. This music belongs on an aircraft carrier. C

I did like that he said at the end of his Silent Tongues review: "Even more than usual, take my grade as a measure of personal usefulness rather than aesthetic merit".

Billie Holiday is uncoverable,
possibly the greatest singer of the century,
yet the fact is that Ross's versions
which occupy only two sides of this soundtrack album
are intensely listenable.

That's the word I want,
because it doesn't fit Holiday,
who either seizes your full attention
or disturbs you in the background.

While copying Holiday's phrasing and intonation,
Ross smoothes them out,
making the content easier to take
without destroying it altogether.

This may be a desecration and a deception,
but it speaks to the condition of a ghetto child
who's always had a talent for not suffering,
for willing herself up and through.

Not every singer turns into a junkie,
after all.

Would You Lay With Me (in a Field of Stone) [Columbia, 1974]
If you think the inflatable dolls they sell with the Orgy-Gell in the back of cheap skin mags are sexy, then you will doubtless find this fifteen-year-old wonder of nature the hottest thing since that waitress who brought you the screwdrivers the time you blew $220 playing blackjack in downtown Winnemucca. A cute little ass, better-than-average pipes, and Billy Sherrill's usual "who gives a shit if the title cut is commercial" country album. Up a notch for no strings. B-

is he saying that this fifteen-year-old has a cute little ass?

I mean, he's obviously going for a satirical "this is what happens when you market a 15-year-old as a sex symbol" tone, but he's doing it wrong.

god those "poems" are annoying

What a creep
that's a classic song too

was tanya tucker strongly marketed as a sex symbol?

Still the best. A mile better than Greil.

was tanya tucker strongly marketed as a sex symbol?
i was too young to know about all that but twelve year old me bought this on account of the cover
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/c/c3/TanyaTuckerTNT.jpg

Delta Dawn > every weird xgau ever wrote

I still think about this review and shudder:

Everyone Who Pretended to Like Me Is Gone [Startime International, 2002]

Just what we always wanted--Jonathan Fire*Eater grows up. Put some DreamWorks money into a studio, that was mature. Realized Radiohead was the greatest band in the world, brainy. Stopped playing so fast, hoo boy. And most important, switched vocalists from Nick Cave imitator to Rufus Wainwright imitator. Wainwright makes up better melodies with a dick in his mouth, and not only that, Cave has more literary ability. New York scene or (hint hint) no New York scene, DreamWorks isn't buying. C+

xxp

well, that TNT cover is 4 years and 6 albums down the road from cgau's review. circa would you lay with me, her image was appropriately innocent, though her song choices were sometimes rather suggestive (title track, for instance).

Would You Lay With Me (in a Field of Bone)

Might as well post the inner sleeve to TNT as well:

http://ickmusic.com/pics/artist/tanyatucker.jpg

she was 20 when TNT was out, according to wiki

also are we really like doing this, defending what xgau said in that shit review based on how "sexy" tanya tucker should or should be?

like honestly you guys, if this was just some random asshole writing this in 2012 for a alt weekly and the link got thrown up on ILM every single person would eviscerate it.

I mean what's to defend here:

Wainwright makes up better melodies with a dick in his mouth,

what an asshole

I've never rated him as a critic, and nothing he's ever written has changed the way I think or perceive a release.

*think about

I mean what's to defend here:

Wainwright makes up better melodies with a dick in his mouth,

what an asshole

we talked about this recently on another thread and Alfred believes he was "making fun of homophobia": Lucinda Williams vs. Greil Marcus

is that like when a guy i know posted on facebook about being mistaken for a terrorist and some white dude chimed in "but all brown people are terrorists" as an attempt at a knowing joke about prejudice but it still came across as gross

i guess my satire is too sophisticated for you

you're some white dude too??

some white, black, purple dude

i'm every some dude, it's all in me

he contains multidudes

we talked about this recently on another thread and Alfred believes he was "making fun of homophobia": Lucinda Williams vs. Greil Marcus

Reading Blues & Chaos, the Robert Palmer anthology
....dude rules, why wasn't he the dean of rock critics instead? Light years better than xgau

"snoop makes better melodies while picking his afro"

Even after reading that thread I still don't quite get how Alfred comes to that conclusion (while he's biting his lip).

sorry -- I was making specious arguments with a dick in my mouth.

*hums a better melody*

not only that, nick cave has more literary ability!

#xgaukoans

how do you bite your lips with a dick in your mouth?

haven't spent time in the gay thread?

ALSO, I LIKE BLOOD SAUSAGE

i mean BLOOD SAUSAGE IS DELICIOUS

http://ring.cdandlp.com/gmsi/photo_grande/114767124.jpg

Is Xgau Dying?

i'm a sympathetic reader, so i figure the rufus wainwright bit (which I thought I brought up first on ILX in '06 but the archive reveals fact checking cuz did in '04) as embarrassing and shitty, but low malice - a sixty-something dude trying to be hip and falling on his ass, only nobody but some ilxors every so many years noticed or cared.

i think every line in that particular review is embarrassing

that said, the reimaginings of his stuff as poems upthread are pretty great

probably

so many "classic" ilx posts
would benefit immensely from similar treatment

to give one example
i always, i think, enjoyed the pinefox's at times curious syntax

granted, your mileage may vary
but it just goes to show:

we're all stars then in the dope show
then and now

i remember reading creem magazine aa a kid and being regularly befuddled by christgau's reviews. and at the time i just assumed that it was something that would make more sense to me if i were an adult and had achieved a certain level of sophistication or whatever. but that go-betweens one cited here still makes very little sense to me no matter how many times i read it

i wonder if he's more of a frustrated literary writer than most music critics, like maybe all his ambitions as a stylist would be better served in a different medium.

Metal and Shells [PVC, 1985]
When what the Brits call pop isn't popular, it's usually rock and roll chamber music if it's any good at all. This U.S. debut, a best-of that highlights the soulful ache in the vocals and the quirky opacities in the lyrics and does what it can for a modest tune sense, honors that suspect notion. It's not stylized, and not static either, but it's pretty subtle, and its half-finished edges and kinetic lyricism are best appreciated in tranquility if not repose. Where it can be expected to unfold for quite a while. A-

wtf does "does what it can for a modest tune sense" mean??

he's highlighting his own quirky opacities, i think

soulful ache in the vocals and the quirky opacities in the lyrics

yes

its half-finished edges and kinetic lyricism

yes, i hear ya

the rest is either impenetrable to me or is hopelessly buried in bizarre syntactical choices. as someone who is incapable of writing a grocery list w/o stacking clauses on top of each other in jenga-esque fashion i can appreciate it, but the first sentence is the obvious huge offender here and is somewhat infuriating b/c once you do manage to squeeze some meaning out of it, it turns out to be a tossed-off sweeping statement that w/o further explication is really kind of pointless?

xp

ha

yeh in re-reading it i came to wonder if it was just one of those write in the style that approximates the aesthetic of the record things

I summarize his review of that Go-Be's comp as: "Much better than rock and roll chamber music has any right to be."

I liked when he dismissively called Spacemen 3 "Stooges for airports."

All that bullshit and he couldn't be bothered to get their country of origin right

whenever i encounter his reviews the voice in my head is a cross between local alt-rock morning dj and beatnik caricature.

then i punch that guy by not reading any more.

god those "poems" are annoying

― (REAL NAME) (m coleman), Wednesday, August 1, 2012 9:15 PM (3 days ago)

thanks! I enjambed them myself

Gomez, Bring It On (Hut, 1998) Really the roots-rock-they mean it, man ("Whipping Piccadilly," "Love Is Better Than a Warm Trombone"). ***

*sassy*

I liked when he dismissively called Spacemen 3 "Stooges for airports."

lol, i love spacemen 3, but xgau otm

i think there are very few rock crits that would survive a "WHAT DOES THIS REALLY MEAN?" close reading of their blurbage, and while xgau has some whoppers he's also said a lot more astute and memorable stuff than your average scribe. shit, we've memorized these whoppers.

i mean yeah how many people can you quote ten words about Gomez on

that's more of a result of his success and longevity than a testament to it, though, kind of a backwards argument.

so why was he successful?

His ten words on Gomez is more than I know of any of the band's music!

so why was he successful?

One of the first, etc.

if you're going to say "no his stuff isn't particularly astute or memorable, it's just that he's a real big wheel at the cracker factory for reasons that have nothing to do with astute or memorable writing" all i can say is "ymmv"

i don't think anyone doesn't think he's earned his spot and has his virtues. just, y'know, some of us couldn't be happier than the dean is the dean and some of us wonder what if it was robert palmer.

http://nyobetabeat.files.wordpress.com/2011/08/what-if-watcher-e1313084886104.jpg

so that's like biting lip on accident or on purpose?

Sub poll:

Time Stand Still vs Owner of a Lonely Great vs Touch of Grey

Lonely heart

I actually don't know how I could pick between those songs

there are a lot of ilxors who stan hard for xgau but i've never really seen a comprehensive explanation of why

being clear and comprehensive would not be in keeping with the spirit of their hero

I think that Christgau's style of criticism, as exemplified by his Consumer Guide, the short, punchy, often gnomic, oracular judgments, worked better in the pre-Internet age, when reviewers still enjoyed a certain mystique by virtue of their coveted perch in the media landscape and their access to lots of promos and exposure to lots of music that was hard to be exposed to unless you were a critic. Now that any idiot can download just about anything, and start a blog or post on a message board (hi!), it's not enough to operate that way. If you want people to pay attention to you, you need to offer them something besides the benefit of your refined sensibility. Christgau doesn't tell you a story or do conventional journalistic stuff, he just assigns his grade and backs it up with some mystification.

we don't have to give comprehensive explanations of why - he's the dean. if robert palmer was the dean we might give the usual comprehensive explanations of why one gets on ilx, but he's not.

Christgau doesn't tell you a story or do conventional journalistic stuff, he just assigns his grade and backs it up with some mystification.

this is otm, and i would also say it would probably work better for me if i didn't think the way he distributes grades is kinda dumb

I found this interesting, from a 2001 interview Scott Woods did at rockcritics.com with Dave Marsh:

Scott: Okay, talk a little bit about editors. I want to know who's the best editor you ever worked for--at a magazine.

Dave: Well, three or four people come to mind. Let me just sort of take a little moment here because I don't want to leave anybody out. I'll give you a handful of people that I've learned a tremendous amount from in terms of their line editing--you know, their actual editing of text --the assignment part is a whole other thing, and a much thornier issue. People who come to mind are Bob Christgau, Marianne Partridge, Jann Wenner, and Barbara Downey--now Barbara Landau.

Scott: What makes a really good editor?

Dave: Well this is what I try to do; this is my theory about it, and different people deal with this in different ways and I would not say that all of the people, with the exception of Christgau, and maybe Marianne on a good day--this is not what Barbara and Jon [Landau] and half of Marianne were after--but what I'm after and what I think Bob's always after, and what I think even Jann's sometimes after is to take something that a writer has done and make sure that the writer has gotten the most out of that that they can. Barbara Nellis, my editor at Playboy, I should also not fail to mention because she can be very good... It's to make sure that the writer is saying as clearly and effectively and, hmmm, whatever that x-factor is, let's say entertainingly, grippingly, however you want to put it, as possible what it is they have to say. There are other things--and this happens a lot at Rolling Stone, where it was sort of like, there were other agendas about what people wanted said, or what people wanted not said, and that to me is a hallmark of... you can't call it bad editing, to me that's just an approach I don't think very much of. It's both the most dreadful process and the greatest one.

Scott: So Christgau's one of the great editors...

Dave: Oh Christgau's great, I mean, fantastic. Tremendous insight into what you're trying to say, really good ideas about what you might do, he'll spot holes in your thinking--his sense of other people's language is not nearly so--at least when I worked with him, which is a long time ago--not nearly so insular as his own writing has become, or at least as I think it's become. No, he's a fantastic editor, just an absolutely fantastic editor.

Scott: Okay, but you do have--I'm not looking for you to slag some of your contemporaries or whatever, but you obviously have some problems with Christgau. You did that piece on the Pazz & Jop poll a few years ago.

Dave: Oh I have tremendous problems. I think I basically--first of all, I think he hates rock 'n' roll. I don't even think he makes much of a secret about it. If you actually look at his reviews, he doesn't like rock bands. He said some miserably--I can't think of a better way to put it but bigoted things about, for instance, the heavy metal audience. And I think he's promoted a fairly self-aggrandizing idea of what rock criticism oughta be. So, yeah, I disagree with all those things, and there's no reason to make a secret of it. And he carries on, and I carry on, and it doesn't make much difference to the clock ticking.

Marcus has had more of an influence on me, but I'll give this a go. The one thing that links all the critics that loosely make up my frame of reference--Kael and Kauffmann and Sarris in film, Marcus and Christgau and a few others in music, Bill James in baseball (he hates having his work reduced to this, but part of what he did in the Abstracts was rate players)--is that with all them, I crossed a point somewhere along the way where their personalities drew me in, and I wanted to know what their opinion was about anybody and everybody. I can't describe how or why that happens, but it does. How often I agree with them matters a little but not a lot. I haven't been interested in what Marcus is interested in for years, yet I'll still read him whenever I get the chance; Christgau's enthusiasms often lose me (especially when he veers off into world music, about which I know next to nothing), but I still have this compulsion to look in on the Consumer Guide wherever it happens to reside and see what he thinks about things. There are many other high-profile film and music critics who write well and knowledgeably, yet they don't mean a thing to me. I can't even really defend that statement--it's just something that happens or it doesn't.

no yeah that's definitely a big factor among different critics, how much you become curious about their take on things whether or not you agree that often

where can i read this dave marsh takedown of the pazz and jop critics poll mentioned in that interview above?

My guess would be that it was in Rock and Roll Confidential; doesn't appear to be archived at Rock's Back Pages.

http://www.rocksbackpages.com/writer.html?WriterID=marsh_d

Marsh once infamously wrote, "Queen isn't here just to entertain. This group has come to make it clear exactly who is superior and who is inferior. Its anthem, 'We Will Rock You', is a marching order: you will not rock us, we will rock you. Indeed, Queen may be the first truly fascist rock band . . . [I] wonder why anyone would indulge these creeps and their polluting ideas."[1] Previously, he had described lead singer Freddie Mercury as possessing a merely "passable pop voice."[2]

In the 1983 Rolling Stone Record Guide, Marsh called Journey "a dead end for San Francisco area rock" and accused them of having "made records perfectly calculated to be inserted into FM radio." He awarded every single Journey album released up to that point – seven studio albums, a compilation album and a live album – the minimum possible score of 1/5 stars.[3] In the same publication, he described fellow power balladeers Air Supply as "The most calculated and soulless pseudo-group of its kind, which is saying something."[4]

Along with Rolling Stone magazine publisher Jann Wenner, Marsh has been involved in organizing and maintaining the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland, Ohio. Regarding a possible induction for Kiss into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, Marsh said, "Kiss is not a great band, Kiss was never a great band, Kiss never will be a great band, and I have done my share to keep them off the ballot." Frontman Paul Stanley responded by calling the Hall "a sham" and "the creation of a group of industry people and critics who decide who they deem as qualified to be in their little admiration society."[5] In his 1980 review on Bob Seger's album Against the Wind, Marsh stated, "I'd like to say that this is not only the worst record Bob Seger has ever made, but an absolutely cowardly one as well."[6]

Marsh has published four books about singer/musician Bruce Springsteen. Some of these became bestsellers, including Born to Run and Glory Days. [1] Marsh is closely associated with Springsteen because his wife, Barbara Carr, is one of Springsteen's co-managers. Marsh is also closely associated with Jon Landau, a Springsteen manager and producer, for the same reason.

he's promoted a fairly self-aggrandizing idea of what rock oughta be.

It was on Addicted To Noise in '97 or '98. Marsh stopped voting in P&J that year, at least partly due to the obtuseness of Christgau's year-end essay. In the ATN piece he quoted a paragraph from the essay and said (I'm paraphrasing), "Do you know what that means? Me neither."

xp

yeah Marsh is undeniably very establishment and dogmatic, especially compared to his contemporaries, but i can't say i hate him for it, he is what he is

(Marsh's wikipedia page evidently edited by someone whose dog Marsh ran over and/or Fred Goodman)

"In 1997, Addicted to Noise and SonicNet were both acquired by Paradigm Music Entertainment, which in turn was acquired by TCI Music, which was then acquired by Viacom in 1999 and folded into MTV's online operation, MTVi."

Very inspirational.

Dave Marsh hates Neil Young because he supported Reagan, and because Marsh's father had to work until he died he blames Reagan too.

It's noted in Shakey that Neil killing Dave's dad didn't come up when Dave interviewed him in the '90s

Christgau has always been gnomic when inspiration fails him and maybe it has in the last three years. I never treasured him as a validator of my tastes because he loathed Duran Duran, Rush, Crowded House, Peter Gabriel, and other stuff. But for every one he despised he was lucid about Wire, Neil Young, Luther Vandross, Go-Betweens, Pavement, Sonic Youth, Womack & Womack, Lou Reed, Prince, and at least two dozen other acts whose relevance in my canon is due in no small part not just to his championing of them but how he taught how to think about them, or think about my tastes generally.

*how he taught me to think about them

Speaking for myself the notion of "relating" to critics is suspect. In the same way that most scenarios in songs don't speak to my own experience at all and require a leap of imagination, so does critcism. Marsh can be a parochial if not stupid thinker (i.e. the entry on Roxy Music's "Over You" in his essential book on singls) but he's a pleasure to read on "Jam On It" or Donna Summer or Smokey Robinson such that I love to indulge his involutions. Kinda like xgau these days on Wussy.

Well, yes and no. Putting the word "relate" in scare quotes is fine, I guess, but maybe it's kind of the same thing as it is with the people we "relate" to in real life, we start out thinking "here is kindred soul who can undertand everything I think and like" or "here is a lampbearer who can show me the way" before the narcissism of small differences and the cold hard facts of life kick in and we start thinking "I can;t believe they think that and like this and hate that!" and we have to refine our "relationship." For me I have kind of the same, um, relationship, with Xgau that I have with his fellow former VV critic, the late Andrew Sarris- both had infuriatingly obtuse prose styles, as described above by others above, at least in Xgau's case, but both spent a lifetime demonstrating open ears and eyes, thinking hard about what it was they liked about the art forms they were engaged with, all the while trying to find new things to appreciate and revisiting and revising their old opinions. Whereas Dave Marsh, say, has had his moments but seems to spend a lot of time and energy as gatekeeper separating out What Really Rocks from What Seems To Rock To Some Yahoos But Actually Does Not Rock At All.

interesting to read that christgau was so important to you, alfred, because i've never known what to make of him. i used to read the voice pretty religiously (this was back in the mid-to-late 80s and early 90s), and i was at that point a fiend for whatever music criticism/record reviews i could get my hands on. it was the only way to keep up with stuff back then. anyway, i loved the consumer guide because it was a whole bunch of reviews, and yes to that, but hated it because it never seemed to mean anything. i never got a hang of christgau's organizing sensibility, so i had no way to contextualize the cryptic blurbs and seemingly arbitrary ratings. tbh, i assumed that he must be an eminence coasting on laurels earned previously.

i'm sure this is horribly unfair, but i have the lingering feeling that his prominence as a critic is as much a product of his grading system, the prominence of his vehicle, and the easy-reading brevity of his reviews as with the substance of his criticism.

^ would love to be pointed towards something that would show me the error of my ways

Putting the word "relate" in scare quotes is fine, I guess, but maybe it's kind of the same thing as it is with the people we "relate" to in real life, we start out thinking "here is kindred soul who can undertand everything I think and like" or "here is a lampbearer who can show me the way" before the narcissism of small differences and the cold hard facts of life kick in and we start thinking "I can;t believe they think that and like this and hate that!" and we have to refine our "relationship."

Or sometimes you "relate" to someone because you have share some of the same perspective and taste, and rather than getting pissy that they're not your mirror, you accept your differences and, in the best cases, let them inform and expand your appreciation of what they enjoy more than you.

almost wrote a comprehensive explanation of why I like xgau here but remembered there are like 30 threads with "Christgau" in the title and I'm sure I've offered some explication on one if not eight of those over the last decade. If someone who currently believes he's coasting on his nickname genuinely wants to be shown the light they can sift through the umpteen previous debates for themselves.

Christgau fans aren't made, they're born. I think right now in Africa there's some guy madly beating on a drum. He's a Christgau fan. Or an old lady sitting on the bus sucking humbugs. She's a Guided Consumer, but she ain't never read the blurbs.

lol

and rather than getting pissy that they're not your mirror
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7pAUeH6fHWc

I love da croup's ”he's the dean of rock criticism because he's the dean of rock criticism and oh btw the mere fact that we're discussing it proves that he's the dean of rock criticism” circular logic itt

i love that you're taking it earnestly

when you argue with da croupier, you play the red and the black comes up

sorry it's just hard to take yet another "i've believed for years that christgau gets by on being the guy who graded albums first - god knows how everyone's glad for grading in music reviews - but please feel free to describe in elaborate detail how i am wrong" thread revive seriously

i like xgau's essays, especially the long ones on chuck berry and al green in that old rolling stone history book. they're earnestly argued and really insightful. he wrote a great piece about john lennon's last album, too. i've never gotten that much out of his cryptogram-wisecrack style in his short reviews, but i think i just hate the format -- i don't like it when chuck eddy does it, or even marcus in that 'treasure island' piece at the end of the 'stranded' book.

Do you ever read one of Christgau's reviews and go to the bathroom?

Christgau has definitely been a touchstone. For me, it's never about having similar tastes -- but rather the extent to which a writer is willing to identify and ascribe certain ideas and beliefs to the subject matter and defend them. And where so many critics seem to coast on observations alone, Christgau has always been too much of a curmudgeon to allow himself that particular leisure. A-

Marcus's discography at the end of Stranded is pretty much my favourite piece of rock-critic writing ever. (xxpost) A friend and I have developed a whole shorthand around it, cryptic references that the other person picks up on immediately. "The Rolling Stones would have killed to make this album" (especially when wildly misapplied), pulling your car over to the side of the road when you hear something for the first time (especially when wildly misapplied), etc. Plus it's where I first encountered so many records I'd never heard of before--Hackamore Brick, Savage Rose, Colonel Jubilation, Jesse Winchester, many others. Not that all of them turned out to be quite as advertised.

I pretty much never have a clue what he means in the little capsule reviews; they seem to be deliberately insular so that only people in his 'gang' (which is a very weird, metaphysical kidn of gang, if it's a gang at all) can tell what he's on about. But I'm British, and he put something I wrote in a book, so he's not a big deal / alright with me in theory.

NTI otm. phil too.

"The Rolling Stones would have killed to make this album"
"Eric Clapton would have paid to hold his coat" or something like that. I used to know a lot of it by heart too, but it's been a while.

Christgau's a much bigger influence on me than Marsh (and Marcus is a bigger influence than either) but Marsh pulls me in more different directions than maybe any other critic I can think of. It really is something close to a love-hate relationship (the fact that he continues to make me think about this and to care is in and of itself a reason to tip the scales towards love rather than hate). Sometimes I think he's wonderful, other times far from it. That's not an interesting point in and of itself, I know, but for some reason I just don't experience the same wild mood swings with Marcus or Christgau. Both can write stuff that infuriates me, but for some reason my overall feelings about them are fairly consistent; I get mildly irritated but nothing like frothing mad when they write something I think is narrow-minded. Maybe more to the point, I'm totally okay with their particular prejudices (even when I don't share them) but for some reason I'm much less okay with Marsh and his prejudices. The Roxy review in Heart of Rock and Soul and the Neil review in Rolling Stone Illustrated History are two prime offenders -- writing I'd actually label "disastrous," a term I don't find myself ever applying to the other two, for some reason. Again, I think they are just more consistent writers, and certainly my own feelings towards them tends to the level-headed. (By the way, I'm the guy who did the Marsh interview quoted above. I regret a bit that I was somewhat in fawning mode at the time -- I'm not the world's most confident interviewer, let's just say -- but I'll note that Marsh was incredibly fun and kind to chat with, and I wish I had let my own guard down some and gone into some of my issues, as I'm sure he would have been more than game to delve into them as well.)

Took a while to remember that the album clemenza's quote refers to is the soundtrack to The Harder They Come. I did not google, I just sat in the o.g. loge waiting for it to come to me.

And the Clapton line is re:Lowman Pauling of the "5" Royales.

Yes. I did eventually google that after the fact to see how close I got in the wording and ended up on Xgau's msn site, where someone had posted it in the comment section of reviews of both a "5" Royales comp and a tribute to them by Steve Cropper, which I listening to right now

I've caught myself a few times recently only half-remembering a Stranded one-liner, i.e., I knew the gist of the line but was unable to immediately place the entry and/or quote it verbatim. Personal progress or early signs of senility?

Skill-testing question for James and C. Grissom (I know Levitt knows the answer): which song compelled Marcus to pull his car over to the side of the road and sit there, overcome with doom and foreboding and rock-critic momentousness? (Not sure if he remembered to signal first or not.)

I have no recollection of that one at all.

"Eve Of Destruction"

No...not 100% sure it was from Stranded; could have been something he mentioned in Mystery Train. (You might actually be joking about "Eve of Destruction," but he did include that in the discography!)

The one I'm thinking of is from Mystery Train, though he's definitely touched on the pulling-over-to-the-side-of-the-road theme a few times.

Can we get a hint? Was it something by The Kinks or Randy Newman?

Early '70s, #1 single, over six minutes long.

must be so awkward to be riding shotgun when that happens

I'm thinking of that scene in Seinfeld with Kramer and the panicky car salesman..."The road, Mr. Marcus--the road!!!"

I'm sure no one cares about this, but I often see Greil Marcus at my favorite coffee shop, and he always orders two espressos in tiny little paper cups. I see him walking up the street holding these tiny cups, bleary eyed, waiting for the light to change. It cracks me up.

must be so awkward to be riding shotgun when that happens

― da croupier, Monday, August 6, 2012 1:19 PM (4 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I'm thinking of that scene in Seinfeld with Kramer and the panicky car salesman..."The road, Mr. Marcus--the road!!!"

― clemenza, Monday, August 6, 2012 1:20 PM (3 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

i'm thinking of the "desperado" episode

You're right--perfect. That's a great story about the coffee shop. If Marcus and I shared coffee shops, I'm pretty sure he'd be changing coffee shops before long. ("I know you're in rush, Greil, and you look a little bleary-eyed, but that 'Surfin' Bird' entry in Stranded, what did you mean by...")

Early '70s, #1 single, over six minutes long.

"Hocus Pocus" by Focus? #1 in Scandinavia, I'm told.

Focus, "Hocus Pocus": The European prog assault broke down so many doors that in the Netherlands anything became possible, and surfacing along with a lot of generally well behaved young men and women was a whole new strain of Teutonic, highly ambitious, dryly objectivistic mellotron jams...

But no. (And only 3:18 in its single edit, according to Wikipedia.)

Early '70s, #1 single, over six minutes long.

"American Pie"?!?!?!?!?!

"American Pie" would cause me to pull over to the side of the road to vomit.

No--there can't be more than a couple more. This one was just under seven minutes as a single, and almost twelve minutes in its album form.

Papa Was A Rollin' Stone

That's it--was just about to add that it was a cover. I'll see if I can track down Marcus's original quote.

Okay, I botched it a bit--it wasn't actually Greil who pulled over:

"More than one person I knew pulled off the road and sat waiting, shivering, as the song crept out of the box and filled up the night."

It is from Mystery Train--it's such a Kael line. So actually there was a whole series of people pulling over to the side of the road...I love it, notwithstanding that it's been a running joke with me for three decades now.

*pulls over to side of the road and reads thread*

And yet, he never paid tribute to Lucinda Williams for writing a song called "Side of the Road."

Have been waiting for that one.

i've never pulled over on the side of the road to listen to a song, but i can drive and listen at the same time

Stevie Nicks pulled over on the side of the road upon hearing "1999."

should stevie nicks have been driving in 1982

I did it once in 1986, the first time I heard "I Wanna Be a Cowboy." I collected my thoughts after about three minutes and resumed driving.

Stevie Nicks pulled over on the side of the road to toot upon hearing "1999."

don't these ppl have jobs to get to? sheesh.

Nicks' job in 1982 was to snort coke.

I actually remember the moment I heard "Papa Was a Rolling Stone" for the first time. Jim DeRogatis and Bill Wyman played it on the original (pre-Greg Kot) Sound Opinions show in ... 1995? It aired late at night and I was listening in my bedroom. I think I may have actually e-mailed DeRo (in the nascent days of AOL, mind you) to tell him how much I enjoyed it.

All kidding aside, "Papa Was a Rolling Stone" was certainly a pull-to-the-side-of-the-road sort of record, if anything was. Indeed, I was eight when that song was on the radio, and I have a very specific memory of hearing it in bed one night and it scaring the shit out of me -- that and "Nights in White Satin." So, anyway, Marcus's method of conveying how monumental the thing sounded is one of the main things that drew me towards his writing, for sure.

Really late back to this thread, but didn't Marcus also pull over (or perhaps got into an accident) the first time he heard "Ode To Billy Joe"?

While I was away from ILX today, I dug out my copy of Any Old Way You Choose It, which collects a bunch of early Xgau pieces ('73-back). I wasn't a really a fan, but this book turned me around to him, or at least to him as an essayist. There's a bunch of quality personal-style rock crit that has a strong sense of place, a real good feeling of how and what it must have been like to take part in the day-to-day transition from the '60s to the '70s.

i'm gonna start pulling over every time i hear a new song on the radio just for the stories

what is the urban equivalent of pulling over?

pooping on the subway

sadly for me, then, i have seen someone "losing their shit" on/in the subway multiple times

Dave: Oh I have tremendous problems. I think I basically--first of all, I think he hates rock 'n' roll. I don't even think he makes much of a secret about it. If you actually look at his reviews, he doesn't like rock bands.

this must be why he reserves all his A+ ratings for jazz outfits like the new york dolls, the ramones & the clash

I struggled to make sense of this one

Vampire Weekend: Modern Vampires of the City (XL)
Think maybe this is overworked? Think maybe the hosannas are reflexive, generalized? I did, and then I didn't. So now think Paul Simon instead if you insist, admittedly a great album. But Sgt. Pepper is a truer precedent, to wit: if you're smart you say where's the rebop, only if you're smarter you quickly figure out that maybe sustaining groove and unfailing exuberance don't matter as much as you believed. Each verse/chorus/bridge/​intro melody, each lyric straight or knotty, each sound effect playful or perverse (or both)‑-each is pleasurable in itself and aptly situated in the sturdy songs and tracks, so that the whole signifies without a hint of concept. And crucially, the boy-to-man themes you'd figure come with several twists I've noticed so far and more no doubt to come. One is simply a right-on credo: "Age is an honor‑-it's still not the truth." Another is how much time Ezra Koenig spends wrestling a Jahweh-like hard case. The Big Guy comes out on the short end of a fight song called "Unbelievers," and a DJ "spinning `Israelites' into `Nineteenth Nervous Breakdown'" gives Him a nasty turn. But Koenig claims no permanent victory. Too smart. Too much a man, too. A PLUS

My attempt to translate it (which may be way off - please correct me if so):

Vampire Weekend - Modern Vampires of the City

Vampire Weekend's third might seem guilty of over-ornateness,
or maybe it's more organic than you first imagine -
in the manner of Paul Simon's debut's using
similar hosanna background effects in its choruses.

Nevertheless, it's initially ornate-sounding effects
eventually succeed in having the same magical impact,
as Sgt Pepper, rather than Paul Simon's own fine effort,
despite the former's sustained uplift, not present here

As instead of carrying one along on an exhilarating ride
its intricacy is all in its interconnected subtle touches
that can be appreciated like a tapestry, as a whole
thus epitomising a kind of rich ornateness, after all

I can't help you on the translation, but I did find it gratifying that the A+ became a mini-story in and of itself (saw four or five different places make note that this was the first one he'd handed out in a few years). I can't rationally defend that, other than to (as I often do) invoke the John McGiver Rule from Breakfast at Tiffany's: "continuity with the past." (I can offer a translation there: if the things I once cared about are still relevant to someone, maybe I am too!)

haha yeah the mannerisms in this one are almost perverse.

otoh, they do capture the reflexive second-guessing process that xgau and no doubt others have gone through w/r/t vampire weekend's music

Do you remember any of the places that made reference to it? I noticed no-one bothered mentioning it on the Modern Vampires album thread (unless I missed it), and kind of thought to myself, sadly, 'he seems to have finally become irrelevant to just about everyone and is just being ignored now'.

at least as far as new stuff is concerned

http://i274.photobucket.com/albums/jj242/donaldparsley/xgauvamps_zps20cabfef.jpg

Here are a few--I'm sure you could Google others.

http://rockcritics.com/2013/05/28/critical-event/

sorta loved that he dismissed Yeezus with a three-star review, frustrating his claque.

Just read the comments under the original review; where he gives a definition of "rebop": oft humorous term widely used in many different contexts to indicate some unspecified sort of rhythmic feel or flow. I became fond of it in the wake of the great Lester Bangs Jethro Tull piece in which Marshall Thieu (of Vietnam if you don't remember) complains that Jethro Tull "has no rebop." I'm doing this off the top of my head and may have the Bangs part slightly wrong. But anything that stops and starts as much as MVOTC or Sgt. Pepper could be accused of lacking rebop.

http://social.entertainment.msn.com/music/blogs/blog--vampire-weekend-deerhunter

He can't stop messing with the danger zone.

I know next to nothing about Vampire Weekend, but I gleaned this from that same comments section: their lead singer once wrote a blog entry about Christgau.

http://internetvibes.blogspot.ca/2005/10/critical-beatdown.html

But Sgt. Pepper is a truer precedent, to wit: if you're smart you say where's the rebop, only if you're smarter you quickly figure out that maybe sustaining groove and unfailing exuberance don't matter as much as you believed.

ah, so I thought he was saying that MVOTC lacked 'sustaining groove and unfailing exuberance' as contrasted with Sgt Pepper's possession of same, but his comment on rebop suggests this lack applies to both, meaning line 8 of my 'translation' is where I get it wrong.

that's a ghastly sentence, whatever it means

I think Vampire Weekend must exist in some parallel universe, but a different one than the one Robert Christgau resides in. They are both smart, the latter demonstrably, the former by way of vicarious affirmation from friends who claim to have heard them, but neither get many spins in my house these days, where the stereo defaults dumb and the speakers face out, blasting proclamations of greatness to passing cars too engrossed in their own doppler effect thump to notice the persistent buzz of culture with a capital C but not Culture (with a capital groove). These roots run deep. A-

so scratch "despite the former's sustained uplift, not present here",
replace with: "though neither sustain uplift, this even lacking concept", or something

So the Paul Simon album does have rebop, Sgt Peppers doesn't, and Vampire Weekend don't either, not even the conceptual rebop, that Sgt Pepper does have?

Unless the Paul Simon album contrasted for a purely non-rebop reasons... Time to stop this now.

"sustaining groove and unfailing exuberance" is a reference to their first two albums, no?

I think this is otm:
"Each verse/chorus/bridge/​intro melody, each lyric straight or knotty, each sound effect playful or perverse (or both)‑-each is pleasurable in itself and aptly situated in the sturdy songs and tracks, so that the whole signifies without a hint of concept."

Ok, I'll give defending the Dean a try. I've been religiously reading his reviews for more than 20 years and he has exposed me to more good music than any human being alive. It's true I have no idea what he's talking about 80% of the time. I didn't take any semiotics classes so I don't get all the obscure references.

But the guy has devoted his life's work to listening to music and sorting it out for us. How any guys in their 70s even know who Kanye West is, let alone can compare Yeezus unfavorably with Late Registration? Each year I find more good music because of him.

Here is a short list of music I discovered based on his word alone: Yo La Tengo, Wussy, Drive-By Truckers, Liz Phair, Luna, Lucinda Williams, Serengeti, Archers Of Loaf, The Libertines, DJ Shadow, The Magnetic Fields, Rilo Kiley,The Go-Betweens, The Hold Steady, Tom T Hall, Lil Wayne and countless more.

If you want to learn about African music, he's the guy. Hip hop, he was an early champion. Country too. So what if his prose can be a bit purple? He's got phenomenal taste and he's still at it after more than 40 years.

Leave The Dean alone, people!

How any guys in their 70s even know who Kanye West is

Lou Reed?

Kornrulez: excellent. My own list would include Wussy and Magnetic Fields too, probably Imperial Teen, and so-many-I'd-have-to-check-back from the '70s and '80s books.

Dude's on my short list of '60s dudes i'll be majorly bummed when they pass, but he can crawl up his own ass sometimes and "Each verse/chorus/bridge/​intro melody, each lyric straight or knotty, each sound effect playful or perverse (or both)‑-each is pleasurable in itself and aptly situated in the sturdy songs and tracks, so that the whole signifies without a hint of concept" sure is a long way to say he thought it was hooky.

dude's provided an intelligent, idiosyncratic take on about 50 years of music with remarkable consistency. if you don't like his voice, that consistency is actually a detriment. if you don't like his tastes, even more so. But I don't feel like I have to defend stray blurbs that are overly insular, because he's the kind of writer who risks that possibility.

I know what he's talking about, I guess, but dude.

Daft Punk: Random Access Memories (Columbia)

The Black Eyed Peas they ain’t ("Lose Yourself to Dance," "Get Lucky") *

yup, he's always hated white Euro dance music....

And prog. So prog-dance ...

<3 xgau

The only album he liked by Daft Punk was their live one. So, the near pan of this one is no surprise. Plus, he also likes Nile Rodgers. Thus, the 2 cuts he likes off the album.

That would be Alive 2007.

him not liking it wasn't a surprise, it was the Black Eyed Peas bit that baffled me.

Xgau loves the Black Eyed Peas. Translation: BEP gets the party started more consistently. I don't think it's right to say he doesn't like the record - per a convoluted rating system that's useful once you get the hang of it, which is the way it works with most of his writing, a * equals a low B+. IOW, it's a cut or two above mediocre. And if "Get Lucky" and "Lose Yourself to Dance" really do get the party started, at least a few others must have something to recommend them, else he wouldn't have Honorable Mentioned the record at all.

his grading system really is the most bizarre thing about Christgau, most things are an A, and if they aren't then it's pretty bad wtf

Never thought about that but you are right.

Think that started in the '90s--somewhere along the way, he made note that he would only good/great stuff and prominent misses, and that everything in between would get those asterisks. Things are pretty evenly distributed in the '70s book, probably the '80s one too.

"only grade"

the first (go-betweens) and penultimate (VW) reviews itt both signal that if the music doesn't rock or swing, it may surprise you that it still has other pleasures.

it's like he writes from first principles of "bass & drums you can feel in yr core", & certain special cases must be made otherwise, always as if to convince a rocker or funk afficianado, or at least warn her.

*aficionado

At the same time, he has almost no appreciation for non-punk non-Zeppelin heavy rock.

I owe him for deepening my appreciation of the Go-Be's but I never bought his initial poetry-with-instruments description; it made no sense.

his grading system really is the most bizarre thing about Christgau, most things are an A, and if they aren't then it's pretty bad wtf

The albums he finds worthy of mounting on his sacred 'A Shelves' are just a tiny fraction of all the music he considers. I remember him saying somewhere that he still receives a ton of free music sent to him by the record companies, and even those he has no expectation of liking, and for which there is zero critical support elsewhere, he tries to listen to a track or two. There is a mass of product he's aware of that he just finds too mediocre to even mention. If it's a big seller, and so people want to know his opinion, such product simply gets marked as 'dud' (bomb symbol)

On the other hand, there's all the stuff that has been highly recommended in other quarters, or is a broad critical favourite, &/or has had some significant cultural impact which he then does feel compelled to wrestle with, however sceptical his instincts. And even if, after half a dozen spins, he decides they're 'duds' after all, when the next one comes along, and enough people he admires still give props to the band, he'll go through that effort again, which is how eventually he came to appreciate Daft Punk, despite having written off their 4 of their albums in a row. That's dedication!

There's also cases where he's so hostile to the consensus, the 'dud'/'bomb' becomes a 'turkey', meaning he will write a review saying just how bad it really is suckers. These are then compiled into his pre-Christmas Turkey Shoot column (don't know if he still does this over at B&N). These are the equivalent, I think, of all those albums he used to give B-MINUS or lower too in his '70s & '80s Consumer Guide books. In his '90s one, he said he wanted to drop all this - time was getting too short for him to be spending such a large amount of time analysing the intricate ways in which one heap of shit differed from another. It's just that, with exception of the Turkey Shoot, he no longer writes about them.

Then there are a class of albums that he doesn't rate as As, but still spends an inordinate amount of time & effort trying to get to their essence, and these are the B-PLUS's (roughly: listenable, but not quite there yet, maybe indicative of greater things to come, and here's the missing ingredient: consistency, groove, commitment, humour, engagement, & so on). These are now sub-divided, into ***,**,* with *** falling just below an A-minus, and can be found in his Honorable Mentions columns. And these he writes about as much (and with greater demands on his dedication, given the proliferation of genres since the B-Plus's of his "Rock Albums of the 1970s" (which, had a best mate not stolen it for me as a bet, on a school trip to Whitby in the '80s, I would not be writing this attempted explanation of his ratings systems now!)

See his lifetime review stats: http://www.robertchristgau.com/cg_stats.php

http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-U-Dvly88wJg/TV3bJelHFdI/AAAAAAAAABQ/VkF0rdXoGyk/s1600/DanteInferno.jpg

I get that there is an internally justifiable logic to it, I just think it long ago became so tortured that he may as well have given up grading. I don't believe it's possible for an individual critic to hand out literally about a hundred A's a year without the distinction becoming meaningless.

I kind of agree, some dude. My last sentence originally said 'tortuous explanation' not 'attempted explanation', and was probably right first time.

Now that he doesn't even do duds or turkey shoots, I think most of the blurbs suggest his degree of enthusiasm long before the B+ to A+, though I think he's better than most about writing so that the grade serves as the blurb's climax. But even if sometimes the writing makes the grade redundant, that's better than most places, where the grade makes the blurb redundant.

True. I've always been a fan of discreetly ending a review with the grade instead of having it scream from above the body of the text, makes more sense structurally and probably lends itself to better criticism.

At this stage, he's essentially only writing about stuff he likes. Biggest confusion from people who don't expect that from a rock critic (mainly because we've never really had a prolific, still-relevant one this old before, who understandably doesn't wish to spend his last years after a lifetime's love of music reviewing crap any more) is that a one star review on B&N represents a 'pan', as I think someone said above. On the contrary,

In his 1970s-1980s books:

A B+ is a good record, at least one of whose sides can be played with lasting interest and the other of which includes at least one enjoyable cut.

Nowadays, a B+ comes in high, medium, and low sub-grades - but they're still all B-PLUS

A *** Honorable Mention is an enjoyable effort consumers attuned to its overriding aesthetic or individual vision may well treasure.

A ** Honorable Mention is an likable effort consumers attuned to its overriding aesthetic or individual vision may well enjoy.

A * Honorable Mention is a worthy effort consumers attuned to its overriding aesthetic or individual vision may well like.

He likes the Daft Punk album, just mildly, and unlike with some of his '70s B-PLUS records, he points out two enjoyable cuts

If he thought the two songs mentioned were only points of interest on otherwise dud album, they'd be listed as 'choice cuts' (symbol now: ✂ (scissors); formerly, icon of 'cut of steak'). For an album to even make honorable mention, he has to find it enjoyable, yet also undermined by too many flaws to want to play often.

Below honorable mentions but above outright duds are those mediocre efforts rated N (for 'neither here nor there' - whose symbol is, or used to be, a smiley face whose mouth is neither smiley nor frowny). Then there's the true duds (whose fine gradations of dudness run from B down to E-MINUS. Xgau: At the upper level it may merely be overrated, disappointing, or dull. Down below it may be contemptible.

Hope that's all cleared up now.

I'm often amused that the cuts he often selects for special notice are rarely the singles, or even the best tracks, but often the deep cuts or outliers. I've always loved this review:

Synchronicity [A&M, 1983]
I prefer my musical watersheds juicier than this latest installment in their snazzy pop saga, and my rock middlebrows zanier, or at least nicer. If only the single of the summer was a little more ambiguous, so we could hear it as a poem of mistrust to the Pope or the Secretary of State; instead, Sting wears his sexual resentment on his chord changes like a closet "American Woman" fan, reserving the ambiguity for his Jungian conundrums, which I'm sure deserve no better. Best lyrics: Stew's "Miss Gradenko" and Andy's "Mother." Juiciest chord changes: the single of the summer.B+

that tendency of his to pick pointed outliers (most hilarious example I can think of - he praises the "I've Got AIDS" skit on Salt'n'Pepa's Very Necessary) adds to the temptation to assume he doesn't really get that much enjoyment out of an album he gives a B+. But a better assessment, personally, would be that I shouldn't put too much stock in an album he considers the 94th best of a year when its rare I'd want to hear that many in full.

His honorable mentions do list his favorite cuts in order of preference though, so that selection from Very Necessary seems less silly in context:

("Shoop," "Whatta Man," "I've Got AIDS") ***

I think he once also defined a B-PLUS as the kind of album he'd be perfectly happy to play if a guest requested it, but not one he'd often pick out himself.

..those first two also taking spots 3 and 11, respectively, in his Top Singles of the Year list.

I like that the song that goes I-vi-IV-V had the juiciest chord changes on Synchronicity.

I don't use him as a consumer guide for new stuff, if I ever did. These days I'll remember he posts on Tuesdays and Fridays and check in. He's still sharp on Afro-pop.

How can he say EBYT has the "juiciest chord changes" of the summer...is he referring to C-Am-F-G? W-T-F?

He might be joking?

But I don't even get it if it's a joke? Does he just mean that the more complex harmonic ideas on other Police songs leave him cold? It's easier for me to believe that he just doesn't know that much about chord changes.

i understand lolling at his flawed terminology but i'm pretty sure he's not the only guy to give love to that guitar hook

does anyone read this guy besides other critics?

i guess he must be doing something right with so many tongues up his who-cares butthole.

does anyone read this guy critics besides other critics?

matt what's bothering you

i think in that synchronicity review it's less about choosing deep cuts and more about pointedly choosing the songs not written/sung by sting. (and then refusing to even name every breath you take. i would actually think that's kind of petty and unhelpful but i guess it's well-chosen cuz here it is 20 years later or whatever and nobody has to think for more than half a second about what song he means.) he's otm about the deep cuts tho. "miss gradenko" makes a good choice to be ultralight and kinda wry and it's a better approach to claustrophobic fear than "synchronicity 2"'s big rock epic thing; "mother" is the most obnoxious song i've ever heard by a band whose thing that isn't and is a treasure. altho idk if i'd single out the lyrics over noted funniest moment on synchronicity HEEEEEEEEEEEEEY MIGHTY BRONTOSAURUS / DON'T YOU HAVE A LESSON FOR US????

and "Miss Gradenko" is two minutes long

does anyone read this guy besides other critics?

I've been trying to hold my tongue on this board but I'm often amazed that he was able to build a career doing this. It seems incredible that there was that much of an audience that was interested in reading this about "Every Breath You Take":

If only the single of the summer was a little more ambiguous, so we could hear it as a poem of mistrust to the Pope or the Secretary of State; instead, Sting wears his sexual resentment on his chord changes like a closet "American Woman" fan, reserving the ambiguity for his Jungian conundrums, which I'm sure deserve no better.

Sun4r wears his resentments on his ILM posts like a closet "Welcome to the Jungle" fan.

rmde any time an ilm poster tries to use "only liked by other critics/nerds/etc" as a dis

I can see how the EBYT chord changes can connect with someone on a classicist basis. (And it's not just the I-vi-IV-V; there's also that secondary dominant chord which I think also has a classicist connotation.)

(To be clear, I wasn't commenting on rock journalism/criticism more generally. I have no trouble seeing why most of it appeals to an audience.)

it's just obviously silly someone trying to criticize another person's work for only appealing to those like the one criticizing it. anyone truly outside this pro-am critic throng wouldn't be bitching about xgau in the first place.

should be a comma between "silly" and "someone"

http://www.npr.org/2013/11/12/244763399/latyrx-still-deft-and-defiant-after-two-decades

He's writing for NPR I see

oddly comforting to know these numbskulls are still around and fighting their fight in 2013:

Why is NPR so big on hip-hop? Use to find NRP's music segments the best part of my morning, now it the part of the morning II turn it off.

And no rap isn't music. It's meter. Was Allen Ginsberg "The Howl" music or singing?

Was Allen Ginsberg "The Howl" music or singing?
yes

No Secrets [Elektra, 1972]
If a horse could sing in a monotone, the horse would sound like Carly Simon, only a horse wouldn't rhyme "yacht," "apricot," and "gavotte." Is that some kind of joke? Why did Mick Jagger want her? Why does James Taylor want her? Come to think of it, why does she want either of them? B-

Latyrx's members aren't kids anymore — The Second Album is what we inevitably call "mature."

Glad the guys who rapped about how old pralines made them feel have finally grown up.

(xpost) That Carly Simon review, funny though it is, is a bit misleading. First sentence of follow-up review (Hotcakes): "'You're So Vain' left a nice afterglow--as Ellen Willis says, it proves that rock and roll is so democratic that even a rich person can make a great single." Which is kind of funny too, because, depending upon your definition of "rich," starting in about the mid-'70s half the great singles ever made are made by rich people.

b-b-b-but she was BORN rich. Actually there are a lot of rich kids in rock past and present

The implicit distinction he was probably making, yeah. I was just thinking how, in 1972, the distinction may not have been necessary--except for a few people at the very top (e.g., Rolling Stones), even the most successful pop stars weren't actually rich. But if you go forward five or ten years, past Elton and Rumours, so many pop stars are now officially rich that unavoidably a lot of great singles are made by rich people.

It's funny, I came here to post something about my awareness of his influence on my writing. Not music writing in particular, but just all my normal journalistic output. And I see that way back when on this thread I was talking about how compact and dense Christgau can be. That's what I love about his writing at its best, the ability to pack a ton of information and ideas into a few sentences. That's what I find valuable. Not something I try to mimic, exactly, but it's affected how I think about sentence and paragraph structure. e.g., the great long sentence/short sentence thing he does sometimes. There's a cadence to it.

OTM. It’s easy to mock certain tendencies and infelicities but on the other hand, like you say, he was able to pack a ton of ideas and information about a wide range of music into a very small space on a good day and there were many, many good days.

And maybe there still are but I haven’t really been keeping up, sorry.

I was gonna say – those first two posts had me Googling to see if...

Ha, no, not an R.I.P. An appreciation while he yet breathes! (And writes, though less.)

I think his influence kinda ruined my writing. That trick of packing a lot of info and insight into a few stray, seemingly flippant sentences really took my fancy and while I never got anywhere near it, it did make me write much less (in terms of volume, not frequency). Not his fault of course.

in case folks are unaware he has a substack where he issues a new consumer guide every month among other things. https://robertchristgau.substack.com/

The Christgau review I mainly remember was of a Tool album where he dismissed it with something like "whatever, I'm not a virgin, I don't care."

Christgau OTM

It’s easy to mock certain tendencies and infelicities

Yes it is

I appreciate his effort at concision, not so much mixing music discussion with sweeping statements and constant references to the zeitgeist. I find it weird that all music leads him to expose a system of working assumptions and conclusions about culture that feel like he had them before he heard the album. His reviews are too unpredictable and overwrought yet they sound so definitive.

I find it weird that all music leads him to expose a system of working assumptions and conclusions about culture that feel like he had them before he heard the album

I don't mind critics making those assumptions -- I like an assured critic -- so long as I agree with their assumptions lol.

Yeah sometimes you can tell he's just using an album as an excuse to make some other point he's gnawing on — but that's true of pretty much all critics, regardless of their style.

(I mean, I'd say that's part of the function of criticism, to connect things in art, culture, politics, the world at large. It's just that you can do it well or badly.)

I can't find it but remember loling at the CG review that dismisses the entirety of opera as elitist European nonsense in a review of The Best Opera Album In The World...Ever

His prejudices against something he calls "European" music are legendary and laughable.

I admit I like this guy's style even if his reviews are baffling and often plain wrong. he still manages to pack so much into two sentences and an emoji

yeah, being "right" or alinging in taste with my own is a low priority for me when it comes to critics

i approve of anti-european sentiment in general but his seems to be based on a dubious racial essentialism which also shows up elsewhere in his reviews (esp regarding black artists who are inauthentic or otherwise doing it wrong in his mind - seems to be a whole thing with white critics of his generation)

also i can't imagine what listening to music with letter grades in mind for half a century does to your mind

and his combination of a sort of nagging professorial pedantry with constant, shameless horniness comes off as *very* weird to me - i'm sure he'd think i'm a prude

i couldn't do what he does and express the above in a pithy couple of sentences dense with slang and jargon and references that collapse high and low brow so credit where it's due C+

In his mind "European" means "contempt for or ignorance of rock 'n' roll verities, i.e. Black American music," which, you know, fine, but is that a pejorative?

i think it is if you want to care about western popular music, but applying that accusation to e.g. kraftwerk or daft punk is weird - maybe he just thinks they're getting it wrong, but he also seems to think that getting it wrong is good when punk-adjacent anglo artists do it. whatever i don't expect a critic to be consistent but he does keep coming back to this

It's also a worldview where the US is still the scrappy underdog fighting against the stuffy elitism of its European superiors, which I think was suspect even when he started and is impossible to take seriously in 2022.

a point worth making in defence of some of xgau's perhaps odder examples of long-term stubborness is that -- for many years -- they appeared primarily in the context of the village voice, which was a forum for a wide* range of outsider voices** many of them cutting constantly against his positions***

so his stances originally existed as dialectical elements in a long maintained conversation or dispute -- until the VV's final owners fucked all that up forever, so that they now persist as the isolated pervy spasms of a crankish loner. this doesn't make him right about anything in particular (or less weird abt some things)! but i do feel it's an important dimension to his history

*the widest? maybe (it was often p flawed but it's fucked up that it was silenced)
**(in particular it was a vanguard for 70s feminism and the new critical languages around LGBTQ etc)
***(and often edited with his help to be as clear and forcefully and unlazily against him as they could be)

he's constantly trying to exorcise the snooty frankfurt school guy in his head who's judging him for devoting his life to mass culture

xp analysis makes a lot of sense it would be nice to have more of that context back

That's true, mark. Xgau's early stalwart embrace of gay/lesbian/queer rights was an important counterbalance. So is his shall we say fraught relationship with feminism (he could not stop commenting on bottoms and breasts and private parts and often knocked down grades for women who showed no interest in performing their sexuality or who had no interest in lubriciousness).

re the "European" thing: was '70s VV aggressive about promoting Kraftwerk, Can, Neu!, Bowie, and, later, New Pop and the New Romantics?

yes if by "kraftwerk, can, neu!, bowie, New Pop and the New Romantics" you mean graham parker and the rumour

timely for I was re-reading his Band Aid v USA for Africa just this week!

(not that Band Aid represents his 'European music' particularly well but its those words "by any reasonably objective critical standard" he uses)

Even his embrace of (some) queer perspectives is, like his relationship to female artists & artists of color, always weighed down by his weird hangups about how those artists should & shouldn't be embodying those identities to his liking, often shared in that entitled boomer-hipster tone like, ie "I get a pass to say this fucked up thing about artist X because I'm a vocal advocate for artist Y."

ooh boy have I a story about that.

I'm amazed this guy is still alive. I remember reading his stuff back in the 70s. I specifically remember his having a very weird take on Led Zeppelin.

hey, he took them seriously!

To his credit, he's possibly the only one of his peers who still keeps up with all of pop music. Nearly all the rest stopped decades ago.

also he's not a boomer he's (ok haha but he is) "silent generation"

Though it could be funny, I found it strange how he would cast aspersions on the fans of the artists he didn't like: "if you listen to Enya to deal with distress, your trauma wasn't actually that serious". Now, in the Ask Christgau column, he's a lot mellower: "Hey, you like Enya? Good for you!"

xp The guy remembers when Bing Crosby was on the radio as a major pop star. That's OLD.

My dad was old enough to live with a grandfather who regarded Bing Crosby as new-fangled trash.

My dad thought Bob Dylan was just some punk who was trying to look tough.

Bing Crosby is a cretinous goon singing degenerate and phony music. Now Al Jolson, that's a singer!

ooh boy have I a story about that.

I assume you'd tell it if it weren't indiscreet?

I’m amused by how much he absolutely despises those Enya albums.

lol I thought of him after the revival in the last few years

I contend that the biggest reason for Xgau’s enduring popularity is not because the writing is all that good, but more because there’s just so much of it and he’s made his entire humongous archive available online in an easily searchable website.

Because there's so damn much of it, a lot of it is good.

If bulk is a factor, maybe he's the Cerebus the Aardvark of film critics.

boom

Hey, he talks all about his relationship with Canada in the new "Christgau Sez" (I must ugh that title every time I mention it).

Big fan of Buck 65...

I kind of hate "Undun," which he mentions, but (along with Bangs) probably one of the more supportive American critics of the Guess Who--B+ for their first greatest-hits, A- for the second.

The only Guess Who record I'd play is "Shakin' All Over," and even then it's at best a distant third behind the original and the Who's renditions.

As much as I hate "Undun," I actually find Kurt Elling's version surprisingly listenable and not too gimmicky.

None of their many Top 40 hits from the early '70s? I loved the Guess Who back then--they were my first favourite group.

I don't know Johnny Kidd's version, but would definitely take Chad Allen/Guess Who's over the Who's.

Listening to them now, I wouldn't say a distant third - a solid third but within a respectable distance.

Johnny Kidd's is more interesting considering that it came out in the UK in 1960:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0UHOf6-7JKQ

The Guess Who's is a bit heavier and lumbering (the rhythm on Kidd's original feels pretty spidery in comparison). Even though the Guess Who's version pretty much duplicates the guitar part, the surf vibe doesn't come across as sharply.

I love the Who's live rendition, it's just crazy. Live at Leeds has probably the best-known performance but I also love watching the Who play it in the Isle of Wight film - it's a looser performance and a melody that segues into "Spoonful" and "Twist and Shout" (the latter probably done in tribute to the Beatles since they officially split up that April). For whatever reason, the concert doesn't work so well as an audio-only soundtrack (Christgau's low rating is understandable in that sense), but the film is a priceless document, a rare case where nearly an entire set of the group in its prime is properly filmed without any major compromises like borrowed equipment, LSD spiked water or a severely truncated setlist.

Someone actually uploaded the whole film in HD, straight from the Blu-ray - the song starts at 32:20

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jiSWhvvirlY

Forgot to add, yeah, not even their other top 40 hits. Something about "These Eyes" is too smooth for my tastes. It's not a unique smoothness, I want to say it's a sound that's very much of its time. And I never liked "American Woman," I don't think it's a good song but it also feels too much like a pastiche - the vocal alone sounds like a John Fogerty impersonation.

timely for I was re-reading his Band Aid v USA for Africa just this week!

Dave Marsh included We Are The World in his best singles book too, it's p funny to see rock critics of the time draw such sharp distinctions when to my ears both sound like tatty kitsch and a lot closer to each other than the cultures they're supposed to be representing in these pieces

Even his embrace of (some) queer perspectives is, like his relationship to female artists & artists of color, always weighed down by his weird hangups about how those artists should & shouldn't be embodying those identities to his liking, often shared in that entitled boomer-hipster tone like, ie "I get a pass to say this fucked up thing about artist X because I'm a vocal advocate for artist Y."

Nik Cohn's history of Rock (published in 1969) is amazing for this, dude's certainty that he understands the Authentic Black Voice leads him down some severely misguided avenues, insane how comfortable he feels calling black artists Uncle Toms!

idk I'd rather listen to Diana Ross, Daryl Hall, and Ray Charles than Bono, Sting, and Tony Hadley. Both songs are pieces of shit; the American song has better performance of the piece of shit.

I don't disagree but think that's still very thin gruel to start a culture war over - we have dozens and dozens of better recordings by Ross, Hall and Ray Charles.

DTKIC used to make me think of steam trains when I was little so that alone could account for me preferring Band Aid

I don't disagree but think that's still very thin gruel to start a culture war over - we have dozens and dozens of better recordings by Ross, Hall and Ray Charles.

― Daniel_Rf,

If a culture war started, the armistice was declared in June 1985.

Note re mid-80s Band Aid v USA for Africa style releases etc. All the way back to Marcus’s sarcastic YES NUKES response to the piety and self-regard of the 1979 No Nukes live show (and LP) the senior common room of radical 60s rock journalism were greatly bothering themselves about the success/ failure of how/where 60s (rock) cultural politics was by then ending up: its victories, its cliches, its smarm… So Marsh et al still battling it out over such singles is just the continuation of a very long-running argument (dying echoes as the politics of it runs into the sand? To me yes, but I’m not from this generation and spent most of the 80s eyerolling at em tbh 😀)

And to reply a bit more seriously to the core of Alfred’s neu/nu-pop query upthread: my notion of the VV project only firms up in the mid-late 80s, when I was reading every issue in London (every issue belatedly, it took three weeks to arrive). So my summary of what it was doing e.g in 1981-82 is only a projection from that semi-future.

(Someone else, possibly poster dow, will have an actual memory so as to confirm or deny…)

First as of like 1986 there was the entire squabbling totality of US rock write opinion to encompass, with all its various wings from large to small: and rather than have its own line/brand (like Spin or Forced Exposure or whatever), VV seemed more to providing an agora for the whole of this, all the difft currents encouraged to flow against one another and flirt and fight and feed…

But second, there was from the offset xgau’s own drive to enculture BETTER CRITICAL THINKING: partly via edit work and all the think-this-thru demands he’d make of a writer at that pre-published stage (countless testimonies as to his patient skill here), but also via his own performance of Being A Shortform Critical Blurbist™️. As with any such exercise this risked simply beaching on his own tastes and quirks and flaws, as in the teacher reproduces worse xeroxes of himself etc. Tho to my knowledge no one has really tried to seize the mantle! And many of the testimonies come from ppl who’ve attempted to come at his opinions from rival angles…

Also also: this positioning of editorial guidance as a species of teaching was always antithetical to rock’s sense of its um aesthetico-political self (= p hostile to teachers!) (tho xgau very evidently knows this and the counterpoise was hence somewhat part of the point).

Frank Kogan iirc says somewhere that the project of listening to literally everything ever (in the popular/semi-popular prism, inc.jazz) is in itself worth noting as unusual and interesting (not a quote/probably also a misprision haha, my memory is also a lethal editor). In fact it’s even kind of avant-garde lol (tho that’s me not Kogan): especially when you’re also busy documenting a complex critical judgment that snapshots “what the world thinks of item X” against “but also what xgau thinks of item X” for everything single fucking release.

Do his flaws (or tastes) outweigh what’s remarkable about this project? I mean for me they generally do — I often find him extremely exasperating! But his compression is a fkn artform!

And as a music historian I would certainly also always turn to his comments at any given moment, if only for the french film (blurred) triangulation against the critical consensus as it has since congealed.

(And yes, sometimes the consensus has obviously very much congealed in his direction and then he’s obviously way less useful or interesting.)

xgau as dean of rockwrite house
https://y.yarn.co/bbe9fb58-2cc8-4fa4-9f6a-d9fca36d1b42_text.gif

^A+

In my youth the elementary school had, well, not an encyclopedia set, but a set called The Book of Knowledge. What a title! So quaintly mid 20th century too: containing knowledge like we contained the Soviets.

Anyway, I thought of it after thinking of xgau's generalism through mark s' prism.

"can we decolonise the encyclopaedia?" is a fascinating question! possibly also urgent & key as ilxor used to say

i think 60s rockwrite was a waystation towards potential solutions but it was often an extremely problematic waystation

(for example it very much took on board leroi jones's and a.b.spellman's pushback against the downbeat-style co-optation of jazz, which was nothing if not an earlier waystation, also quite problematic!)

Ah ver Dean! Ah humanities!

Something about "These Eyes" is too smooth for my tastes. It's not a unique smoothness, I want to say it's a sound that's very much of its time.

It reminds me of Classics IV. This is a good thing to me.

Maybe this should be taken to the Guess Who thread (is there a Guess who thread?) but I’m really curious about the hatred for “Undun”. I love it, but that’s wrapped up with hearing it on AM radio for the first time and thinking it was just the strangest thing – this “jazzy” (not really) sound like Blood Sweat and Tears complete with a swingin’ singer I could picture on the nightclub stage snapping his fingers, but the lyrics were BLEAK: disillusionment, loss, a complete breakdown. That contrast has always stuck with me.

Anyway, back to Xgau:

and his combination of a sort of nagging professorial pedantry with constant, shameless horniness comes off as *very* weird to me - i'm sure he'd think i'm a prude

I have been reading Going Into The City, and my big criticism is “too much sex/relationship stuff”. Granted, I’m a Village Voice/60s counterculture obsessive, so anything not related to that felt like a waste, but I can’t imagine anyone wanting to know the ups and down of his sex life/romantic travails in such detail (sometimes literally as when he writes about his bout with ED…excuse me, “genital anesthesia”).

My favorite recurring theme is how he keeps setting himself up for heartbreak in relationship after relationship by refusing to say he wants to be monogamous/”go steady”, largely because he wants to reserve the right to fuck around himself, only he doesn’t, or when he does, feels depressed about it.

Like so many (too many) accounts of the post-60s hangover, it makes all the screwing around and sexual freedoms of the 70s seem enervating, like bed-hopping was something everyone had to do, but no one actually enjoyed. It couldn’t have been that bad, could it?

Bliss it was in that dawn to be queer!

C or D:: the Guess Who

Forgot to add, yeah, not even their other top 40 hits. Something about "These Eyes" is too smooth for my tastes. It's not a unique smoothness, I want to say it's a sound that's very much of its time. And I never liked "American Woman," I don't think it's a good song but it also feels too much like a pastiche - the vocal alone sounds like a John Fogerty impersonation.

I always figured American Woman was a pastiche of Mississippi Queen, but I’ve never confirmed the timeline

The usual culprit cited is "Whole Lotta Love"!

"american woman" was released before "mississippi queen"

Now reading this thread title to the tune of a certain Lovin’ Spoonful number.

"Forget Donna Summer—this is the real disco porn. She's covered on the cover right up to the clavicle, her rhythms sound more binary than her producer's, and she can't sing a lick. But even if you haven't seen her movies, she projects an exhibitionistic suck-and-fuck tractability that links the two pervasive fantasy media of our time, and from such conjunctions Great Art arises."

— More, More, More, reviewed in Christgau's Record Guide: Rock Albums of the Seventies (1981)

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