XGAU VS PITCHFORK – THE POLL

The Needle Drop | The Internet's Busiest Music Nerd

This poll's victor will take on Fanta in due course.

I mean, at least Pitchfork has moved to being much more inclusive and mostly gotten rid of their earl misogyny and I can't say that same about Xgau, so...

"early misogyny" that should be

theyve scrubbed most of earl misogyny's reviews from their database iirc

damn -- my favorite Odd Feminism rapper

Where's the historicist pro-Xgau take that stresses generational differences and focuses on his status as *checks notes* the Dean of American Rock Critics?

and ... 2010 misogyny

Ginger: She looked sort of like a tranny and couldn't sing but she was the Betty Hutton of the 1990s: Her brassiness and Union Jack dress best articulated what the hell the Spice Girls were supposed to be about.

I haven't subscribed, but before he went to that, seemed mainly to be grading for lyrics, esp. anti-Trump, but I still check his site, and am tempted to say that, like many music artists, he gets better the further back you go, though the Esquire columns have def. not improved with age, but stop short of those, and you'll be okay (or jump past them to '66--think that's pre-Esq., and read his Times story of the young woman who starved herself to death on a macrobiotic diet, really a different kind of topic for then, and he handles it well).
I don't keep up with Pitchfork all that well, but random reads over the past few years usually turn out better than prev.(though the review of AngelHeaded Hipsters seems ronger the more I listen).

"seemed mainly to be grading for lyrics": might well be inaccurate, and I hope it is, but that was often my impression in the last few months before hitting the paywall (and mainly why I haven't signed up).

So I'm still Undecided.

Writer vs website is an odd poll tbh but I voted for Christgau. He's funny sometimes and, if he is saying nothing, he only takes a few sentences to do it.

I'm just here for the Earl Misogyny discography

Writer vs website is an odd poll tbh

I may in fact be trolling a little bit here.

Also, if we're talking about "moving towards being inclusive", this was his Dean's List for 1986: https://www.robertchristgau.com/xg/pnj/deans86.php 2xp

if he is saying nothing, he only takes a few sentences to do it.

counterpoint: ive spent longer trying to parse wtf xgau is trying to say in a 12-word review than its taken me to read entire pfork features

this is like choosing between having my left testicle or my right testicle stomped. throw fantano in the mix and i will pass out as a result from the physical pain. hopefully to wake up in a much better off world.

so idk, pfork i guess?

Just doing his part to keep close reading alive in the age of distant reading.

xp

so idk, pfork i guess?

lol I genuinely did not expect you to say that.

Austin said "fuck you, left testicle"

Literally Hitler.

On the third day Xgau rose again.
He ascended into heaven,
and is seated at the right nut of God the Father Almighty.

B+

Lol

I think "Earl Misogyny" might be my most proud moment on ilm.

it is a stellar contribution to the canon

(which, given the thread, is very appropriate)

I love reading his Consumer Guides on his site, fun tracking the evolution of music over such a long time frame. Personally, I prefer Stereogum.

so this is basically a deathmatch between the Dean of American Rock Critics and the Duke of Earl Misogyny, did I get that right?

Yepperoni.

"Nitsuh"; "Katherine"; "Brad"; "Philip"; "Alfred" ✂

. . .but what about earl's early misogyny?

Earl Misogyny’s Top 50 albums of all time

The Beatles, Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band L
The Beatles, The Beatles’ Second Album L
Chuck Berry, The Definitive Collrction L
Blondie, Parallel Lines L
James Brown, Star Time L
The Clash, The Clash
Culture, Two Sevens Clash
DeBarge, In a Special Way L
DJ Shadow, Endtroducing DJ Shadow
Bob Dylan, “Love and Theft” L
Bob Dylan & the Band, The Basement Tapes L
Eminem, The Marshall Mathers Album
Eno, Another Green World L
The Flying Burrito Brothers, The Gilded Palace of Sin
Franco & Rochereau, Omona Wapi (Shanachie version)
Girl Group Greats L
Gogol Bordello, Super Taranta! L
Grateful Dead, Workingman’s Dead L
Al Green, I’m Still in Love With You L
Guitar Paradise of East Africa L
Michael Hurley/The Unholy Modal Rounders/Jeffrey Fredricks & the Clamtones, Have Moicy!
The Indestructible Beat of Soweto L
Latin Playboys, Latin Playboys
John Lennon, Plastic Ono Band L
Jerry Lee Lewis, “Live” at the Star Club, Hamburg L
Lil Wayne, Tha Carter III
Little Richard, The Very Best of . . . Little Richard L
M.I.A., Kala
Joni Mitchell, Blue L
Van Morrison, Moondance L
New York Dolls, New York Dolls
Orchestra Baobab, Specialist in All Styles L
Public Enemy, It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back L
Ramones, Rocket to Russia L
Otis Redding, The Immortal Otis Redding L
The Rolling Stones, Exile on Main Street L
The Rolling Stones, The Rolling Stones, Now! L
The Roots, How I Got Over L
The Sex Pistols, Never Mind the Bollocks, Here’s the Sex Pistols L
The Shirelles, The Very Best of the Shirelles (Rhino)
Sonic Youth, Daydream Nation L
Dusty Springfield, Dusty in Memphis L
Steely Dan, Pretzel Logic L
Television, Marquee Moon
The Velvet Underground, The Velvet Underground L
Kanye West, Late Registration L
Wire, Pink Flag L
Wussy, Funeral Dress
Neil Young, After the Gold Rush L
Tom Zé, Brazil Classics 4: The Best of Tom Zé L

P4K’s Initial Release 10.0 albums

12 Rods - Gay?
Walt Mink - El Producto
Amon Tobin - Bricolage
Radiohead - OK Computer
Bob Dylan - The Bootleg Series Vol. 4: Bob Dylan Live 1966, The "Royal Albert Hall" Concert
Bonnie 'Prince' Billy - I See a Darkness
The Flaming Lips - The Soft Bulletin
Radiohead - Kid A
...And You Will Know Us by the Trail of Dead - Source Tags & Codes
Wilco - Yankee Hotel Foxtrot
Kanye West - My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy
Fiona Apple - Fetch the Bolt Cutters

💣 vs 0.0

I mean, if newspapers in the '70s had the technology, would xgau have embedded a video of a monkey pissing in its own mouth for a review?

Christgau, flaws and all. (Unfair vote--Pitchfork came along after my interest in reading any kind of rock criticism had narrowed to a few people I'd been reading for years.)

My taste probably overlaps about evenly with both (ie not that much), but Christgau is reliably more interesting to read, IMO.

idk if this counts as a hot take but I read music writing to learn of music I think I will enjoy and will enrich my life, not (primarily) to delight in sparkling prose or whatever, and for all its flaws Pitchfork has been a good resource over the years. I mean, Wussy are fine and all, but.

Essentially my position as well.

Pitchfork I've been reading loyally since Ryan Schreiber/Brent Dicrescenzo days, but they've consistently improved, and they've aged right along with me.
And as for Christgau, I've never understood his shtick. Is he still alive?

Real poll options:
Are you closer to 60 or closer to 40?

but I read music writing to learn of music I think I will enjoy and will enrich my life

Exactly why I read Christgau (discovering Wussy being a perfect example); actually not that big a fan of the way he writes. (By which I simply mean the way he puts words together.)

And yes--much, much closer to 60!

enchoroot - he is alive

in terms of sourcing music to enjoy, I find having a variety of writers more useful than having one guy whose sensibility/interest set seems to rarely overlap with my own

This must surely be a joke but xgau for his stubbornness and tenacity. p4k has some good reviews but the institution of "p4k" amounts to less than the sum of its parts- obsession with consensus is nauseating.
both execrable tbh

the idea of sourcing music through reviews seems a bit old fashioned.

obsession with consensus is nauseating
^ goes for this board too (ducks)

hipster canon building is tedious but horny old hippies are worse

I had seen Christgau's name before and, of course, had heard Lou Reed calling him a toefucker on "Take No Prisoners" but I had never read a word of his, so when I joined ILX (quite a while ago now) and his name kept being brought up like he was the fucking Pope I was quite taken aback. Then I realized I had fallen into a den of music critics.

Christgau's Rock Albums of the 70s book did get fairly widespread distribution in London bookshop at least, and iirc was even remaindered at one point. So that plus the Lou Reed and Sonic Youth mentions put him more on my radar than most US rockcrits.

Twenty bucks says if Xgau were a Very Online Millennial he'd be peppering his reviews with references to 'Eurofags'.

I feel like you're confusing Christgau with Carducci there.

Until Piazzolla, I never gave a thought to tango, which I conceived vaguely as the music of displaced Europeans slumming their way through an American limbo, compounding angst and self-regard into ridiculous sexual melodrama. But now that I put all that down on paper, it seems both kind of interesting and ripe for destabilization.

The only part of this that even has the potential to be "kind of interesting" would be hearing him explain how he arrived at his vague (and absurd/pathetic/self-revealing) conception.

Who's Carducci?

Joe Carucci, author of Rock and The Pop Narcotic, used to get a pass for rockism, incl. from xgau.
xxpost, At least tango diagnosis got him and me to check out the album!

At his most appealing, xgau, like Newman, can or could lead me past just thinking about how *he* feels about something, and I think that's what he might be trying to do w some of the more cryptic or tricky comments---which sometimes seem like doors to nowhere, but not always. The more journo side, incl the appealing descriptions of what and why he don't like, work best, or did when he allowed for them (also some of the longer journo stuff, like when he went to visit Peter Stampfel and his wife, also the visit w John Prine and Iris DeMent, when they were on tour).

Who's Carducci?

Joe Carducci, author of Rock and the Pop Narcotic (a book that's half brilliant and half bullshit) and Enter Naomi (a shorter but better and more focused book that filters the history of SST Records and the LA hardcore scene through the biography of Naomi Petersen, who photographed most if not all of the bands in the 80s).

Christgau himself on it: https://www.robertchristgau.com/xg/bkrev/carducci-91.php

Ah, thanks (x3).

Anyway, I wasn't expecting this thread to turn into an Xgau discussion chamber over and above its poll rival, but it makes for an interesting development nonetheless.

That's all from me. Somebody tell more about Pitchfork, please.

Carducci did fill the lacuna in prog and hard rock appreciation among rock writers but took the Europhobia and machismo into cartoonish overdrive.

over and above its poll rival

Tbf, there's a perpetually-updated thread dedicated to Pitchfork, or at least its dumbness.

Carducci is a genuine kook libertarian

I haven't read Rock and Pop Narcotic in years. He's a rockist, but like he owns it, he likes a certain strain of rock music and thinks that it's the best music ever made.

Can be a really amazing writer about the things that he loves. Can be ugly at times.

Enter Naomi: SST and All That is by far is great work, really touching and kaleidoscopic reflection on LA punk, California itself through the lens of one of the great (and overlooked) rock photographers of all time. But it was written much later than R&tPN and feels more elegiac and wistful. he talks about a lot of the people who didn't live, a lot of the people who got lost on the way.

he makes you think about how he feels about them. Which just isn't as interesting.

Those two reviews side by side are a funny comparison.

Astor Piazzolla: "I dont know or care an iota about this kind of music. That being said, I happened to hear it, so here's my opinion.
Born Again: "Why should the world be so fascinated by what THIS guy thinks about? Boooring!"

I'm a 78-year-old white man who favors radical police reform and hopes you in particular get everything you want from politics and life. But I'm also a veteran editor who knows an unfortunate turn of phrase when he sees one. "Defund the police" does more harm than good. Period. https://t.co/dIwyiUDwX8

— Robert Christgau (@rxgau) November 11, 2020

Well, I'm certainly glad the dean has weighed in on this one.

78? Damn, I hadn't realized.

has this guy’s political outlook changed even slightly since he was chiding funkadelic for letting the black community down or whatever. entitled liberal dickhead

what is even he doing there, pairing or opposing his whiteness/maleness with his seniority & supposed lefty credentials. gross attempted power move

"radical police reform" uh huh

What he disliked about Funkadelic were their ties to the Process Church of the Final Judgement, a quasi-Satanic occult group. He wrote a review of Ed Sanders' book on the Manson Family and other cults of the era, and swallowed a lot of the author's dubious claims about these occultists.

I didn’t know about that, I was just going off his fymayawf review which seems to epitomise his weird race politics

Lefty cred not very impressive, and he was pretty soft on Bush Wars (as Merle Haggard called them, and not as a compliment), at least when they started (incl. First Gulf War), but I have heard liberal Dems saying that "defund the police" was a gift to Republicans--"radical police reforms" is not much better, just not as catchy, not as likely a gift: if he means something about police unions, who tend to defend even the worst police, then yeah, but he should say so (lots of investigative journalism on this subject, esp. in past year or so).
However dangerous they may or may not have ever been, The Process were (hopefully mostly past tense) Satanists, yeah, though with their own take. a few years ago, I got a promo of one of their songbooks performed by Wooden Wand and friends: hymns to Jesus and to Satan, like If you love X, give Y a try. No idea how closely or how long any of Funkadelic were ever tied in with them, but it was worth mentioning in the post-Manson era, when several cults were becoming more noticeable via bad behavior.

George Clinton apparently read Process Church literature when he was living in Toronto. The church members, hooded and robed, would hand out their pamphlets to passers-by on Yonge Street. Clinton reprinted some of their writing as the liner notes to Maggot Brain and America Eats Its Young; I don't think he was really a hardcore adherent of their philosophy.

Yeah, think you're right, judging by the records.

The Process were more like a Scientology knockoff, manipulating the malleable; their "theology" was not Satanic so much as a warped Christian bothsidesism:

The Process Church preached the existence of four gods, who were regarded not as literal entities but as inner realities existing within each human personality. Accordingly, these deities were not worshipped. The names of its deities were drawn from traditional Judeo-Christian religion. They were known as Jehovah, Lucifer, Satan, and Christ, and were collectively referred to as the "Great Gods of the Universe." The Church stated that "Jehovah is strength. Lucifer is light. Satan is separation. Christ is unification."

There's a good documentary about them, Sympathy for the Devil; I have the DVD. They were really good at marketing, which made their public profile much larger than their actual membership deserved.

Xgau, no shame

I can understand someone with different taste not enjoying his takes but in terms of inclusiveness he was way ahead of the curve with pop, soul, r'n'b, hip hop, world music and yeah, female artists. there are great writers on pitchfork but in general the pitchfork perspective is incomparably duller and shallower than his. i'm closer to 40 btw

enjoyed rereading this 1976 longform piece abt rockcrit+springsteen (courtly overdecoration of its essential my-colleagues-are-dangerous-naifs thesis and all) this morning while listening to wild+innocent

In the early-'60s tradition of Del Shannon (a closer analogy than Roy Orbison even if he isn't named on Born to Run), Springsteen is a rather operatic rock star. Years of touring have formalized his histrionic tendencies, and now he risks getting tripped up in his own self-consciousness. Further, as Langdon Winner puts it, "Bruce has a real problem with rhythm"; when John Rockwell extols Springsteen's phrasing, I recall uncomfortably that Rockwell's roots are with Caruso rather than Ray Charles. For unlike the R&B-and-blues-influenced titans who are invoked as his predecessors--Presley, Dylan, Van Morrison--Springsteen shows no aptitude for the relaxed scat; he is obviously attracted to rhythm-and-blues as teen rather than black music. But this in itself is far from fatal. It simply means that in these respects the great rocker he resembles is John Lennon...

It was an assumption of most early rock critics, who tended to be young litterateurs on a paying gig, that rock and roll was in hibernation in the years preceding Beatlemania. This was flat-out wrong. The early '60s were a rich if somewhat silly period that nurtured both the soul style (irrelevant here) and a wealth of not-so-ephemeral pop rock and roll, consummated in the enlightened hedonism of the Beach Boys and the great production machines of Motown and Phil Spector. This is Springsteen's era--he may talk Berry and Presley, but his encore is Gary U.S. Bonds....

Like the early '60s, the mid-'70s are a myopic time, but they lack hope and innocence; our rock hero is Elton John, who makes up for his visionlessness with overwhelming studio perspicacity. I'm sure it will seem willful to Jon Landau, who can't stand Old Four Eyes, but on mornings when I feel like playing Born to Run real loud I often opt for Elton's Rock of the Westies as well. Both answer my need for monolithic, full-sounding, produced rock and roll--a need I indulge freely because I know I have other very different ones.... For like so many of the best American popular romantic/primitive formalists, Spector was a unique but very narrow artist. He had a vision, yes--but it was romantic to the edge of camp, barely adequate to his more innocent and hopeful time.

It's fine for Springsteen to set himself up as the boy Darlene Love is gonna marry, or to vouchsafe the Beach Boys some East Coast hustle--but only if he can transform the high fantasy content of those images into something more than another of the doomed-loser myths that have littered America's artscape since the frontier closed. Early rock and roll was energized by the class mobility and material transport of a genuinely expanding economy, and the fact that those stimuli have dissipated doesn't mean people don't still hanker after them. Springsteen does, and so do his fans. His aesthetic strategy on Born to Run is to duplicate that energy and then add a patina of tragedy, just to remind us things aren't so expansive anymore. His rebel adolescent hero can be jubilant or mournful, defiant or driven to self-deceiving, but one thing is certain--he can always feel sorry for himself. This is a high grade of sentimental escapism, indulgence of a sort that is anything but wise. There is nothing tough or new in it. The future, rock and roll version included, is going to be tough, and it had better be new.

American popular romantic/primitive formalism challenges moribund notions of culture and limns a psychological dynamic that anyone who wants to affect this country (or this world) had better not only understand but harness. Nevertheless, it misses an awful lot. Most significant, its purview--just like our establishment, fancy that--is entirely male. I'm not being prissy here; I'm not suggesting that Springsteen write songs to Susan Saxe or give up male chauvinism for Lent. But he might try to defeat the stereotyping that afflicts even Terry in "Backstreets" and Crazy Janie, both presumably people he has known. The women of Dylan, or Ferry, or Fagen and Becker are hardly heroic sisters, but they are at least considerable rivals; their autonomy goes beyond that of Peggy Sue and the ladies of "East of Eden."

Admittedly, the politics of class and sex are a tick of mine, one that may well disfigure my analysis of an artist who has moved my colleagues so profoundly.... Springsteen... has always played a winningly articulate kind of loser, and now he is rich as well as smart. And so my colleagues both thrill to a fellow winner and identify with his loser rebel persona, forgetting in the rock and roll moment how much the winner in them shares with what the fighter was fighting against....

Welles theorizes that Springsteen's success reflects "the psychological needs of those who operate the media" more than it does "the desires and interests of those to whom the media is [sic] directed," but this is massculture theory cant, the kind that can be plugged in anywhere. Obviously, Springsteen does fulfill the fans' needs and desires--that's why they buy him and not Randy Newman. This does not mean, however, that their experience of the artist doesn't differ from the critics'. For the most part, Springsteen the winner can provide them strictly vicarious delight; what they need and desire--ominously, I think--is an artist who romanticizes and even celebrates a defeat that is a lot more likely for them than it is for any establishment, rock and roll version included.

I like parts of that a lot, though it's got the condescention towards both the audience and his peers that turns me off on him

I guess I should read more of his long form stuff, the capsule reviews he's known for probably exaggerate the smug, cryptic side of him

this is uhhhh o_O

he is obviously attracted to rhythm-and-blues as teen rather than black music

For the most part, Springsteen the winner can provide them strictly vicarious delight; what they need and desire--ominously, I think--is an artist who romanticizes and even celebrates a defeat that is a lot more likely for them than it is for any establishment, rock and roll version included.

^this is kind of interesting given we know what's coming from springsteen - darkness, the river, born in the usa, springsteen felt the same I guess

Admittedly, the politics of class and sex are a tick of mine, one that may well disfigure my analysis of an artist who has moved my colleagues so profoundly

"Sometimes it can be a burden, this gigantic brain of mine..."

lol

tick

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PkBNBxQZbY4

78? Damn, I hadn't realized.

― pomenitul, Wednesday, November 11, 2020 12:51 PM (six days ago)

I thought he was older tbqh

Destroy (or Defund) both options in the OP

To be fair, Christgau is about as defunded now as a rock critic can be.

he says he's making more from his subscription model than he ever suspected.

I'm glad to hear that, but I assumed the previous poster meant that he should be "deplatformed" (without an official soapbox, since no-one is publishing him in a regular forum).

orig included a note loling at how unfortunate “tick” is so close on the page to prissily [sic]ing another writer over using “media” in the singular— but ended up having to admit that the monolithic concept the latter solecism betrays is actually relevant to building a case that a guy thinks in microwaved adornoisms. lol tick tho yeah

^booming post

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n-dpqVdKG9I

I can't remember which critic wrote about this (it was dated before 2006), but it was someone unaffiliated with the Village Voice and apparently Christgau called him up and badgered him to use a thesaurus. It was probably in response to a Pazz & Jop ballot.

Automatic thread bump. This poll is closing tomorrow.

I ain’t no boomer, I voted for the fork.

Automatic thread bump. This poll's results are now in.

loll

looooool

This poll's victor will take on Fanta in due course.

https://atothejay.files.wordpress.com/2010/06/52pickup.jpg

otm

oh cool they both lost

Next do john peel vs. wfmu