In praise of Xgau

"I love lists, and that love is a source of my own peculiar cult status,'' Christgau comments in a recent online interview. He adds somewhat wistfully, "This is why Greil Marcus attracts fans who write avant-garde theater pieces based on his critical fantasies'' while he himself tends to receive queries like "What are your top five concerts of all time?''

however I like Xgau more than GM for the same reasons that Mary thinks the opposite!

The article wasn't totally one-sided; there were a lot of criticisms in there buried underneath the praise.

And that he's totally tripping.

At least Christgau mixes his overratings (which are distinctly less melodramatic) with acute cynicism.

I hereby pledge to devote my entire career as a music writer to the repudiation of this concept.

xgau's cynicism is the aspect i trust least (nobody who carries on listening to as many records as RX does is convincing as a cynic)

Good heavens Justyn! That's an awfully hard modernist line you're taking. Are you certain that the reader knows as much about the text as its transmitter does?

This has been your daily pose of logical positivism.

the world-revolutionary in music is GM's life topic: so this diss is really only as fair as saying "i wish the source covered more country music"

B-but it is which is why I get bored by it sometimes.

My real problem with GM is sometimes like my problem with Marcello (which is a compliment to both, I think) -- all punctum or paradigm this or that and like amateurist said it limits the criteria by which we can understand albums.

My favorite part of GM is spotting the places where his prose ceases to be purple and downright asphyxiates, but only in an affectionate fashion.

"But the world always seems to change in the same way": i don't think reading presliad against lipstick traces against invisible republic will let this claim stand, actually => compare the variation at phrasemaking level (which are his shtick, and admittedly mileage will vary with reader taste) with the difference in the overall structure, which is to say, the different places the material takes him

note how amateurist's reason for abandoning LS is identical to the "error" he's criticising

I didn't abandon Lipstick Traces. Well, yes, literally I left it at college. But I finished the book.

this is a lovely connection, a fun connection, to make. I must read LT (I only read his book on punk, which was v good).

To clarify maybe:

I don't have a taste for that contemporary intellectual tendency David Bordwell calls the "punning heuristic": using wordplay, rhymes, etc. as the basis for arguments about cultural phenomena.

I'm a dabbler with regard to--?

This is a very cunning strawman indeed: wordplay/rhymes/etc aren't the bases for said arguments, just springboards. Even in Total Wordplay Overdrive ppl like Cixous. I too get irritated by this stuff sometimes but I think that overreacting to it can cost you some good engagement with interesting minds

It's not that I don't consider rock music unworthy of serious criticism, it's just that the common modes of rock criticism don't excite me (except negatively, sometimes).

Correct: It's not that I consider rock music unworthy of serious criticism

you can say "i don't think the similarities are there" if you like, or "yes they're there but it's just coincidence as far as i'm concerned": but you can't say "they can't be there because official culture says that they can't be" w/o ceding GM's main argument, which is that, in order to bring these little episodes back into routine sociology (which he has always anyway been very hostile to) you have to overlook and/or completely set aside the things the actors in the episodes keep saying matter, esp. if these things ARE similar

("official culture" is a yech phrase i know)

(i have to say that the leydon link is the cheekiest in the book and the one that i said "o for fux sake" at, first time round, also: but it stands out bcz it's untypical)

(if you want to be spooked by a tripling of the connection, read the first page of nick tosches's country)

"breadth of his scholarship" = he's reading this stuff just now, just like you're allowed to, bcz it's fun and interesting and hey look at this = the opposite of namby-pamby criticism obviously (which is sticking within the lines yr teachers drew for you w/o knowing what made them draw those lines)

("punning heuristic" = some of the lines some of our teachers drew, obv, tho not mine bcz a. i'm v.old and b. punning never caught on in mathematics)

three worldshifting models is STILL limited if yr. applying them to ten things every two weeks.

I think Marcus's criticism is emblematic of a mode wherein a critic is struck by a song--by its formal qualities, that is--and lacks the musical literacy to explain just how, and thus displaces that feeling of revelation/surprise/joy, onto all kinds of speculation about the social, political, world-historical import of said song.

One thing that can be said for Xgau is that he generally avoids this (save for his Pazz and Jop essays which I find unreadable) and tries, sometimes successfully and often not, to actually explain the music he fancies. There is more honesty in his approach, I think, even if the results aren't so spectacular.

Re. Cixous: for all her worldplay, most of the salient moments in her books are crushingly banal.

one thing that always gets overlooked about Xgau's P&J essays is that they're written to parse a specific set of numbers, e.g. the poll results. "unreadable" maybe but they're generally meant to be read alongside the poll results.

Marcus intellectualizes rock in the same self serving way that a mook turns rock into a mosh pit. To personify popular music isn't bad in itself; the problem is that rock music isn't all that intellectual to begin with. Marcus may find illumination in 16th century Switzerland when evaluating Sleater-Kinney (or whomever) but it seems more of a stretch than rock's immediate appeal, which is overwhelmingly visceral. Marcus' tendency to intervleave his tangential inspirations often comes at the cost of rock's obvious immediacy, or at the very least, minimizes it.

And that's somethign that Xgau doesn't usually fall prey to.

Also, I know a lot of people who think that Xgau is unreadable on a regular basis, not just in his P&J essays. A lot of people don't get too jazzed by his dense wordplay and 200 word sentences.

in other words, instead of simply shouting 'Oh! oh! HOW AMAZINGLY IMMEDIATE THIS ALL IS! oh! oh!", he actually takes it to the next step, which is, "Given that I am myself a fairly sedate and literary type fellow, and also not someone deeply trained in the history and techniques of musicianship itself, what is it in these songs that causes me to respond to them as examples of 'immediacy'? What IS immediacy and why does it matter culturally?"

(don's argument, that immediacy has no cultural consequences whatever and that rock has always only ever been a laff down the pub and that's it, is one of the standard rebuttals: i think it's an anti-music argument as well as anti-intellectual, but obviously my take is also "self-serving" here: "self-serving" in the sense of "i am defending my values so sue me")

What I'm trying to say is that Marcus often leaves me cold with his tangential approach. I certainly wasn't asserting the converse--anti-intellectualism--into the argument (or at least wasn't trying to). I was only pointing out that his often tangential approach can be more distracting than illuminating. This is not some battle between the hooligans and academia; I merely assert that Marcus has a tendency to take things a step too far--not that he becomes "anti-immediate" or "anti-cultural, but that his take on things overtly minimizes the visceral aspect of listening to music. That's all.

I don't think Xgau has this problem at all.

Origins of the Popular Style: The Antecedents of Twentieth-Century Popular Music by Peter Van der Merwe (very learned, rather dry, naive i think on the impact and transformational whatever of recording technology) (also he prefers the past to the present, which means it has a v. lame ending)

Music Grooves: Charles Keil and Steven Feld (i tht this wz terrific, esp. keil's klostermannish essay on POLKA and why oh why dz everyone diss it in favour of the blues)

Feminism and Musicology: Susan McLary (a patchy set of essays, i think actually best on "light" classical stuff: interesting eg on stave-analysis of harmony in madonna songs but then entirely doesn't examine any other musicianly dynamic in same)

Studying Popular Music: Richard Middleton (a set text in cult stud apparently, though i thought it wz terrible, boring to read AND lowgrade insights-wise)

I also read a book on heavy metal guitarists by Robert someone, who = McLary's husband, which I liked quite a lot, but gave back to the guy who leant it to me, and have myself lent to someone a hilariously misconcieved book by a Yes-fan/professional musicologist on why Yes would be T.W.Adorno's favourite band if he was still alive)

(i guess i wz taking issue w. "self-serving" really, which you don't need to make yr strong point* — — and which i wd argue if you actually rest any weight pushes you into my version of what you said, whether you meant it this way or not)

*which is i guess that at sentencemaking level GM can be stylistically demanding in a way many readers clearly find tiresome and offputting (this = a habit of his that said readers then interpret in terms of speculation about the social, political, world-historical corruption in GM's own personal world)

Yes, but the result is sometimes akin to numerology.

Mark et al: As your capsule reviews suggest, bringing musicology to bear on rock music doesn't always produce useful results. As for the accusation that formalism (although I know that word has little currency in musicology, and is almost redundant in that context) gets us away from history (an echo of which resounds throughout several of these posts), it's true but only of naive formalism. A rich formalism brings us closer to history, closer to the contexts in which decisions about form were made.

(That's a paraphrase from Barthes, to make up for my having dismissed him earlier in this thread.)

Thank you for posting that list, BTW.

Also: I don't find GM's sentences as difficult to parse as Xgau's. Sometimes Xgau's reviews are completely opaque to me (as likely to be my fault as his). GM's ideas, on a sentence-by-sentence level are usually very clear.

"...a heroically diverse collection of strange records that prophesied Captain Beefheart -- a word like 'influenced' is just too paltry -- a very hot late '50s-early '60s fuzztone stomp."
!

I find Xgau much more difficult, on average, to parse. But that's what I like about him. I often find his prose like a puzzle, the kind of thing that demands more attention than the speed-reading I give everything else. And while Marcus is good with words, I just find his conjecture less compelling on average.

That list is interesting. Thanks for that.

ha Jones you've beat me to this one while I was writing it, double :)

Anthony Miccio: Christgau is definitely more inscrutable, but he doesn't sound like a college freshman writing an essay in his English class about how Lewis Carroll reminds him of the Beastie Boys, who just coincidentally happen to be in his CD player.
I suspect that Christgau tries to cram everything he's thinking about in as short a sentence as possible. Its interesting that he can cram alot of information into a small space. But (sometimes) he's a bit *too* glib and terse to be fully understandable.
Hmmmm. Maybe Christgau and Marcus have opposite problems. Xgau focusses too tightly and tries to compress it all into too small a space; Marcus is broad and unfocussed. Maybe?
Agree/Disagree?

I always thought GM was the critic most obsessed with the "visceral aspect" of music, actually. The first page of Lipstick, with his amazing description of hearing "Anarchy In The U.K." for the first time, was what hooked me into the rest. I don't think he's into "impressing us with his breadth of knowledge" at all: most of the stuff in LT he was running across for the first time while writing the book (he says in the introduction that he'd never even heard of the Situationists).

Mark, do you know how 'Leyden' is pronounced? I always thought it was a silly connection until it hit me that it might be pronounced the same as 'Lydon.'

However, my comments are more directed towards what Marcus has done for the past couple of years on Salon.com. And in that body of work, if he's not into "impressing us with his body of knowledge", he's at least into impressing us with his desire to connect what would otherwise be disparate cultural/societal/philosophical/political concepts. Nothing wrong with that; much of historical art criticism falls along those lines. I don't think that Marcus is necessarily too far flung as I find it often unappealing. It's possible for crit to be interesting without having appeal.

Jack Rabid has referred to rock music as the "most exciting art form ever", but I will always be leery of the baggage that comes with referring to rock as "art."

Joy of Cooking [Capitol, 1971]
Led by ex-folkie Toni Brown (the principal composer) and ex-blueswoman Terry Garthwaite (whose three rhythm songs sizzle joyously), this may not be your idea of rock and roll. The music revolves around Brown's piano, which rolls more than it rocks, and the band goes for multi-percussion rather than the old in-out. I find it relaxing and exciting and amazingly durable; I can dance to it, and I can also fuck to it. The musical dynamic pits Brown's collegiate contralto against Garthwaite's sandpaper soul, and the lyrics are feminist breakthroughs. "Too Late, but Not Forgotten" remembers a trailer camp while "Red Wine at Noon" touches international finance, but the two protagonists are united by one overriding fact--they're victimized as wives. And it's about time somebody in rock and roll said so. A

(i imagined an f-word in a sentence in there, and there wasn't one.)