Christgau on Antony

say what now?

Re: counter-reaction I was kind of thinking about that -- he reviews records really late! Antony is his "dud of the month" nearly a year after it was released; other records reviewed in this batch include Fiona Apple, Clap Your Hands Say Yeah, Madonna, and Lady Sov. It certainly gives a person a lot of space to digest the conversation about something and come in with some authoritative-sounding pronouncement about it.

No shit: I just checked, and the Stylus review of the album came out a year ago today!

and Xgau likes his records/artists a little more universal than that. you can be niche, but you need to be better than this.

it stretches one aesthetic to a kind of uncut, over-the-top purity.

as an Xgau-acolyte, I'm tempted to recoil in horror

I still don't understand how a DUD OF THE MONTH can be a B MINUS.

because, per Xgau, 'in the era of grade inflation, read everything from a b on down as flunk' (paraphrased, at least). the dud of the month isn't the worst record of the month, it's the most interesting/talked-about/worth-commenting-on bad record of the month.

haha that's what I was thinking!

more like compTROLLING hyack hyack

Sorry, I was as obscure as Xgau here. I meant that his reviews come very late in the game (as has been noted upthread) and sometimes read as conflict-resolution court decisions, the Last Word on an album: for instance, to understand his point on Antony, you need to not only have listened to the record but also have read all its major reviews.

Clap Your Hands have a groove that's reminiscent of that Feelies era (even if nothing screams Crazy Rhythms to me), but the vocal is this loud-ass Verlaine/Gano thing. I actually do like their stuff more each time I hear it, and I'm sure Xgau's given it more spins.

Does this mean Antony's gonna beat MIA and Sufjan?

this is where you should have ended the sentence

Mark I'm certainly not denying the presence of irony and self-consciousness in indie! I don't think anyone would describe Merritt as an emotionalist in Antony terms, but yes -- I'm talking about a specific strain / brand of indie records. And I'm talking less about emotion, really, and more about aesthetics -- i.e., the same reasons Cocteau Twins don't throw a funny roots-rock song onto Treasure.

anymore

i actually don't like antony and the johnsons that much, but then again i only heard it once. it's that last couple of lines that put me off. who's to say what we should care about?

but xgau hated the radio skits! the only difference songwriting-wise is the lack of funny sound effects, which you might have missed if you only played it once.

that seems somehow sad to me. i don't really read reviews to read what the "audience" reaction will be/is, usually. tho mostly i'm not even sure what you were trying to say, other than "people react in this way to these things" which doesn't resonate with me so much. aside from being not sure about it, it doesn't even seem interesting to me, y'know, whatever the assumed "consensus" on things is. that's why we get 10-billion boring year-end lists.

No one wants Chan to crack a smile in the middle of Moon Pix, you know?

no one? i dunno about that. a l'il humor wouldn't hurt her music much, i think.

Heed his words. And never ever listen to the Clap Your Hands lip-flapper sing.

xpost - J I'm not even really talking about the content of the Antony album, I'm talking about the approach to it at the end of that text. That and the mode of fandom: I really don't know that those metaphorical-political concerns are really that wrapped up in appreciation of the records. (You kind of separate them yourself, right; you rate the tunes and singing higher than the lyrical matter.) Possibly the issue is that Christgau is focused enough on the subject matter that he doesn't realize the album's boosters are enjoying something well apart from just that.

like, fair enough that our timely friend doesn't like antony; what bothers me about the review is the way it is far more concerned with the alleged perceptions and opinions of some supposed indie scene hegemony than the music itself. "indie denizens"? dude is boxing shadows.

in my experience, too, it just doesn't cut it to judge who supposedly has one quality of life versus another. just 'cause someone's middle class and white or something doesn't innately give their life less suffering than someone from a third world country or whatever, if I am to parse the Poobah properly there. also, to say that the reason folks dig antony is 'cause he has a PC agenda is super lame. xgau just sounds like a prig, and yes i am writing this defensively 'cause i really *enjoyed* the fuck out of this record. i also enjoy never taking the dean seriously.

Smog and Leonard Cohen- lotsa laugh lines, self-undercutting, and irony

Low: within the art there is some humor, but it's wayyyy dark and maybe primarily confined to cover choices. However, their between song banter can be hilarious.

Codeine: can't think of any humor going on at all, not that they come off as pompous or pretentious (I don't think they do), but I can't think of any clear "laugh lines".

I had this one Jandek album that had some other guy singing these kind of blues songs. They weren't funny, but it was funny that they were on the album.

"But bleak/heavy/powerful isn't whiny/mopey."

i said he could be bleak and heavy AND he could be whiny and mopey. he does more than one thing.

"and do you think *The Anal Staircase* is a humorous song title?"

Yes I do.

Current 93 also have a sense of humor, but it's sly and occasional- check out the deliberately goth-baiting EP "A Gothic Love Song". The whole Noddy imagery throughout the early years of Current 93 is half-humorous/half-unsettling.

Because during the week-long course of this thread I've also been trawling through the whole history of the Consumer Guide, and trying to figure out why it is that Christgau hates so much of everything I like, and apart from the obvious age and indie and other to-each-his-own stuff I come up with this: Christgau seems to want his music to have well-rounded personality. Cf the Antony review that started us off, where he wants the melodrama cut with something else. He spends a lot of time analyzing the personalities that people present (in words and music), and scrutinizing them on that pseudo-moral level, which is a cool enough habit that I don't even mind how much he points that skepticism at men ten times more than women. And so I can see why this makes him unhelpful to my personal tastes, sometimes: I kind of like art when it isn't well-rounded, when it gets to work on making one element of personality concrete. I like bands as stand-ins for states of being I don't plan on experiencing all the time. This is totally an "indie" sensibility as opposed to his "universal" one, which is totally fair-enough -- but it's good to have my own mental picture of why we're not on the same page.

(NB he uses the same formulation he uses with Antony a lot, or maybe just a lot for the kinds of records I'm interested in -- "those interested in [perceived personal/political aspect of record] will go for this." Does this mean the "indie aesthetic" basically amounts to the love of special interests?)

the new orleans show was cancelled because of katrina, so perhaps not all that surprising.

What a homophobic idiot. I would have "retired" him from the Voice on the basis of that doggerel alone.

OK i don't even know what this means

you should see me on a scale. oof! did i have to eat the WHOLE pie?

As his advocacy of the Pet Shop Boys, early Rufus Wainwright, Imperial Teen, and the Scissor Sisters proves.

Are you asking us to parse Robert Christgau's sentence?

I wonder whether he's off base with regard to the lack of humor in the music, too. I mean, I perceive some deadpan humor in the absurd, overstylized, insanely risky faux-grandeur of it. Whether or not that humor is intentional is another matter, but that's the way laffs work, right? Just 'cuz Xgau isn't laughing doesn't mean there isn't anything funny about it.

I wonder if Christgau shit a brick out when he found out that the Scissor Sisters derived a great amount of influence from one of the musical artists Christgau was most especially harsh on in the '80s. Need I name the artist in question? (BTW, if you don't know me, Google "scissor sisters" and "the reason we got into music" for the artist's name.)

A+ classic christgau clusterfuck

they don't make 'em like this anymore

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