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.

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)

...