This is the thread where you ask for help in parsing one of Robert Christgau's sentences.

Transplants? On initial listen, it sounded like weak loops and a guy barking on top of it. I was hopefully since I figured Rancid raps would sound like the verse to "Time Bomb" or something. I wanna hear it again but it was pretty ungainly. Plus I don't WANT people to sing about being materialist criminals when they're NOT them. Real rappers are bad enough these days. Unless it's like, really smart and funny. Which it didn't seem to be.

Sheesh, you guys, he's using "back-in-the-day" as a noun...as in old-style...that old bastard...the back-in-the-day is recommended to them...where's Strunk and White when you need 'em?

I don't think Meltzer's problem with Christgau and Marcus has anything to do with "PC" or that back-in-the-day (adj.) stuff...he just thinks they don't understand that being a bad boy is the right of rock journalists, just as it is the right of some guy in the New York Dolls. There's some rather blatant personal animus in there too, which grumpy old Meltzer doesn't hide...I mean, I would be grumpy too if an editor called me up and told me, "Get out your thesaurus, it's word choice time," as R.M. asserts R.C. did (in "A Whore Just Like the Rest"). But yeah, he does think rock ended with the first Moby Grape album or something.

I don't capitalize rock and roll...that was, you know, a joke...although I had the misfortune to spend a couple of months in Cincinnati, Ohio once and was appalled to see that, in the alternative weekly there, the music editor capitalized EVERY SINGLE possible permutation of "genre"--Jazz Rock, Folk Rock, Singer Songwriter, Classic Pop, Blues, Blues Rock, Emo, Alternative Rock, Grunge, Harmolodic Pop, Post-Big-Star-Power Pop, Power Pop...

I think that the end result of this is that Xgau should get a new editor, like MEEEEEEE.

I was thinking about this last night, about how deceptive album grades can be compared to whatever private connection the reviewer has with the record. I was listening to a CD, and I said to myself "This is a three-star record if I've ever heard one. It's nice in no particularly spectacular way, it's pretty but not terribly original or statement-making, and it's doomed for a life in cut-out bins all the world over. And yet, I like it. A lot. I can't stop listening to it. But I'd be lying if I were to grade it and give it more than three stars."

Oooh... you claim you don't like rock critics and you use the word "angst." I renounce my crush on you. :-(

As much as I love Ol' Meltz, that imitation is spot-on.

I don't understand your comment (Christ, I'm sorry I ever mentioned Meltzer to this crowd, by the way...)

about the incorrect use of "is" in the sentence

"Surrounding outtakes that were just outtakes is back-in-the-day recommended to Tim and Missy (even has some pronunciation in it) and four autobiographical pieces."

Am I missing something here? Chriss-gow is saying "Surrounding outtakes that were just outtakes is old-style stuff recommended to Tim and Missy." How is this incorrect?

I think the major problem is that I would like to become more engaged with the sort of music Christgau reviews, but I'm simply not at the moment. Perhaps this is why so much of his writing is lost on me. It's my loss, I suppose.

Bit of both. I mean, I appreciate the universally grokked understanding of the star system (even though grades are horribly inflated in venues like Rolling Stone). I know what "3 stars" means and I'm comfortable with the definition, although I'd just as soon use "3 stars" as a descriptive tool to get across the feel of a record, the place it occupies in the music world, etc. As a rating in and of itself, though, it's faulty. It doesn't tell me much about the record's intangible qualities.

Surrounding [X] is [Y] and [Z]. But "[Y] and [Z]" is a plural construction. The only way to make it non-plural is the chop the sentence up like this:

Surrounding [outtakes that were just outtakes] is [back-in-the-day] recommended to ([Tim and Missy (even has some pronunciation in it)] and [four autobiographical pieces]).

Surrounding [X] is [Y] recommended to ([Z] and [W]). But recommending [X] to [W] doesn't make sense. And if you take [W] out of the compound prepositional phrase, you're right back at the plural problem.

God help me, I am a grammar bore.

Surrounding outtakes that were just outtakes and four autobiographical pieces is back-in-the-day recommended to Tim and Missy (even has some pronunciation in it).

well, this depends how many "stars" three is on a scale of. but if you like it a *lot* and can't stop listening to it, jody, why do you think how "important" it is otherwise even matters? a good record is a record you LIKE. PERIOD. not acnowledging THAT would be lying.

All of it (the bulk of it in the abstract) is recommended to Missy and Tim. If he'd enumerated each component, piece by piece, then he would've said, "Surrounding outtakes are echo, use of dialect humor, fast talking, loops, more loops, simulated orgasms and gunshots, and samples from both Silkworm and Ennio Morricone, all of which are recommended to..." But that's not what he said. Plus, he's only recommending "back-in-the-day" to Missy and Tim not "four autobiographical pieces."

This is naive. There are thousands of different shades to what "good" means. It's never as simple as merely "liking" something.

Also, I didn't use the word "important." My interest isn't in the album's importance writ large, it's in its function as a thing to buy, a thing to consume, a thing that sits among other things in record stores and (abstractly) in magazine pages and on my shelf when I need a thing to reach for.

Shut up, Dan.

Emphasis more on the "it's this thing" than any of the buy/consume rhetoric here.

= it's pretty, but it's not important.

as if prettiness, in and of itself, can't sometimes be enough.

British critics, in contrast, were skinny opportunists who listened once, rewrote the press release, added some sneer about class, then sold your record down the Record and Tape Exchange at Notting Hill Gate.

and who the hell in america calls their elders "sir"?

and if american critics are so stuck on the past, how come it was the british guys who thought oasis were important?

though obviously it's true that american rock critics never sell promo CDs; can't argue with you there.

OK. On one hand, prettiness is enough -- i.e. "I like it because it's pretty" is valid praise. On the other hand, lots of records are "pretty," so no, it's not enough; it's too reductive. In this case, the record's averageness is one of its defining characteristics. When I listen to records, the first thing I think is "Well, what is this? What little niche does it occupy in the grand snapshot? How can I pin this down, understand it, come to terms with it?" And I can say "This is a forgettable, unremarkable album that came out in 1997; I see it in one out of every nine cut-out bins I visit; the music is sort of amateurishly played and not that well-written, but there's something to it that strikes a particular chord with me and strongly evokes an interesting time in indie rock. And this is the type of record I'll pull out in six months when I'm bored with all my other CDs and I'm idly scanning the shelf for a disc I haven't heard in a while and should probably listen to more." So... not a 5-star record, but it's just as essential if you need a record that serves the function of a good 3-star record.

They don't! I didn't say that! The words I used were examples of why a record might be canonized.

BEST POSTS EVER!

I feel mingled admiration and dismay about a figure like Christgau. In Britain we just don't have this kind of literary-humanist lifelong rock critic at all, just as we don't have literary-humanist rock stars like Lou Reed, who starts his career studying with Delmore Schwartz and collaborating with Andy Warhol, and ends it adapting Poe and making respectable distortion on his guitar, distortion with tradition behind it. Instead, in Britain, we have rock stars like Bryan Ferry who studies with Richard Hamilton but then becomes a 'gent', and we have critics like Paul Morley, who start by writing about rock but then move on to 'serious' reviews in the Sunday Papers and BBC 2, and who would feel a bit snubbed by commissions to review pop records.

Literary humanist dignity is great in theory. Especially if you're getting on yourself. But it's... cracker barrel. 'Better with age' is generally a lie.

And Paul M was reviewing records really quite recently - also his TV appearances have mostly been on BBC1/C4 clip shows lately.