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.

And the Voice reviews are ALWAYS months late. Chuck, y'wanna speak to that?

not centered around the week of release like a goddamn sales catalog != late

maybe he's saying
without indie denizens
there's no antony

matos OTM about being late.

jeann3 otmfm

OTMFM X ONE MILLION (sez a guy who likes the Antony record OK)

Hooray!

"Late" means that you're past the point of providing useful information about the album/single to your readership. Unless you have something really pertinent or intelligent to add a YEAR after the albums release, that sucker is LATE. Anything on this particular one seem like it sheds light to the nature of 'Bird'? Or doesn't it seem more like a tardy weigh-in on a "timely" subject?

"speak to" = "address," not "talk about"

is an issue something you address or discuss? unless you've got the issue at hand propped up in front of you, perhaps in a seated theater whose podium you're standing behind, I tend to think of it as something that's discussed.

you're not crazy at all

Secondly, show me the lyric in "Hope There's Someone" that is culturally limited to *any* community or nationality. Whenever a gay person makes art it's "gay art" first and "art" second-- to panicky straight people who can't figure out if it's cool for them to like it or not. It's sad that he's exposing the identificatory limits of his sympathy and imagination so publically, but that's his problem.

Well, to some degree I do have to be timely. If a band is coming to town and the record seems noteworthy enough ("noteworthy," btw, is the word I meant more than "major" earlier, at least as far as my own seeing of things goes), I'm compelled to either run something in advance or review the show a week later. But it's not a hard-and-fast rule, nor should it be.

And the reason most of us don't weigh in on them publicly is the fear of being/seeming "late." Which isn't a bad thing entirely, because there's already SO MUCH stuff out there about many of these artists/records that adding one more voice to the pile seems kinda pointless six or ten months after the fact. Let's say Kanye West doesn't release another album until early 2008. Unless he gets hospitalized or makes news on the level of his Bush comments, why would anyone in July 2006 want to read a think piece on Late Registration? There've already been dozens of those!

there is some misreading going on, I think. understandably so, but yeah, that's always been his aim--it's one person's listening and only one person's.

you may not be reading close enough. he says that those aligned w/ A's worldview will "feel" his songs, while those un-aligned should "enjoy" something else, i.e. "feel" /= "enjoy"

oy fucking vey.

the latter, most likely

xpost to Anthony: That's kinda my point: a review is (or should be) primarily meant as a bottom line tool to determine whether or not the art in question is worth the time/cash/etc. not about how goddamn clever the author is.

oh please. this is like saying "the purpose of all music is to provide happy beats for me to dance around to." no it fucking is not. I may like that kind of music (and dislike some of it), but that's not what it's all for, and the same goes with criticism, and with any/everything else.

FWIW, the few times I've been called upon to do writer for freebie/hire, I listen to whatever I'm writing about relentlessly and for days. Probably a topic for a different thread, but how often and over what period of time do you suppose most reviewers listen to a piece before writing about it? And does greater exposure lead to a more seasoned/reasoned review?

most reviewers don't spend nearly enough time w/a record before writing about it, including myself, because we're tied to deadlines and the kind of "timeliness" you seem to value a lot. several records I've reviewed I go back to after the fact and realize I misheard or was too excitable about.

shouldn't that be "whom"?

"address" vs. "discuss": I don't want to drag out a semantic debate that has nothing to do with Xgau (there are plenty of semantic debates to be had within Xgau) -- but whenever I've heard the phrase "speak to," it's been in the context of "such-and-such issue has been raised, can you speak to that?" As in, "can you respond to/retort/address it?" and [implied] "I'd like you to do so because you're the expert here."

No offense, but this just laughable.

haha I just started noticing the phrase's widespread use recently and it's been driving me batshit, figured I'd go off on it somewhere someday and look where it ended up. sigh.

tell us more, o sage one

Me, the guy's voice annoys me like Rufus Wainwright's. I only liked him on that Lou Reed live comp released a couple of years ago.

which, I'm guessing, is a hell of a let less pretentious (especially given that the pretension/joke is admitted) than, oh, Antony and the Johnsons

"Late" means that you're past the point of providing useful information about the album/single to your readership.

I'm certainly part of Xgau's readership and probably not too far off his intended audience, and afaic it's rare that there's any such thing as "late" with him - if something's undeniable he's going to let us know pretty quick. If it's not, it will take a little longer, and I'm willing to wait and let his better ears do the listening for me and save my money in the interim. If it takes much longer, I know that he doesn't have much that's good to say. There are rare occasions when there's something I know I'm going to like because it pushes my buttons even if it's only so-so and I don't wait for him, but I have few enough vested interests these days that such occasions are nearly non-existent.

People generally fail to get him because they're insufficiently familiar with his method/terms of art which he has explained in print and are familiar to his regular readership.

Christgau's pimping straight liberal "compassion fatigue" as a global perspective

please, he's saying that even if you approach the relevant issues with the specific perspective (which he admittedly doesn't quite share), you're still not going to like this record very much if you have open ears. and that if you don't, he wouldn't recommend the record as the right place to approach that perspective.

and blount, for fuck's sake. all i'm saying is that a poorly written review that comes out a year after an album hits that basically charts the listeners personal biases is pretty useless both as a thought piece or as a recommendation. you got any other axes you feel like grinding, though?

or, alternately, you didn't make your point very well, whatever it is you brought in

Anyway I started this thread mostly because of that last line, because it seemed ridiculously wrong-headed to me and I was wondering if any of Christgau's fans could decode something in it that I was missing -- seems like the final call is that it really is just kinda dumb. The only "explanation" I can think of for it is that he finds the music on the record just so patently not-good that the only reason he can think of for anyone liking it is "political." Which still seems deeply wrongheaded / misreading.

xpost GRRR this is not about whether Antony is good; I could care less whether Christgau likes Antony or not; I'm just totally put off by his reasoning in those last few sentences!

http://images-eu.amazon.com/images/P/0006490344.02.LZZZZZZZ.jpg

I'M LIKE A BIRD

http://www.januschmidicollection.de/Cover/Cover%20Nelly%20Furtado.JPG

Joya [Drag City, 1997]
"Why are you sad?" inquired the alt-rock mag. "I dunno," replied the former child actor d/b/a Palace and such. "I guess I was born." Admired for his reticence, sexual ambivalence, and general refusal of formal commitment, I mean closure, Oldham lacks neither talent nor originality, and up against some truly lousy competition this is his most melodic record. But to declare him a new avatar of Appalachian purity is absurd, not just because he's a rich city kid who can't sing, but because his purity is a candid affectation--a standard variation on late alt's agoraphobic cultivation of ineptitude as a token of spiritual superiority. Why is he sad? Because sad is easier than happy--almost comforting, in a chickenshit way. C+

Reviewing is the process of describing and passing judgment on something in order for people who have not experienced the thing in question to decide if they would want to experience it. Criticism is the process of making connections, exploring ideas, all that kinda stuff. They can occur simultaneously but since reading criticism requires a larger body of knowledge than reading a review, the existence of reviewing separate from criticism seems like a valid thing. The reason I think people here want to make them inseparable is that there's almost no place for pop music criticism aside from reviewing (as is not the case for almost all other genres except for TV at this point) so the idea of writing a review that's not also a piece of criticism seems like a wasted opportunity. But reviewing is supposed to be primarily for the reader's benefit and I've heard from many people that reviews that are trying to be criticism often just end up unread.

"I mentioned in a previous lecture that there's a difference between criticism and reviewing. Criticism tries to assess the intrinsci merits of a work of art, be it a film or a book or a movie. Reviewing is more interested in whether a particular type of audience will like it. Reviewing, then, is much more adapted to the marketplace. Its about matching products to consumers."

xpost Gabbneb + Alfred WTF can anyone explain why the Antony record is an indie "special-interest" record, apart from the fact that, umm, Christgau says so? And if so, how more so than, umm, Comet Gain?

x-post calling the Antony record "special interest" is seriously iffy.

"Poet, critic and blogger Alison Croggon made the excellent point that theatre reviewing is usually straight journalism -- a brief description of an event, written to a tight deadline -- where 'criticism' is a more leisurely, reflective and discursive activity that puts theatre in the context of the wider culture."

dude's voice is not as good as some of the greatest voices ever
emotion without irony or humor is spiritually weak
dude is too privileged for me to have to feel empathy for him
dude's album will only appeal to folks highly interested in aids and transgender issues

having read this, i don't know a whole lot about the music and i don't think xgau is very clever. but i guess i shouldn't buy it.

Hi. I believe we've met.

in other words, reviewing = trade-mag writing and criticism = isn't. hmmm.

But, conversely, anything that could turn down knob on the how-clever-the-author-is-O-meter would make me a happy camper.

The end leaves a bad taste because it implies -- of MUSIC, of all things -- that our personal experience / empathy / ranking of "importance" of the subject matter is the critical element in enjoyment! And I'll give him the benefit of the doubt that he's just saying this is the case with Antony's record in particular -- not music in general -- but if so I see absolutely zero reason WHY he seems to think that's true of Antony. ("Nina Simone is better" does not strike me as an adequate reason why.)

I don't know that that's really what he's trying to do, though his grafs always move so decisively toward the gavel-sounding moment of the letter-grade that to be fair it's hard to read him differently. Still, I think of him as sort of the Paul Celan of rock critics, trying to condense all the information he has to impart into phrases and sentences that eventually carry more weight than they really can, with the result that they're really (jargon alert here) text-productive: vide the Joya review upthread, which states the case against Palace 1997 as compactly as is possible in a paragraph that, yes, is worthy of extremely long threads agreeing or disagreeing or calling bullshit - which is impassioned debate, which is what criticism ought to inspire, which is wha Xgau does let's face it Charlie.

Just my take obv.

I'm all for critical reviews, but I also think there's an assumption here that you're a bad writer if you make any effort to tell someone if they should buy a product, and that's sort of the core purpose of reviewing.

(Which I know we might not like, but...)

Now That I've Found You: A Collection [Rounder, 1995]
Even with the greatest voices, tastes are personal--where you might prefer Aretha's Diane Warren song, I'd probably go for Al Green's. Krauss isn't quite in that class, but after this compilation-plus overcame my personal penchants, I began to think she was only a notch below. However much fans appreciated the child prodigy for her fiddle, they love the woman for her kind, precise, intent soprano. And not only is this a singer's showcase, it's a pop singer's showcase. Sure she's still country--bluegrass, even. She's nothing if not principled. But she also ropes in not just the Beatles but the Foundations and, believe it or not, Bad Company. And by reclaiming guest tracks from specialist albums by Jerry Douglas, Tony Furtado, and the Cox Family, she oversteps the sonic boundaries of her admirable but specialized band. Best in show (after the Beatles, the Foundations, and Bad Company): a sexy little sacred number. A-

his point is to acknowledge that the dude has chops, but to say that there's better places to go for that sort of thing (as well as other better places to go for the other sorts of things that Antony is - see Rufus, et al). as always, he's looking for a point of marginal distinction, i.e. a reason to spend your money on this rather than on something else, or not at all.

mookie: a differing opinion
dude's voice is not as good as some of the greatest voices ever
Probably likely, but that's a hell of a poor reason to ignore someone's work.
emotion without irony or humor is spiritually weak
Only if you're so cynical and unhappy that you need an excuse to feel something.
dude is too privileged for me to have to feel empathy for him
Privileged people don't deserve empathy when they feel pain? Wha?
dude's album will only appeal to folks highly interested in aids and transgender issues
While I have more than a passing care about both of the above they're not exactly my raison d'etre and I still thought it was a hella nice disc. I daresay that if you picked up the album and didn't know a thing about the performer, you might be hard pressed to determine if it was a man or a woman, white or black, etc.

show me one good piece of writing whose entire purpose is to simply review by your definition, and is free of critical thought. (I almost said "memorable piece of writing" but lord knows there's acres of memorably bad writing out there that does exactly this.)

xpost Can anyone actually dig in and explain the judgment that Antony is a special-interest record? Seriously: why? Is the idea here really that any singer who's not as good as Nina Simone is thus a special-interest variation?

aside from the idea that Sasha is trying to "match" anyone with anything, as if he were a junior marketer with his eye on a promotion, you're making two completely separate points here. being aware of your audience is a given with any kind of writing with an audience of more than one.

It is to me.

Then again, Gore Vidal's dictum -- all criticism is, in essence, description -- is just as valid.

xpost Matos if we're taking Antony as by-definition special-interest "indie" -- which I'm not sure is a good idea -- then why would the review start out comparing his voice to Aretha and Billie? (What's the point of ghettoizing if you're not gonna talk about the context of the ghetto?)

I think I know the quote you're talking about, but I think you're being a little willful here regardless. (unless it's a different quote, in which case c'est la vie.) I just don't think that matching a writing tone to an audience is the same thing as matching a product to its market. the former is about getting a point across, regardless of whether anyone buys a damn thing as a result. the latter is entirely about sales-results. see my point?

well, this is pretty fundamental, unless i'm missing something. are you saying that music is separable from the words? that you can listen to one without the other? that different people made them? that they express different attitudes? his response here is to both, as they are to some extent inextricable.

I also don't quite understand who some of you think I am, but whatever.

This is going to be the title of my National Solo Album Month joint

Sure, but c'mon, you know I'm not saying it's your job to sell any product you're given to the audience you're writing for. There's no one right way of writing about something, and if you like something, it seems logical for you to want to write about it in such a way that the audience you're writing for will be most likely to understand why it's great. That doesn't necessarily mean they'll buy it, but it does mean you're concerned primarily with the object under discussion rather than its wider connections.

Of course in the case of Sasha he also has a) the liberty to only write about things he likes, and b) editors who will probably kill anything they think isn't right for their audience. (And god bless those editors, by the way, for being far more generous about this last point than the editors of most similar publications.)

i don't see how this follows at all.

Sleater-Kinney?

he's reviewing one guy who wrote both the words and the music and performed them simultaneously (well, you know what i mean). but to some extent he is of that opinion - the musical and political aesthetics are analogous.

I.e. I'm deeply curious as to what Christgau would think of this album if Antony were singing about whatever holds "metaphoric-political centrality" in Christgau's world.)

well he'd probably be more predisposed, but Xgau is basically saying Antony probably wouldn't sing about same, because if he did he wouldn't be Antony

Sleater-Kinney?

see what I mean?

Here's a site that's really good at it with movies:

http://www.capalert.com/

Granted, there's a bit of a religious bias there, but the prose used in each review is extremely deterministic and possibly auto-generated.

The reviews there are essentially seeded by values!

I'd like to see someone do this with music reviews... seriously!

You might be right if and only if 'queer studies angle' is different from 'queer angle' (and I'm not sure you'd be right even then). He gets that this is a big indie record. He doesn't think it's a good indie record, even if you somehow pretend the words aren't there. His framing isn't about witholding of empathy, it's about explaining to you why his rejection of Antony ISN'T witholding of empathy, because it's Antony's referents with whom he should empathize, not any so-so singer who chooses to refer to them.

everyone's big pass on Drew's challenge to point out what, precisely, is so queer-centric about the emotional content,

it's not queer-centric. it's SELF-centered.

Arthur sez he first saw him in NYC about ten years back as part of a larger group.

The Chronic [Interscope, 1992]
The crucial innovation of this benchmark album isn't its conscienceless naturalization of casual violence. It's Dre's escape from sampling. Other rappers, as they are called, have promised to create their own musical environments, usually without revealing how much art and how much publishing fuels their creative resolve. But Dre is the first to make the fantasy pay out big-time. The world he hears in his head isn't the up-to-date P-Funk fools say they hear--that would be too hard. Instead he lays bassline readymades under simulations of Bernie Worrell's high keyb sustain, a basically irritating sound that in context always signified fantasy, not reality--stoned self-loss or, at a best Dre never approaches, grandiose jive. This is bell-bottoms-and-Afros music, its spiritual source the blaxploitation soundtrack, and what it promises above all is boom times for third-rate flautists--sociopathic easy-listening. Even if it's "just pop music," as some rationalize, it's bad pop music. C+

to make it clearer, Xgau also might think more of Antony if he sounded more like S-K (who don't occupy remotely the same subject-matter landscape as far as Xgau is concerned)

Grace [Columbia, 1994]
Although Tim's vocal traces are in his genes as surely as John's are in Julian's, it's wrong to peg him as the unwelcome ghost of his overwrought dad. Young Jeff is a syncretic asshole, beholden to Zeppelin and Nina Simone and Chris Whitley and the Cocteau Twins and his mama--your mama too if you don't watch out. "Sensitivity isn't being wimpy," he avers. "It's about being so painfully aware that a flea landing on a dog is like a sonic boom." So let us pray the force of hype blows him all the way to Uranus. C

Okay, all of a sudden Xgau is the best writer who ever lived on this planet.

and as far as Xgau is concerned the core of Antony is a moderate narcissist who doesn't sing well enough to interest many who would not otherwise be touched by his subject matter

No - he also thinks his voice sucks.

But I'm sure Christgau's apologists will patiently explain to me why I'm wrong here. Before they do that, I'd like to point out that this is not for me about liking or not liking Antony's record. There are plenty of people who just don't like what he does and they don't think it works as art. Fair enough. This is about the political implications of Christgau's rhetoric, and his ghettoizing, marginalizing response to Antony's record. As we already know, large numbers of straight people already enjoy Antony's music. I find it extremely implausible that they are only doing this to indulge in PC pity parties and feelgood backslapping about how non-homophobic and openminded they are.

If you like this record it's because you're interested in the special-interest subject matter. Because I say so."

no, he's saying that if you like the record, your ears aren't as open as his. because he's heard more and thought harder than you have.

I have discovered Kiki and Herb = I have read the Voice listings section twice

Hey asshole, reading a listing doesn't amount to hearing, and even if it did, how come nobody read that listing till 2005?

you mean how K&H put out that live album and it was way better than the studio one?

I guess that explains it, thanks

I.e.: Hi, I'm in fifth grade. You totally only like that band because the singer's cute.

Which, as a review ending, is basically just baiting someone like me. I like the Antony record. My liking of it has nothing to do with my perceiving any metaphoric-political centrality of transgender issues and the AIDS epidemic. Add this to basically everyone I know who likes Antony, and it would seem that Christgau is just, umm, wrong! As fuck!

This isn't really a valid argument, any more than "people only like MIA because she's from Sri Lanka" is, but I don't see where he's arguing for the marginalization of gay art as much as he's trying to argue that people's liberal sensibilities are getting the better of them. Which is annoying heterocentric but not really what you're accusing it of being. He's not saying there aren't interesting themes of mortality there, just that it's all being elevated by this extratextual stuff.

By which I mean that clearly he's admitting there's a lot else there besides just 'all that gay stuff.'

This is about the political implications of Christgau's rhetoric, and his ghettoizing, marginalizing response to Antony's record.

because Xgau's audience really goes in for ghettoization and marginalization?

I'm used to people on Christgau threads defending him by adding words to his reviews, but now you're actively contradicting what the text of the review says.

I think that's implicit in everything he writes. He should have to add it as a tag to every review? Everyone who's perplexed by Xgau's capsules will understand him a hell of a lot better by reading one or all of the introductions to his decade books.

Arguing that "people's liberal sensibilities are getting the better of them" can be a fair argument, dude, but that doesn't mean it isn't just plain WRONG! I'll say it for like the 85th time: I know pretty much zero people who like this record for reasons constructed mainly around this perceived subject matter. Do you?

x-post

1) Antony has this indie-stylised "pure" approach to singing which emphasises the frailty, pain and general awfulness of his existence. His style is a cheap grab for the listener's empathy which I can see through, and anyway, he's not as interesting or good or universal a singer as x, y & z.

2) However, indie denizens are suckers for this shit, but they are not to be trusted (so disregard the high polling for this record in P&J)

3) "But Christgau! This is not just an indie affectation! This guy has had a really bad life, read his bio! His voice is a conduit of pure pain and emotion, straight from his life to our hearts!"

4) "Who the fuck cares? Not only have billions had it worse, but even if one of those billions had made this album I still wouldn't like it or empathise with it, and I don't see why I would be obliged to."

In other words, the second half of the piece is the ballast for the first: Christgau first dismisses Antony as being a vehicle for pointless indie over-emoting, then dismisses any attempt by an imaginary opponent to make out Antony as being objectively more than just a vehicle for pointless over-emoting.

The only stumbling block is the last line about the political centrality of transgender issues, which I think can actually mean: "if you (the indie listener who bigs up Antony) aren't actually convinced of the metaphoric-political centrality of transgender and AIDS issues, stop pretending that you "feel" Antony's pain and start admitting that you enjoy this album as an aesthetic-stylistic exercise."

In other words, he's not dismissing these issues and arguing that the the record only works if you take those issues seriously. Instead, he is deeply suspicious of the notion of the music-critic establishment as a whole "feeling" Antony, and he's trying to draw a line in the sand between those who can legitmately claim to "feel" Antony and those who are just dressing up their enjoyment of it with an air of grand pathos.

Of course I'm reading a lot into a very compressed (as per) piece which might indeed be housing the sorts of blinkered political views that people above have ascribed to it.

Eppy otm about persona

Signing off for now: this text still looks to me like the Angry White Male of record reviews. "Right, he suffers." Look at Christgau's defensive posture! Look at this ridiculous assumption -- this assumption that Antony wants Christgau to feel sorry for him! And look at him run away from it and cast off the record toward some "special interest!" Look at the idea that "empathy" is some kind of currency that the mature white man holds and doles out grudgingly among the various groups supposedly begging for it! This seems so fucking pinched and defensive, this weird feeling of assault, like someone's trying to make Christgau feel sorry for Antony and Christgau is rebelling against it; it's disturbingly 1996-Republican. Whereas maybe some might find that Antony made a fairly lovely record (maybe not Billie Holiday, but pretty lovely) about issues that involve him -- not some piteous application for Christgau Empathy Relief.

Tim that strikes me as a possible but very generous reading, and one I don't know enough about Christgau to go out of my way to adopt. And more importantly I still wouldn't find that worthwhile, for exactly those ombudsmanship reasons -- it would become not a review of Antony's record but a review of the perceived reasons why other people like Antony. In which case just go all out and say "Dud of Last Year's Critical Consensus on Stuff."

i like how everyone in this thread keeps forgetting to read this line. the next two proceed from it forcefully and beautifully and actually completely free from drew and nitsuh's concerns/misreadings. guys, he's knocking the album down because he thinks it's kitsch!

I feel fairly certain that it would be the natural reading if you knew more about Christgau

I think that's what the review actually is whichever way you spin it.

It would be interesting to compare/contrast the politics implied in this piece with those in his M.I.A. piece (oh no!)

xpost
Nick that's exactly the line I'm talking about in this post! What in the FUCK is this kingly "obliged to empathize" line? What kind of fucking currency does he think people want from his empathy? Why does he think there's some market of obligation for doling it out? That's fucking anti-human bullshit and seems to me to undercut the entire function of music in society. Some of us prefer to listen to music not as some empathy-market; some of us prefer to hear people make lovely music and then actually take some open approach to thinking about what they have to say.

Humour is not just jokes and ironic poses and winking detachment though. It's about providing some level of internal perspective on the pain and suffering presented elsewhere in the piece.

"Some of us prefer to listen to music not as some empathy-market; some of us prefer to hear people make lovely music and then actually take some open approach to thinking about what they have to say. "

Isn't this what Christgau is saying though, nabisco? I think his entire axe to grind here is disgust with the notion of indie-music as an empathy-market.

And in fact the amount of emotional expression in this vein which doesn't have some sort of humorous content is quite small I suspect - Morrissey (to use the obvious example) is just as OTT as Antony and can be just as straightforwardly sincere, but has a much higher humour content as well.

Certainly all the "universal touchstones" of angst have some humour quotient, unless I'm forgetting someone.

humor /= jokes
irony /= an ironic pose

you mean like what you do when you pick up a cd at the record store and then decide to put it back on the rack?

But Tim, part of what follows from that is that, so far as I can tell, people listen to Morrissey for vastly different reasons than they listen to Antony.

That empathy-market reversal there is another reasonable-sounding argument about this review that still strikes me as just plain wrong. Who's introducing an empathy market into the critical discourse? This review is. I still see no support for the assumption / contention in this piece that this perceived subject matter is why people like this record. I'm sure there are people out there who like the record for those reasons, but among music critics and the "indie" fans under discussion I see very little evidence of that stuff.

And focusing on that as an extra layer of Antony's dudness strikes me as even worse than the possibly non-existent thing he seems to think he's arguing against. The end of that review is a bit like if I said I liked Morgan Freeman's acting and you said "he sucks, you don't have to like him just because he's black." Why not even begin to respond to the idea that people might like the thing on its own merits, not as part of some perceived market of obligation and empathy?

xpost okay yes I think Drew and I are sympatico on this one.

yeah, how could anyone who begins an album with the lines, "Hope there's someone to take care of me/When I die, oh, when I die" POSSIBLY be eliciting the listener's sympathy?

EVERYTHING XGAU REVIEWS HAS TO PASS A UNIVERSALITY TEST FOR AT LEAST A LIMITED COMMUNITY (LIKE, FOR INSTANCE, THE GAY COMMUNITY) - IT'S WRITTEN INTO HIS GRADING SYSTEM (excerpted)...

An A is a record that rarely flags for more than two or three tracks. Not every listener will feel what it's trying to do, but anyone with ears will agree that it's doing it.

An A- is the kind of garden-variety good record that is the great luxury of musical micromarketing and overproduction. Anyone open to its aesthetic will enjoy more than half its tracks.

A *** Honorable Mention is an enjoyable effort consumers attuned to its overriding aesthetic or individual vision may well treasure.

A ** Honorable Mention is an likable effort consumers attuned to its overriding aesthetic or individual vision may well enjoy.

A * Honorable Mention is a worthy effort consumers attuned to its overriding aesthetic or individual vision may well like.

A Dud () is a bad record whose details rarely merit further thought. At the upper level it may merely be overrated, disappointing, or dull. Down below it may be contemptible.

A Turkey ({Tu}) is a bad record of some general import, although no artist should be saddled with more than two in a decade. What distinguishes a {Tu} from a is that it's reviewed and graded. I'm aware of no {Tu} lower than D, and a few even get a B, a grade reserved for Voice Dud of the Month, whereas the annual Turkey Shoot works down from B-. But such distinctions are, as the saying goes, academic. In this age of grade inflation, all of 'em flunk.

He's marginalizing someone because of their identity, and assuming that that person wasn't marking art but asking for sympathy.

he's marginalizing anyone who enjoys, as Tim said, the "indie-stylised "pure" approach to singing which emphasises the frailty, pain and general awfulness of his existence." if some or many of these people happen to be gay, so be it. but he likes a lot of gay people who have even marginally different aesthetics, i.e. cut with humor or irony.

Yes of course. The whole point of Christgau's piece, I think, is that most of the reasons that people would want to listen to Antony's music are fairly dud-like reasons (i.e. they don't "get" Christgau's wisdom about emotional expression).

"That empathy-market reversal there is another reasonable-sounding argument about this review that still strikes me as just plain wrong. Who's introducing an empathy market into the critical discourse? This review is."

There have been, though, a lot of reviews of the album which play up the "Antony's had a shift life/and gee you can really feel it" angle. And more generally a lot of music has been marketed on this basis (Cat Power concerts basically are an empathy-market). That said I think Christgau is over-emphasizing slightly the extent to which this is done (in the same way he over-emphasized the M.I.A. backlash) - if anything I was surprised that the transgender angle wasn't played up more than it was by the crit establishment.

"I still see no support for the assumption / contention in this piece that this perceived subject matter is why people like this record. I'm sure there are people out there who like the record for those reasons, but among music critics and the "indie" fans under discussion I see very little evidence of that stuff."

I don't think Christgau is arguing that though, I think he's arguing that people like the record because of the musical/stylistic choices, and then when critics write about it they are tempted to smear on this patina of socio-cultural worthiness because it makes for good copy.

Critic likes record + Critic has great angle upon which he can attach his enjoyment of the record (which gives the record some sort of socio-cultural air of importance, an aura of subversion even) = Record gets written about excessively and ends up winning the P&J poll.

I think the difference perhaps is that one can say quite straightforwardly "we should stop talking about this album in terms of it being rejected by a major label and start talking about it as an album" and not raise too many hackles.

It's much more fraught to say "we should stop talking about this album in terms of it being the work of a transgender artist and start talking about it as an album" because it's much less clear that the framing story and the music itself can be separated out, or whether doing so is desirable, or etc. etc.

O.K., I simplified things, but my point still stands. I realize that Xgau's use of "undercut" implies his preference for the kind of "internal perspective" you mention, but I don't necessarily see a lack of humour or irony as a "spiritual weakness" or flaw.
Antony's perspective might preclude the sort of humour or irony that Xgau seems to crave. Honestly, I haven't listened to most of the album (because Antony's voice makes me cringe) but I won't assume his emotional expression needs to be tempered by anything that isn't already there.

have most of the mainstream reviews (not features) talked about Antony as transgender artist? comparisons to Nina Simone etc, but i'm not sure that the vast majority haven't dealt with the album qua album just as they would a new Jeff Buckley album, if such a thing were to be released.

probably because we've seen how that's turned out

oh god no. she is horrible. like having teeth pulled. only if you have a serious case of whiteliberalguiltitis. or you live in france.

yeah, how could anyone who begins an album with the lines, "Hope there's someone to take care of me/When I die, oh, when I die" POSSIBLY be eliciting the listener's sympathy? -- Isn't it kind of self-centered on the listener's part to imagine that a singer's expression of a particular hope is a calculated bid for the listener's sympathy? Hell, if we're really gonna read this through an AIDS-crisis lens, isn't this just a pretty basic unpitiful non-maudlin hope? Why is the only option here to feel sorry for Anthony, when the hope expressed in that line is bascially the same hope everyone has? And hell, if we're gonna read this in terms of "universality," isn't that hope something that'd be a million times more resonant for, like, older people, like maybe my divorced parents, than for the younger indie demographic?

Not every listener will feel what it's trying to do, but anyone with ears will agree that it's doing it. -- Gabbneb, this is the part of the grading system that can be read as saying the exact opposite of what you're claiming about universality.

The whole point of Christgau's piece, I think, is that most of the reasons that people would want to listen to Antony's music are fairly dud-like reasons -- This is like saying "the whole point of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion is that Jews exert sinister control over everything" -- it may be his "point," but I'm deeply unconvinced that those are the reasons actual people like Antony, leave alone the reasons abstract people "would want to" like Antony. This is precisely what I'm complaining about.

I don't think Christgau is arguing that though, I think he's arguing that people like the record because of the musical/stylistic choices, and then when critics write about it they are tempted to smear on this patina of socio-cultural worthiness because it makes for good copy. -- In which case, per that previous quoted paragraph, this becomes not a review of the Antony record at all (some "consumer guide") and more a review of critical response to the album, which is another thing I'm, well, not so much complaining about as just pointing out.

that's certainly the impression Christgau gives of what puts him off about it. -- This regarding the voice, but it's just another example of people putting words in Christgau's mouth to explain his writing. (I was brought up to think it's a sign of bad writing/thinking when other people have to make up what your point was, but that's just me.) In any case that's definitely NOT the impression Christgau gives of what puts him off about the voice -- he explicitly lays out his opinion of the voice, which has nothing to do with emoting / purity / frailty or anything of the sort: he says Antony's voice, compared to various greats, is "thinner," "drier," and "more sustained." Christgau should just retire and let his supporters explain what he thinks of everything.

I dunno, young people have pretty melodramatic fantasies about what its like to be old, sick, dying etc.

no. this part of the grading system says that certain records (A's) are so good they transcend their specific niche. Xgau doesn't think Antony's is remotely such a record. he doesn't even think it's good enough to please people within the niche.

This is like saying "the whole point of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion is that Jews exert sinister control over everything"

you're comparing the indie aesthetic to anti-semitism?

if the singer isn't singing for an audience of one, than no, it isn't

Hell, if we're really gonna read this through an AIDS-crisis lens, isn't this just a pretty basic unpitiful non-maudlin hope?

most hopes of this sort become maudlin as soon as they're broadcast, AIDS-crisis lens or no AIDS-crisis lens. sure, most people hope for someone to take care of them when they die; you'd be unhuman not to. but why bring it up at all unless you're going for the throat, emotionally speaking? again, I like the Antony album fine, but to pretend it/he aren't pushing buttons is absurd.

I wasn't suggesting that people haven't known trouble, I'm just noting that there's also an audience that gets off on this type of thing as fantasy. Especially in indie rock.

The Arcade Fire to thread STAT

It's really a matter of whether or not you're offended that he assumes you've responded 'but he suffers!' to the first two sentences.

no, it's amplifying what is already obvious about what was written, and done for the purpose of demonstrating the parallels w/Binjominia's apparent problems with Antony's voice.

(I was brought up to think it's a sign of bad writing/thinking when other people have to make up what your point was, but that's just me.)

"thinner, drier, and more strained" certainly have their analogues in terms of emotional impact, and I'm sorry you refuse to recognize it. you're a lot smarter than that, I would have thought.

That said, I also think that part of the interest in that lyric does come from context -- an AIDS-related context in which having someone to care for you when you die is a much more immediate and practical concern than it might be if expressed in a more vague emotional sense. I object to the idea that having that reaction has anything to do with thinking there's some kind of "centrality" to AIDS or gay issues. I think implying that it does have to do with that centrality is just another example of the classic white-hetero-man tactic of seeing every bit of "difference" as somehow political. I don't see any "centrality" to those issues, and I don't care about the politics of Antony; I think it's interesting in an ART sense how that context can lurk behind and add additional tension to what would normally be a standard emotional hope. I certainly don't "feel sorry" for Antony-as-queer or Antony-as-affected-by-AIDS-crisis.

And Gabbneb I know you're not dumb enough to run with a comeback like that. The Protocols analogy means something very obvious: just because something is a text's "whole point" doesn't mean that the point is remotely true.

And yes, this is it exactly: whose exactly reviewed Antony by saying "the music's so-so, but he's suffered so much and we're obligated to empathize?"

x-post

And yes, this is it exactly: whose exactly reviewed Antony by saying "the music's so-so, but he's suffered so much and we're obligated to empathize?"

-- nabisco (--...), January 5th, 2006.

it's a crucial critical line though, esp for as absolutist a reviewer as xgau (e.g. he would never say "well this rock album is pretty good for being made by a bunch of thalidomide babies!")

*this is the tone I got from a lot of reviews, not my saying Antony is very sensitive, btw

Assumption does not equal argument, or even assertion.

Haha, I was just thinking earlier "xgau is writing for an audience of people that already agree with what he's about to say."

x-post there's plenty of his value assessments I don't agree with (part of why I wish he'd drop the damn grades), but I do think his descriptions tend to mesh with what I get from music too.

On the flip side, I still don't feel like anyone's done much to support some of the assumptions that really are there, and aren't getting filled in -- including the idea that people are responding some sort of pity/obligation when they enjoy this record.

no. but they are getting of on it by using it to aggrandize their own, far lesser troubles in a fashion analogous to the way metal or gangsta heads fantasize about their superiority through music choice.

I don't think you have to be transgendered or care about AIDS to relate to the hope that you don't fucking die alone.

no, of course not. but Xgau is saying that this, unlike the Comet Gain record, isn't a good exponent of a universal feeling, because its particular expression (magnitude) is highly specific, and in any event it's not very good.

Gabbneb I know you're not dumb enough to run with a comeback like that. The Protocols analogy means something very obvious: just because something is a text's "whole point" doesn't mean that the point is remotely true.

I misread what you were saying, in part because what you said was based on this fundamental misapprehension you continue to have about what he's saying about why people like the record. You're reading the review from the end backwards, when we've pointed out that that's not the way the analysis works.

It seems this thread has split into two obvious factions 'I like Antony and I really don't appreciate these claims he's making about his audience' and 'I like xgau so I'm giving him the benefit of the doubt.'

I would recharacterize as a split between those who have read lots of xgau and therefore give him the benefit of the doubt and those who haven't and therefore don't

a lot of the "explanations" here bring in so much stuff -- so much stuff that wasn't said -- that it's practically like Biblical exegesis:

well, yes, that's the way his criticism works - no capsule review is an island. rather you must cross-reference with many others to put the puzzle together. many people find doing so rewarding.

"Not only is his willingness to express emotion commoner than indie denizens imagine, his failure to undercut that emotion with irony or humor is a spiritual weakness."

why does he think that indie denizens think that antony's willingness to express emotion is uncommon? indie denizens listen to TONS of heartonsleeve stuff. they know it's common. and i don't agree with the last part either. it's speculation. either the emotion without irony or humor works or it doesn't. it's not some spiritual fault on the part of antony. it makes me think that the listener is uncomfortable with emotions that don't have room for irony or humor and that makes me believe that the listener might, in fact, have some spiritual weaknesses.

"Taste is personal, but I don't think Antony will be to that many people's tastes, and his voice doesn't stack up against some of the best singers ever. Indie kids only like him because they think being super-emotional is special, which it isn't. Plus Antony's too one-note emotional and could stand to undercut it with self-consciousness. Yeah, he's got something to be emotional about, but so does everyone, and I don't care. If you happen to think the stuff I perceive to be his subject matter is interesting, you'll like this record. Otherwise, it's not that good."

That's what it reads like to me, and that strikes me as a somewhat badly written / badly thought-through review.

and nabisco, I apologize for saying "I thought you were smarter than that." it was rude and uncalled for.

Of course this line is hardly ever taken by any reviewer ever, and it would be a lot harder to make strawmen of other critics (which is precisely what Christgau is doing here and I don't think anyone will dispute that) if we waited for such admissions.

This is why this debate reminds me of M.I.A.: no-one said "gee, her music's weak but she's got this cool political aura so let's give her an album an A+". But many critics claimed to like the music and the aura, and these critics were then accused by anti-M.I.A. critics of overrating the quality of the music on the basis of this supposedly cool political aura.

Problems with this accusation:

1) It's hard to prove
2) If not made with sufficient precision it unfairly implicates people who merely thought and said "I like the music" and left it at that.
3) It tends to imply that the "supposedly cool political aura" is somehow a negative, either explictly bad or false somehow.
4) It reduces the spectrum of critical commentary w/r/t the music to being about that aura.

Nonetheless, this accusation may well be true of many critics!

Replace "M.I.A." with "Antony" and "supposedly cool political aura" with "allegedly noble but subversive transgender pathos"...

Having said all this, I kinda like what little Antony & the Johnsons that I've heard, but haven't heard enough to begin to determine whether Christgau's assessment is actually correct...

xpost Tim the issue I have here is one you haven't listed, maybe something like 5) "It means we all start ignoring music itself and making flimsy, insupportable accusations about why other critics like or don't like music." This strikes me as a pointless thing to do, both within the world of criticism and for all those people who open alt-weekly music pages looking for, duh, actual music criticism.

x-post Scott OTM

Would you have been less irritated by this if it had appeared as part of his commentary on P&J?

What's so hard to understand? Patronizing and reductive, Xgau dismisses a whole segment of the population by refusing to believe that Antony's thin, dry, strained voice/ethos captivates them. So what?

Shit, aren't critics supposed to piss people off?

haha oh you know it will! even more truncated and strawman-baiting, probably!

xpost

M, now that I think about it, though, I might be offended by your saying me reading old Christgau would be like Antony listening to Nina Simone! To me -- to kind of bluntly overstate the matter -- a text is kinda "bad writing" if someone has to go buy your books to not have it make you look like a dick. (That's vast overstatement: I mean, I kinda like the idea of this multi-decade music history that keeps building on its own ideas, but there's definitely a point of stoppage; there's a point where the text itself becomes so dependent on other stuff to make you not seem like a dick that it's certainly not worth publishing in a weekly paper.)

His last turkey shoot was pretty funny in that you had to know his old Black Sabbath reviews to understand what planet his Slim Thug review was coming from.

Would be better: "decrees his lyrics with nervous eagerness of the virgin".

Part of the problem w/ Christgau is his reviews can be baffling if you're not familiar with his underlying attitudes about aesthetics. He doesn't like any artist who wallows in suffering or indulges the death instinct, so he has no use for such disparate folks as The Smiths, Cat Power, Marc Eitzel, Jeff Buckley, Nick Cave, early Sonic Youth, Antony, et al. It's a deep-seated personal preference, and one that overrides his populist bent. Whether a maudlin performer sells one thousand or one million records, or eventually becomes a music legend/widespread influence, odds are he's going to trash them if they're self-pitying.

It's a blind spot for him, and one that leaves a lot of great music outside of his field of vision. His loss. If he were a poetry critic he'd probably write off Rimbaud, Poe, Plath, and Mark Strand because of their unhealthy obssessions with dark, self-destructive thoughts, rather than evaluate their work on its own terms. Which I think is why McGonigal calls Christgau a prig.

Although I agree "Hope There's Someone" begins with a universal lyrical sentiment, the extended reverie at the end of the song(combined with the album's cover art and the song's video) is a tumble down a sonic rabbithole of death-throe-as-ecstasy. Check out Antony's "The Lake," an adaptation of a morbid Poe poem, or the (literally) masochistic "Fists Of Love." Christgau's got Antony's number, and it appeals to a whole gamut of emotions he finds personally distasteful. Too bad he's not better at communicating that.

Note: I love Antony and the Johnsons.

I like the villainy that implies.

Brotherhood [Qwest, 1986]
I never knew why their definitive electrodisco impressed me more than it moved me, and now I don't know why it has me rocking out of my chair or grinning foolishly as I forage for dinner at the supermarket. The tempos are a touch less stately, the hooks a touch less subliminal. Bernard Albrecht's vocals have taken on so much affect they're humane. And the joke closer softens up a skeptic like me to the pure, physically exalting sensation of the music. A

he loved Nirvana though

OMG, he almost got out of his rocking chair listening to an album that features *ACTUAL LAUGHING* so you know that it's a goof and nobody got hurt making the record. good for him!

Argh, but see this is my problem with Christgau threads -- they inevitably become amount his tastes on some holistic level, which means dancing right away from discussing whatever particular idea started the thing off.

Saying "it's just that he hates the maudlin" evades the thing I think people (or at least Drew and I) are criticizing here. (Not liking Antony on "maudling" or even "self-centered" grounds is completely sensible to me.) What's interesting is the defensive posture that comes after that -- the backlash against the idea that someone (Antony? other critics?) thinks he's "obliged" to buy into Antony's maudlin qualities. And what's even more interesting than that is his sense that someone (other critics? fans?) thinks the reasons for that have to do with transgender issues or AIDS or Antony suffering because of them. I mean, do you see the political ideas that this treads on? It would be one thing to read Antony as just-plain-emotional, maybe in the same way as Cat Power or something -- but he seems to be falling into that mainstream-whiteguy trap of not being able to do that. It seems like Antony isn't just maudlin to him, he's gay-maudlin, special-interest maudlin. Hence my Morgan Freeman analogy way upthread: it's as if, instead of actually writing much criticism of Freeman's acting skills, you just said you didn't like him and then added "people who are interested in black people will find him interesting." It's a way of thinking that doesn't allow some folks to ever just be people in their own context; it forces them to represent politically even when they're not, turns them into little pawns of "difference" viewed from some supposedly neutral whiteguy territory, with some read as "special interest" (say, transgendered) and others prized (black).

I wouldn't have been struck by this capsule at all if he'd just said the stuff about Antony's voice and then gone on about not buying Antony's particular emotionalism / maudlin-ness -- those are exactly the reasons I'd expect someone to not-like Antony. They're precisely the reasons I don't like Antony, in whatever moments I don't like him. What makes me like him, though, when I do, is not a matter of suddenly swallowing him on some kind of special-interest pity card. And whether or not some people's rhetoric makes it sound like that's what's going on with them, it seems like a better use of a critic's brain to talk about what's working or not-working in the music itself, rather than strawmanning other people's supposedly bad reasons for liking it.

x-post what could anybody say at this point that would make you happy, nabisco? The reason tangents are forming is because everybody agrees that it was wack, even if we're not equally up in arms about it.

i don't agree. i think it pisses him off when it sounds good, but doesn't fulfull all the other extra-musical criteria that he holds dear.

oh wait, I remember...

Nabisco OTM.

when does this happen for him? I think he likes one metal (Motorhead) and goth (Joy Division) band apiece! he dislikes the sound of both genres so much he usually doesn't hear whether or not they HAVE any of the extra-musical criteria he holds dear.

I do thinks that why Interpol got special mention aside from all the other distracting self-involved people

that's only if you grant they "sound good," which is hugely debatable.

i dig this, i really do. can i be the one to say Nabisco OTM this time?

"Those convinced of the metaphoric-political centrality of transgender issues and the AIDS epidemic will feel Antony's songs."

x-post ugh, xiu xiu. you can stop with the comparisons mission accomplished fret not.

-- latebloomer: Grab my puffy nipples and make a wish. (posercore24...), January 5th, 2006.

who didn't?
-- 'Twan (anthonyisrigh...), January 5th, 2006.

Uh, lots of people?

Holy shit, that is SO not true. At least Simone can hold a tune.

nabisco, I was referring to his Interpol review re: hippie fruitcake.

Living in the Material World [Apple, 1973]
If you call this living. Harrison sings as if he's doing sitar impressions, and four different people, including a little man in my head who I never noticed before, have expressed intense gratitude when I turned the damned thing off during "Be Here Now." Inspirational sentiment: "the leaders of nations/They're acting like big girls." C

LOL.

x-post

that is beautiful

Oldham: "Admired for his reticence, sexual ambivalence, and general refusal of formal commitment"

If you happen to think the stuff I perceive to be his subject matter is interesting, you'll like this record. Otherwise, it's not that good."

this is the "fundamental misapprehension" - because you're mistaking "feel" for "like," you're then taking the wrong negative implication - that only those who are interested in the subject matter could like it. if xgau were saying that those who shared the "special interest" (arg) would actually "like" the record, it would get a * grade or better. rather, he's saying that if you share Antony's worldview/experience (which isn't the same as poltiical orientation or level of empathy), you'll feel some affiliation with him that may legitimately cause you to overlook how bad the record is. if you don't, however, you don't want to waste your time (and if you do already like the record, your ears aren't as good as his or your liking the record is illegitimate in his eyes because you're lying to yourself about why you like it (which is probably for one of the reasons Tim or I identified)).

I also read other parts of the review differently

Taste is personal

i'd paraphrase it this way - 'voices are manifoldly-variant (because biologically diverse) acoustic sounds that register on a level deeper than artistic intention, so to some extent all bets are off on that front'

you might also read it this way, though it would be a potentially broader (perhaps contradictory) disclaimer - 'voices are as various on a persona level as a sound one - every personality and its corollary aesthetic is distinct, so i'm writing for a general audience here, and you, dissenter, might be a special case (but don't bet on it)'

his voice doesn't stack up against some of the best singers ever.

yes, this is literally what he's saying, but what i read as your implicit value judgment (the 'as if that were fair' that would follow) suggests that you don't hear the slightly exaggerated tone that i do - he's saying 'antony is not exactly vocal-pantheon material (despite the hosannas you may have heard from your favorite boosterite rag or your cool-seeking friends), so don't imagine that the voice gets this one to the finish line'

Indie kids only like him because they think being super-emotional is special, which it isn't.

i'd put it this way - 'indie kids only took notice of this one, as opposed to other chancers, because the super-emotion pricked up the ears of their fetish for aesthetic novelty/fetish (and they might get rid of it when tastes change down the road)'

Plus Antony's too one-note emotional and could stand to undercut it with self-consciousness.

I'd say it's more like 'I could take this guy more seriously if he were a little less self-serious/pretentious'

Yeah, he's got something to be emotional about, but so does everyone, and I don't care.

again, this is a bit off from my reading. I think he's saying 'Antony might have more than you or I to be emotional about, but he protests waaay too much nevertheless, as if insulting those with far more to be emotional about. I'm not require to be proessionally interested in people with cause to be emotional unless they make art that's good (and proportional in response). This guy doesn't.'

fwiw, the review reads to me like he's going after the implicit hypocrisy of those who may empathize with antony's music, but the very idea of hitting the local drag show wouldn't even cross their minds. so the music may resonate, but it's a superficial resonance. it's like buying a prius and then calling yourself an environmentalist even though you still drive that car like crazy.

a. you're never going be like the REAL divas - you'll always have a marginalized audience. fact are, even physical facts are...you're a dried-up, straining to be the real thing but again, 2nd-rate cunt.
b. the only emotion this transgendered artist can express and conjure is sorrow, so you can only connect with his work throught empathy if you're not a sorry sucker with aids or transgendered. those of you who who don't buy into the guilt a "luckier" person would naturally feel in that situation, can choose to go out and buy another album that's actually fun.

sucks ass.

If you happen to think the stuff I perceive to be his subject matter is interesting, you'll like this record. Otherwise, it's not that good.

-- to yours --

if you share Antony's worldview/experience (which isn't the same as poltiical orientation or level of empathy), you'll feel some affiliation with him that may legitimately cause you to overlook how bad the record is

-- you've only exacerbated what I'm saying is wrong with this review.

(You're also changing his words in order to defend him again! He doesn't say anything about worldview/experience as distinct from political orientation -- he specifically refers to "those convinced of the metaphoric-political centrality of transgender issues and the AIDS epidemic." He gives them their "political" names; he puts the word "political" in the sentence. That's not about Antony as a person, or Antony's personal relationship with those issues; it's about the subject matter as a political issue, period. Which is a typical reaction of a lot of people, to view "difference" only as a political issue and not as some other people's genuine experience and context.)

i was saying exactly that difference may be genuine experience and context, but that it need not be determinative of politics. you may be right, though, that i misdescribed him in my last post, and i'm too tired right now to puzzle it out for sure.

-- Matos-Webster Dictionary

Why apologize, isn't "rude and uncalled for" your schtick? Christgau is infamously a humorless prick, and you obviously worship him? Why not embrace your inner bully??

There's less irony than bitter wit in Plath; the same could be said of Eitzel and Morrissey. Face it, Christgau just hates whiners.

The ironic thing is that Eitzel and Antony are quite funny in a live setting. If the music thing didn't work out, Eitzel could have become a stand up comic.

BTW, I am not convinced of the metaphoric-political centrality of transgender issues and the AIDS epidemic, yet I still feel Antony's songs (as do many others). Antony transcends any queer cabaret-style "ghetto." That's what interesting about him; it's why he's important.

Maybe Chuck can tell us how many pissy letters + emails Christgau gets next week over this one...

*backs out of thread slowly*

Who, or rather what, won?

No, NYC. I just carpetbag.

Dismissing anyone who courts Thanatos should not be confused with wisdom, either.

No, hearing the phrase "extra-musical criteria" in this case made me think people were saying Xgau has a standard of relevance and meaning or something. Is that what was being said and, if so, does he?
-- Tim Ellison (thefriendlyfriendlybubbl...), January 4th, 2006.

Christgau has a strong dislike for whiney, mopey music that overrides the actual quality of the music - see my first note about 200 posts back...

Talk Talk = Christgau's least favorite band ever?

yeah, xgau hasn't been consulted on national security matters since that jackson browne/iran debacle of 1974.

Thread word count, minus Xgau review, but including names, emails, and dates: 28,265 and counting

hi dude, I base 80%+ of my purchases on the "holy xgau." and when I like stuff he doesn't (like, for instance, the over-sensitive/pretentious (AND GAY! OMG WTF!) Indigo Girls (though he likes Indigo Girl Amy Ray's punk-inflected solo stuff fine - do you see?)), I recognize that there's something to what he's saying when i remove my subjective aesthetic preferences/personality tics/listening history.

xpost

Nabisco, I'm not sure if I agree or not, but it would explain why I went from indie-identifyin' to oh-no-not-me in a few years. lately I like almost nothing but funny records.

3 or 4 years ago, I had an Antony discussion with a very gay, cabaret-y musician who assessed A as "too gay, too cabaret ... too everything!" I'm not sure if that proves Xgau's argument or not, but I think he has a broader definition of "metaphoric-political centrality" than is common, ie, everything is political.

I suspect people who think Antony's aesthetic is ridiculous hesitate to say so cuz they don't want to come off as insensitive bashers, just cause he's SUPERgay in a way that makes Rufus Wainwright seem like the Brian Jonestown Massacre guy.

Well, like I said I don't purchase much, especially much that's new. But after a few months of reading the guy against what I owned/knew/bought, I established sufficiently that I find him almost completely reliable in an objective sense, and I know well enough how my taste differs.

Outside of hearing of Antony throughout the past year, I knew very little outside of his collaborators on the album and a general idea of the sound after hearing a few clips online. In other words, I had no idea that Antony addresses gender issues, nor did I really care. The sound and type of music just weren't appealing to me at the time although it may be soon -- I think this is indicative of much of the record-buying public. I can only think that from Christgau's view, most of the public isn't going to be interested in the album from the music alone and will need some backstory to be interested. Mentioning the political/social centrality is a dead giveaway since it means he's aiming his review (and possibly reflecting his biases) as he's aiming right at the middle of the mainstream and claiming that deviations from the middle are due to either a specific talent or novelty.

The way he phrases this makes him a total asshole, though.

xpost -- that word "too," Morbius, it does strike me as part of the issue with a certain strain of indie record, this type of record where the artist is basically trying to construct a full-on uncut otherworldly version of a particular aesthetic. I know I've reacted to records in this way, where the last thing I want is for something to undercut them and bring them back to earth -- the whole point is for them to stylize further, to stylize as much as possible. The pull is to go beyond reality, and you can see exactly this in the way critics respond to a lot of the results: isn't it a pretty common indie bit of praise to say "this album sounds like it was made by [insert impossible unreal fantasy here]?" Don't J Newsom's fans basically want her to sound as much as possible like an actual fairy-crone?

I think this is part of what goes on with Antony-fandom, definitely. This shifts the terms of the kind of empathy Christgau's talking about: I imagine in lots of cases it's less on-earth interpersonal empathy and more operatic, empathy with the "character" that's being conjured by the record. I can see arguments being made that this is nearly as ghettoizing as what Christgau's doing -- accepting Antony only as a fictional character and still not as a person. But what makes this a step closer is that Antony is doing the creation, as a person; we know there's artifice in his self-presentation. It seems to me to be a self-evident indie habit to want that kind of artifice blown up, taken to its limits, stylized to the point of dreaminess.

xpost Mike I don't doubt that those people exist, as they do for just about every document that speaks in a seldom-heard voice; I don't know them, though, and I'm not sure how they're relevant.

That's why he's being a jerk, not because the record is *only* for queer fetishists but because he's marginalizing the indie crowd that will like the package as a whole, gender issues or not.

i think this is significant, because to my mind the range of emotional expression (or forms of emotional expression) that christgau seems to find sympathetic has definite limits.

xxpost

I understand what qualifies somebody to be a critic. It's cause you've spent untold hours brooding about this kind of shit, it matters to you, you have ideas, you make connections (or at least you're always auditioning them in your head), you've pissed away a bunch of time/energy acquiring that "larger body of knowledge" mentioned ------ bascially you're obsessed and pretty much everyone on this board knows what that's like.

so then what exactly qualifies somebody to be a reviewer? just having the promo copy? shit --- not in a world where anybody can download anything they want.

what makes a review better or worse, if not the amount/effectiveness of the criticism it contains?

The Smiths - Meat Is Murder [Sire, 1985]
It makes a certain kind of sense to impose teen-macho aggression on your audience--for better or worse, macho teens are expected to make a thing of their unwonted hostility. These guys impose their post-adolescent sensitivity, thus inspiring the sneaking suspicion that they're less sensitive than they come on--passive-aggressive, the pathology is called, and it begs for a belt in the chops. Only the guitar hook of "How Soon Is Now," stuck on by their meddling U.S. label, spoils the otherwise pristine fecklessness of this prize-winning U.K. LP. Remember what the Residents say: "Hitler was a vegetarian." C+

The quality and accuracy of your descriptions.

Perhaps Christgau just doesn't like swooning gay men?

does this change your mind?...

Very [EMI, 1993]
Fey and ironic naturellement, but I wasn't ready for baroque--techno synths, massed brass, Village People chorus boys. And I also wasn't ready for sincere. For all his "I've been a teenager since before you were born," Neil Tennant finally seems, well, ready to love--finally seems to comprehend that needing another human being is more than an experiment you perform on your feelings, a way to insure that you'll not only be ravished but ravished exquisitely. Convinced cornballs may still find his emotions attenuated, but I say the production values suit the tumult in his heart and the melodies the sweetness in his soul. And I dare anybody who still thinks he's just talking to notate his high notes. A

-- anna graham (bluldyvisio...), January 4th, 2006

is that you, Kathleen?

He's gone on record as saying he doesn't like classical.

quote?

But maybe you arrived at that perspective merely by reading Christgau reviews of very stylized albums that he thought just kind of stunk anyway? You'd have to provide an example of a review where he slags a very stylized album not because of the quality of the music but merely because it's very stylized for me to agree with you that he is biased in this way.

His high regard for Hunky Dory-era Bowie, post-Very Pet Shop Boys, and Rufus Wainwright's first album all refute this.

Everyone Who Pretended to Like Me Is Gone [Startime International, 2002]
Just what we always wanted--Jonathan Fire*Eater grows up. Put some DreamWorks money into a studio, that was mature. Realized Radiohead was the greatest band in the world, brainy. Stopped playing so fast, hoo boy. And most important, switched vocalists from Nick Cave imitator to Rufus Wainwright imitator. Wainwright makes up better melodies with a dick in his mouth, and not only that, Cave has more literary ability. New York scene or (hint hint) no New York scene, DreamWorks isn't buying. C+

quote?

-- gabbneb (gabbne...), January 5th, 2006."

From the rockcritcs.com interview/e-mail exchange (classical reference at the end, but I'm including the whole thing for the hell of it):

"[Question]: It's safe to say that no other rock critic has ever covered as wide a range of music as you have. In terms of genres or significant artists, what--if any--do you think are your blind spots as a music critic?

[Christgau]: First of all, I don't think I cover more kinds of music than any other critic. I think I'm remarkably enthusiastic and knowledgeable about African music and that confuses people. Jon Pareles and Chuck Eddy, to cite just two colleagues who jump to mind, have as broad a range as I do. As for my limitations, they're public and they're legion. Metal, art-rock, bluegrass, gospel, Irish folk, fusion jazz (arghh)--all prejudices I'm prepared to defend and in most cases already have, but prejudices nevertheless. I pretty much lost reggae with dancehall; my acquaintance with most techno is a nodding one (zzzz); I've never really liked salsa even though Puerto Rico is one of my favorite places on earth and my daughter loves salsa and my niece and nephew run a fucking music club in San Juan. (Admittedly, all my rels share my fondness for older Cuban-influenced styles.) Mostly the salsa thing is a matter of brass tuttis--I've never liked most '30s jazz because I don't like tuttis. I also don't like flutes or vibraphones most of the time. As I said, I'm prepared to argue these prejudices--even the tuttis. I oppose shows of virtuosity and undisciplined outpourings of self-regarding emotion on deeply held aesthetic grounds. But since I'm always ready to make specific exceptions to any such generalization, it would certainly be fair to argue that in all the above styles I'm not ready enough.
Oh yeah--classical music. Did I mention classical music?

(xpost)

-- Matos-Webster Dictionary

No, I am A Bird Now.

Which is to say that I'm not sure there's that much of a difference between the self-regard of your average indie-rocker and the self-regard of your average rapper. It's just that the experience of the former is already well-aired, already familiar to a lot of the people doing the writing. They don't want to hear it -- not because the artist is too self-regarding, but because it reminds the listener way too much of his own modes of self-regard.

Master of Puppets [Elektra, 1986]
I feel at a generational disadvantage with this music not because my weary bones can't take its power and speed but because I was born too soon to have my dendrites rerouted by progressive radio. This band's momentum can be pretty impressive, and as with a lot of fast metal (as well as some sludge) they seem to have acceptable political motivations--antiwar, anticonformity, even anticoke, fine. But the revolutionary heroes I envisage aren't male chauvinists too inexperienced to know better; they don't have hair like Samson and pecs like Arnold Schwarzenegger. That's the image Metallica calls up, and I'm no more likely to invoke their strength of my own free will than I am The 1812 Overture's. B-

Self Regard:

Me Against the World [Interscope, 1995]
Tough-guy sentimentality is an old story in American culture, but self-pity this rank is usually reserved for teen romances and tales of brave avant-gardists callously rejected by the mass media. His I-love-Mom rings true because Mom was no saint, and his respect for old G's seems genuine, probably because they told him how smart he was. But whether the metaphor be dead homies or suicide threat, the subtext of his persecution complex is his self-regard. What's doubly galling is that these are essential hip hop themes--as Ice Cube and B.I.G. have made all too vivid, it is persecution that induces young black men to kill each other and themselves. That such themes should rise to the top of the charts with this witless exponent of famous-for-being-famous is why pop fans decry the mass media. C+

Just data points - this is actually quite interesting a decent perentage of the time...

I don't know, it reads to me like a list of musics he has no use for. But, of course, I could be misreading him. That seems to happen a lot.

uh, so if you like classical then you like the 1812 overture?

I do find that he Xgau underrates some things, though - he's less reliable (but more entertaining and possibly more interesting) when he goes on the attack. But if you're not buying much music and aren't too worried about perhaps missing something, it is perfectly sensible to use a single source of recommendations that you have found to be reliable.

This fondness of mine for the nasty, brutish, and short intensifies a common semipopular tendency in which lyrical and conceptual sophistication are applauded while musical sophistication--jazz chops or classical design or avant-garde innovation--is left to the specialists. This isn't merely because we're suckers for snappy melodies with a strong beat, but because we find upon reflection that we value crudeness actively, as a means to some sort of vitality. And when rock pros define musical sophistication as an overlay of polish and/or flair on the same old snappy melodies and strong beat, they only encourage out atavism--such standards not only have nothing to do with artistic advance but spell an end to any sense of spontaneity, innocence, or discovery. We believe that what really tones up our beloved basics is the kind of conviction that can make change happen from inside--even jazz chops or classical design or avant-garde innovation, if one (or all) should fit.

I thought this was called "having a style."

I'm not sure why you'd even begin to paraphrase what I just posted that way. I'm saying you're maybe right about what would happen if I read back over the guy's work -- there's something about the bits being shared here that I find offputting. And that "something" is that it seems like he's not just approaching works with his own aesthetic and moral ideas in mind -- he's almost bullying or dominating the works themselves with his own aesthetic/moral system, to an extent that might result in "reliable" reviews for those who share his tastes (Scantron never fails) but doesn't sound like it'd be very good at speaking to how art works on its own terms, or really having much human openness or curiosity about those terms at all (except w/r/t Yo-Yo Ma, apparently).

This is just the scary sense I'm getting from the discussion and quotes here.

Because everything following this in your last post corresponds to my paraphrase! "He's not allowed to hear things through his ears or respond to it in his own manner. He can only hear and respond to things through the ears of"--what, the people who made it? Their intended audience? What you're suggesting is every bit as Scantron like as anything Christgau writes, just in a don't-hurt-the-precious-artist-or-their-audience way.

pure idealism, really

To me, that's pitiful. But I suppose that lots of you guys (and hundreds, surely not thousands, of others) really adore and are absorbed by it all.

shrug…

So you can't explore a series of topics in short reviews? Oh, I see: books = serious.

I think that's great. Would you rather read a Christgau collection about a thousand albums or a Greil Marcus book about one song? Would you rather read Psychotic Reactions and Carburetor Dung or "that novel Lester was going to write?"

Take that Smiths review, for instance. It tells me a whole lot about the Smiths' ability to pass through Christgau's aesthetic/moral Scantron machine, but doesn't actually tell me much at all about the Smiths. It's hard to imagine that this isn't related to either ignorance of or complete dismissal of the myriad ways people can approach music, a variety that I guess is way more important to me than it is to Christgau -- largely because half of the joy of listening to music is, to me, the ability to float between different modes of perceiving it, and music's ability to draw you between those different modes and lure you to new perspectives. This is a joy that any kind of Scantron approach is seriously antithetical to.

I'm positive you know what I'm talking about here: it's the difference between exercising your mentality all over an object and actually making an effort to figure out how the object works.

It doesn't? It doesn't get right to the heart of the Smiths' preciousness and sensitiveness and whether or not it was contrived, which, for me, has always been issue number one with the Smiths? (Plus saying that he kind of likes "How Soon Is Now" anyway?)

xposts - anthony addressing same topic

of course you can, but that's virtually all he's ever done—it's as if he's afraid that if he doesn't weigh in on juelz santana or something then armageddon will ensue. maybe he would be refreshed if explored a topic at book length…then maybe his prose wouldn't need to be dense and could breathe a bit…

his books are so masturbatory: "I thought Gilbert O'Sullivan deserved an C-; in fact, now I see he deserves a C---" or whatever…

maybe it isn't masturbatory, since lotsa people are so hung up on him…

Leaving aside the floridity of "choking the vitality from music" (no music with any vitality has ever had it choked away by a review, sorry), you seem to be missing the point--a point you've hinted at in many a lit thread. People read writers for their viewpoint, their use of language, their specific systems of hearing/thinking/feeling/knowledge. Because Xgau is in what amounts, in many people's eyes, to a service industry he's supposed to know his place and "hear things the way they were meant to be heard" and not how he hears them. He isn't interested in "the myriad ways people can approach music" because they're infinite and his subject is how he hears it. What is difficult to understand about that?

It's especially interesting that you're saying all this, of all people. When do you plan to go back and rewrite your Sire Records Story review or your twee overview to incorporate the viewpoints of someone else? Oh wait--you're not going to, and you shouldn't, because it misses the point completely. I disagree with Christgau constantly, especially about techno and to a lesser degree hip-hop. I read him because I like his writing and find his viewpoint interesting, whatever its limits. I like to think that if someone is reading me regularly they feel the same, adjusting for oversights and limits. But deciding a writer in whatever field should hew to their idea of what writers in that field "should be doing" is fraudulent reasoning pretty much all the time.

http://www.zoilus.com/documents/christgau.jpg

i'm not going to say that you're wrong to reading the excerpts we're providing according to your own frames, but i assure that there's stuff you're missing because you haven't explored the larger whole.

so why don't you and your allies respond to my point that XG is on a treadmill?

I have a whole host of reasons why I don't think that Smiths review is accurate or worthwhile, but I have to head home; I'll get back to it soon. About midway through the list is my whole problem with the Scantron approach: even if you do identify the stuff as just post-adolescent sensitivity (a reading superficial enough that only a "tenured" guy like him would be praised for it), there's no room or ability to begin to think about how post-adolescent sensitivity might function in general, or what's unique to this particular case of it, or how it's employed/deployed by the Smiths versus their peers, or any of a million related issues. These are the things that I (personal taste alert) feel critics should be interested in, and they seem to be missing from a Scantron system that basically just registers a dot on a page (IF A$=POST-ADOLESCENT SENSITIVITY GOTO 50) and reports back same.

I'm not hugely versed in the Christgau ouvre, though, and any of y'all are welcome to show me examples of how this isn't the case; it'd make me feel better for the guy.

Don't see how he's more "on a treadmill" than lots of artists or workers of other sorts.

wow. if I thought "hey, your point of view sucks--think you could swap it out for my benefit? thanks" would work, I would ask it of SO MANY people.

That seems to me to be an assumption on your part. Why do you think he didn't just judge the album as a particular (and, in his opinion, not very good) example of this?

not if your name is dan perry.

i'm really jealous of his typing abilities. damn, he's fast!

As far as criticising Xgau goes, I have a bigger problem with him overestimating certain artists (Sleater Kinney) than with him hating on a favorite.

(But there's no question I have an aesthetic, even if I don't want to articulate it - I know for example that it only about 50% overlaps with Christgau's.)

Why I like Xgau is simply that he usually packs a lot of ideas into a very short space - and challenging ideas too, in the sense of 'challenges me to define why I *do* like the Smiths'.

Xgau totally must ask himself what people like about albums, he just gets snotty if he finds the reasons wanting.

I agree with this. For a long time, he kept up with much of everything. Starting in the nineties, though, it seemed to me that his indie rock coverage became only high profile stuff. For a guy who liked Half Japanese, etc., it seems to me that he could have found more interesting things to write about.

Obviously that's only one aspect of criticism, but an important one in a consumer guide.

the idea, though, that Xgau's taste is "excessively codified and rigid and systematic" is belied very easily by the breadth of what he likes. I mean, just take a Random A-List.

Tom says in way less words what I'm shooting for here, but now I'm home and I'll say it in way more.

So here's my deal. Most music listeners develop some kind of aesthetic by the age of, say, 15. At that point it's not a very sophisticated aesthetic -- less like a Scantron and more like the square hole in a child's toy. It admits square pegs and rejects round ones; we like this and we don't like that. It's terrifically useful to us as listeners, but it's not very interesting as criticism because it's very mechanical: things that match the aesthetic are approved of, and things that aren't are scorned.

And then, as time goes by, our tastes change, and the shapes and number of our holes change. We develop round holes, and star-shaped ones, and eventually we have a much more sophisticated aesthetic. Now for me personally, this is the interesting thing about music. There is a cliche in fiction writing that says a good novel "teaches you how to read it." And that, to me, is the beauty and communicative power of music -- the way that a good record can actually teach you something. A good record can justify its own aesthetic to me; it can teach me how to listen to it; it can bore a whole new hole in my child's toy, in a shape I'd never before imagined. A big part of what I want from criticism -- both from myself and other people -- is to sort out which records do this, and to describe the shape and contours of those new holes.

What's been emerging to me on this thread is a sense that maybe Christgau is operating in the first of those modes, and not the second. Granted, it's no square hole he's working with: like you guys say, he's put enough listening and thought into this to develop a very sophisticated and well-defended aesthetic system, a space-age Scantron next to other people's building blocks. But it's still mechanical, and that Meat is Murder review seems just as predetermined as a fifteen-year-old's square-peg mentality might have produced. (Just lower the diction and replace "post-adolescent sensitivity" with "whiny" or "faggy.") It seems mechanical, and as a result it seems resistant to letting music do the thing that impresses me most about music -- letting someone else communicate their aesthetic to the listener, in a way that's convincing and maybe unexpected. This is what I mean by "choking the vitality" out of music; to me, the whole vitality of the art is that no matter how much I think I hate some quality, someone might come along and rearrange that quality in a way that convinces me.

Sure, the Scantron remains an interesting project -- there's something to be said for having years and years of records filtered through this guy's very-sophisticated aesthetic grading system, especially if you find that you agree with his outlook. And yes, the guy writes longer and more penetrating pieces elsewhere. But this project strikes me as way too dry and mechanical to ever be that interested in. How could it not? It's deliberately resistant to the one thing I find most valuable about art in general -- the way that it can exercise its vision on my prejudices, as opposed to the way I can exercise my prejudices on its vision.

Does that make more sense?

In what ways is Christgau prejudiced, though? Because he didn't like that Smiths album?

I paid $16 for it! Christ. He's also gotta redress his late-period Al Green love, an investment in which I've invested a lot of capital for little return.

Sorry ...

(xpost)

I don't think this is true at all of xgau. For example:

Dr. Buzzard's Original Savannah Band [RCA Victor, 1976]
I hated this the first time I played it, which turned out to mean that I had encountered a clear, uncompromising and dangerously seductive expression of a vision of life that was foreign to me. Call it disco-sophistico: a version of post-camp nostalgia that celebrates the warmth (OK) and class (ugh) or a time irretrievably (and safely) past. Since they're not white, the Savannah Band never make you feel they love the '40s because there were no uppity muggers back then, though I still wonder about their get-thee-behind-me dismissal of hard r&b, not to mention their fashion-mag potential. But it's a pleasure to admit that their music is a fresh pop hybrid with its own rhythmic integrity, and that its sophistication is a lot brighter and more lively than most of the organic bullshit making it to the rock stage in the mid-'70s. A

In Search of a Song [Mercury, 1971]
Forget arty pontificators like Kris Kristofferson and Mickey Newbury--wouldn't you rather have Woody Guthrie? Hall's politics are only liberal, his ironies sometimes pro forma, but like Guthrie's his observations and presentation are direct and unpretentious in a way that can't be faked or even imitated--he has a few things to say, he says them, and that's that. While in the past the dull sentimentality that is the downfall of so much country music has flawed his albums, here even the worst song, "Second Hand Flowers," qualifies as bright sentimentality (with a twist). The best is "Kentucky Feb. 27, '71," hidden away on the second side because it's too subtle to make its impact broadside. Simple as death, it recounts Hall's pilgrimage to see an old mountain man, who explains why kids move to the city--"They want to see the things they've heard about"--and apologizes for not providing Hall with a song. A

Gear's right. Xgau has a delightfully loveable face.

Anthony's face, though also extremely loveable, is marginally less so, perhaps. On the other hand he evokes more of a protective instinct.

Game over.

http://www.hbo.com/sopranos/img/252x190/actor/peter_bogdanovich.jpg

Chic: The Best of Chic Volume 2 [1992, Rhino]
Not the hits, as Ken Barnes notes defiantly. And about time, as I might say. They never would have written "Good Times" without disco hanging around their necks, and then where would we be? But only after they tired of that round did the sparest and smartest of the great funk bands make their move. Believe me, kids, three of their four '80s albums--the grooveful Tongue in Chic, the light-hearted Take It Off, and the serious Real People--are worth scouring the vinyl bins for. But bless Barnes for skimming the cream; I could niggle, but in fact left-field picks like the fancy-schmancy Risqué ballad "Will You Cry" and the acoustic Soup for One fantasia "Tavern on the Green" only deepen your astonishment at their intelligence, intensity, sophistication, spirituality, and verve. Oh yes, all that--there's no music like this, including the hits. It just keeps dancing. A

Nabisco aren't we all working with Scantrons of greater or lesser sophistication?

Your issue here seems to be not that Christgau is a Scantron, but that what he's scanning is too one-dimensional i.e. he's dismissing all whining mopers at the outset and not having the patience to sort through the wining mopers so as to distinguish between those who worth putting up with and those who are not.

And that this is because he has over time built up a finite number of categories into which he can place music, and "whining mopers" has no sub-categories (except perhaps "leavened by some humour" and "unleavened by any humour whatsoever")

Whereas (to put words into your mouth) perhaps the task of the critic should be to constantly interrogate these categories, to bring out new models of the Scantron on a as-needs basis when confronted with music that seems to defy or confound easy categorisation.

Which I think is a much more supportable argument. I'd maintain though that the Scantron still does and can exist despite this new drive-towards-self-improvement and the planned-obselence of critical categories.

This because the role of relativism and subjectivity in music criticism is not necessarily for the purpose of reinforcing the notions that musical experience actually is relative and subjective, but rather a move of expediency acknowledging that we cannot possibly predict in advance the multitude of factors that might influence how we engage with and respond to a given piece of music. Taste is thus like some arcane physics: real and objective, but practically impossible to pin down.

So your beef with Christgau perhaps is that, in his desire to map the entire universe of music and musical taste, he's deliberately introducing these shorthand calculations (whiny mopers = all crap) in order to keep up, he's refusing to upgrade the Scantron because (like when you upgrade to a newer, more intricate version of Word) it just slows everything down.

But I think it's important to acknowledge that we all do that, we're all ignoring the absurd shorthand critical reductions and conflations that we must make in order to presume any sense of confidence or consistency w/r/t music. And Christgau's rules really aren't any more rigid than most other critics (if you had people obsessively poring over my reviews or yours they'd find similar reductions, similar repetitions, similar blind spots, similar sites of unwillingness to think things through further, to keep striving and struggling).

What maybe grates with Christgau is rather the authority, the sense of him passing judgment not only on the music but on all other critics' judgments (as someone noted upthread, the sense in which Christgau holds himself out as having the final word, the role of grand arbiter). As per rockism, popism etc. the fear is that Christgau's limitations will become not only his own, but the limitations of others as well.

... Except that, as Tom noted above, with Christgau it's the opposite that happens, somehow he demulsifies critical consensus, hence this thread.

Another way of putting my beef here is in your own words. You say I'm annoyed that some critics might not have "the patience to sort through the wining mopers so as to distinguish between those who worth putting up with and those who are not." But that's still Scantron absolutism; your wording suggests that whining mopers are an absolute bad, and that to enjoy their music we have to "put up with" that aspect of it. Whereas what I like about music is the same thing that I'll grant Christgau explicitly lays out in that Dr. Buzzard's review: I'm interested in those records where an act can justify, say, whining and moping. I'm interested in records that do whatever it is they do so well and coherently and convincingly that I'm not just "putting up with" their aesthetic -- I'm actually being convinced, for four minutes or forty-five, that their aesthetic really is a terrific thing.

There are bands whose whining and moping strikes me as terrible; there are bands who make me feel like whining and moping is the most beautiful thing a band can do. If I were to spell out some kind of "mission" for myself as a critic, it would have to do with figuring out what the difference is between the two -- not to figure out which acts are good enough at what they do that I'll "put up with" the qualities I don't like.

he's repeatedly stated that he can't "get into" classical music and occasionally notes that he has not made many attempts. he often writes this as an apology which suggests a serious defensiveness.

At Fri Oct 14, 04:20:19 PM, i.s.h. said...
nice, you saw the brief mention about the upcoming show in the Mercury. nice.

it says that last time they were here the crowd consisted mostly of music critics. i didn't even see Greil Marcus there that night, did you? i talked to Christgau though while we stood at our respective urinals and he didn't look so good. "i think this coke has too much baby laxative in it or something," he said unevenly as his gaze alternated between the dick in his hand and the poorly chopped lines on top of the john. i told him not to cop from Lester if he wasn't in the mood to take a chance and he mentioned something about DeRogatis being tapped and having to resort to "plan B".

"if you want to dance you have to pay the fiddler," i told him and took a small dab of the stuff with the tip of my finger and placed it onto my tongue. "Jesus, Bob!" i said, "you might as well put
this shit up your ass as well as your nose for all the good it's going to do."

he was starting to kind of slump to the floor at that point, pants
undone, penis still held loosely in his hand. i went to help him up but heard the opening lines to "Charlemagne In Sweatpants" and hightailed it back to dancefloor

the latter. i'd rather read marcus talk about "it's too soon to know" for 90 pages than read a 90-word christgau review, to be honest.

So I agree with you. And I agree that there is no element in music which is an automatic force for evil, and that clever criticism is mostly about learning to understand the relationships b/w elements. And any critical manoeuvre which amounts to "this is bad because it is [x]" is likely to be superficial and unconvincing. (more than just agree, yr argument here is like an article of faith for me and a total personal goal/objective in my own writing)

But I think to assume that this is what Christgau does as, like, a general critical strategy, is unfair. A lot of his writing is actually the expression of very complex relationships in very compressed formulas. It's a shining example of what you're advocating. And the fact that people can say here "oh, that's just his way" with such clarity is due to the fact that his prejudices are clearly marked out against a backdrop of very subtle, thoughtful, sophisticated criticism.

Skipped right over that, woops! Thrilling!