Do you ever read one of Christgau's reviews and go, What the hell is he talking about?

i think every line in that particular review is embarrassing

that said, the reimaginings of his stuff as poems upthread are pretty great

probably

so many "classic" ilx posts
would benefit immensely from similar treatment

to give one example
i always, i think, enjoyed the pinefox's at times curious syntax

granted, your mileage may vary
but it just goes to show:

we're all stars then in the dope show
then and now

i remember reading creem magazine aa a kid and being regularly befuddled by christgau's reviews. and at the time i just assumed that it was something that would make more sense to me if i were an adult and had achieved a certain level of sophistication or whatever. but that go-betweens one cited here still makes very little sense to me no matter how many times i read it

i wonder if he's more of a frustrated literary writer than most music critics, like maybe all his ambitions as a stylist would be better served in a different medium.

Metal and Shells [PVC, 1985]
When what the Brits call pop isn't popular, it's usually rock and roll chamber music if it's any good at all. This U.S. debut, a best-of that highlights the soulful ache in the vocals and the quirky opacities in the lyrics and does what it can for a modest tune sense, honors that suspect notion. It's not stylized, and not static either, but it's pretty subtle, and its half-finished edges and kinetic lyricism are best appreciated in tranquility if not repose. Where it can be expected to unfold for quite a while. A-

wtf does "does what it can for a modest tune sense" mean??

he's highlighting his own quirky opacities, i think

soulful ache in the vocals and the quirky opacities in the lyrics

yes

its half-finished edges and kinetic lyricism

yes, i hear ya

the rest is either impenetrable to me or is hopelessly buried in bizarre syntactical choices. as someone who is incapable of writing a grocery list w/o stacking clauses on top of each other in jenga-esque fashion i can appreciate it, but the first sentence is the obvious huge offender here and is somewhat infuriating b/c once you do manage to squeeze some meaning out of it, it turns out to be a tossed-off sweeping statement that w/o further explication is really kind of pointless?

xp

ha

yeh in re-reading it i came to wonder if it was just one of those write in the style that approximates the aesthetic of the record things

I summarize his review of that Go-Be's comp as: "Much better than rock and roll chamber music has any right to be."

I liked when he dismissively called Spacemen 3 "Stooges for airports."

All that bullshit and he couldn't be bothered to get their country of origin right

whenever i encounter his reviews the voice in my head is a cross between local alt-rock morning dj and beatnik caricature.

then i punch that guy by not reading any more.

god those "poems" are annoying

― (REAL NAME) (m coleman), Wednesday, August 1, 2012 9:15 PM (3 days ago)

thanks! I enjambed them myself

Gomez, Bring It On (Hut, 1998) Really the roots-rock-they mean it, man ("Whipping Piccadilly," "Love Is Better Than a Warm Trombone"). ***

*sassy*

I liked when he dismissively called Spacemen 3 "Stooges for airports."

lol, i love spacemen 3, but xgau otm

i think there are very few rock crits that would survive a "WHAT DOES THIS REALLY MEAN?" close reading of their blurbage, and while xgau has some whoppers he's also said a lot more astute and memorable stuff than your average scribe. shit, we've memorized these whoppers.

i mean yeah how many people can you quote ten words about Gomez on

that's more of a result of his success and longevity than a testament to it, though, kind of a backwards argument.

so why was he successful?

His ten words on Gomez is more than I know of any of the band's music!

so why was he successful?

One of the first, etc.

if you're going to say "no his stuff isn't particularly astute or memorable, it's just that he's a real big wheel at the cracker factory for reasons that have nothing to do with astute or memorable writing" all i can say is "ymmv"

i don't think anyone doesn't think he's earned his spot and has his virtues. just, y'know, some of us couldn't be happier than the dean is the dean and some of us wonder what if it was robert palmer.

http://nyobetabeat.files.wordpress.com/2011/08/what-if-watcher-e1313084886104.jpg

so that's like biting lip on accident or on purpose?

Sub poll:

Time Stand Still vs Owner of a Lonely Great vs Touch of Grey

Lonely heart

I actually don't know how I could pick between those songs

there are a lot of ilxors who stan hard for xgau but i've never really seen a comprehensive explanation of why

being clear and comprehensive would not be in keeping with the spirit of their hero

I think that Christgau's style of criticism, as exemplified by his Consumer Guide, the short, punchy, often gnomic, oracular judgments, worked better in the pre-Internet age, when reviewers still enjoyed a certain mystique by virtue of their coveted perch in the media landscape and their access to lots of promos and exposure to lots of music that was hard to be exposed to unless you were a critic. Now that any idiot can download just about anything, and start a blog or post on a message board (hi!), it's not enough to operate that way. If you want people to pay attention to you, you need to offer them something besides the benefit of your refined sensibility. Christgau doesn't tell you a story or do conventional journalistic stuff, he just assigns his grade and backs it up with some mystification.

we don't have to give comprehensive explanations of why - he's the dean. if robert palmer was the dean we might give the usual comprehensive explanations of why one gets on ilx, but he's not.

Christgau doesn't tell you a story or do conventional journalistic stuff, he just assigns his grade and backs it up with some mystification.

this is otm, and i would also say it would probably work better for me if i didn't think the way he distributes grades is kinda dumb

I found this interesting, from a 2001 interview Scott Woods did at rockcritics.com with Dave Marsh:

Scott: Okay, talk a little bit about editors. I want to know who's the best editor you ever worked for--at a magazine.

Dave: Well, three or four people come to mind. Let me just sort of take a little moment here because I don't want to leave anybody out. I'll give you a handful of people that I've learned a tremendous amount from in terms of their line editing--you know, their actual editing of text --the assignment part is a whole other thing, and a much thornier issue. People who come to mind are Bob Christgau, Marianne Partridge, Jann Wenner, and Barbara Downey--now Barbara Landau.

Scott: What makes a really good editor?

Dave: Well this is what I try to do; this is my theory about it, and different people deal with this in different ways and I would not say that all of the people, with the exception of Christgau, and maybe Marianne on a good day--this is not what Barbara and Jon [Landau] and half of Marianne were after--but what I'm after and what I think Bob's always after, and what I think even Jann's sometimes after is to take something that a writer has done and make sure that the writer has gotten the most out of that that they can. Barbara Nellis, my editor at Playboy, I should also not fail to mention because she can be very good... It's to make sure that the writer is saying as clearly and effectively and, hmmm, whatever that x-factor is, let's say entertainingly, grippingly, however you want to put it, as possible what it is they have to say. There are other things--and this happens a lot at Rolling Stone, where it was sort of like, there were other agendas about what people wanted said, or what people wanted not said, and that to me is a hallmark of... you can't call it bad editing, to me that's just an approach I don't think very much of. It's both the most dreadful process and the greatest one.

Scott: So Christgau's one of the great editors...

Dave: Oh Christgau's great, I mean, fantastic. Tremendous insight into what you're trying to say, really good ideas about what you might do, he'll spot holes in your thinking--his sense of other people's language is not nearly so--at least when I worked with him, which is a long time ago--not nearly so insular as his own writing has become, or at least as I think it's become. No, he's a fantastic editor, just an absolutely fantastic editor.

Scott: Okay, but you do have--I'm not looking for you to slag some of your contemporaries or whatever, but you obviously have some problems with Christgau. You did that piece on the Pazz & Jop poll a few years ago.

Dave: Oh I have tremendous problems. I think I basically--first of all, I think he hates rock 'n' roll. I don't even think he makes much of a secret about it. If you actually look at his reviews, he doesn't like rock bands. He said some miserably--I can't think of a better way to put it but bigoted things about, for instance, the heavy metal audience. And I think he's promoted a fairly self-aggrandizing idea of what rock criticism oughta be. So, yeah, I disagree with all those things, and there's no reason to make a secret of it. And he carries on, and I carry on, and it doesn't make much difference to the clock ticking.

Marcus has had more of an influence on me, but I'll give this a go. The one thing that links all the critics that loosely make up my frame of reference--Kael and Kauffmann and Sarris in film, Marcus and Christgau and a few others in music, Bill James in baseball (he hates having his work reduced to this, but part of what he did in the Abstracts was rate players)--is that with all them, I crossed a point somewhere along the way where their personalities drew me in, and I wanted to know what their opinion was about anybody and everybody. I can't describe how or why that happens, but it does. How often I agree with them matters a little but not a lot. I haven't been interested in what Marcus is interested in for years, yet I'll still read him whenever I get the chance; Christgau's enthusiasms often lose me (especially when he veers off into world music, about which I know next to nothing), but I still have this compulsion to look in on the Consumer Guide wherever it happens to reside and see what he thinks about things. There are many other high-profile film and music critics who write well and knowledgeably, yet they don't mean a thing to me. I can't even really defend that statement--it's just something that happens or it doesn't.

no yeah that's definitely a big factor among different critics, how much you become curious about their take on things whether or not you agree that often

where can i read this dave marsh takedown of the pazz and jop critics poll mentioned in that interview above?

My guess would be that it was in Rock and Roll Confidential; doesn't appear to be archived at Rock's Back Pages.

http://www.rocksbackpages.com/writer.html?WriterID=marsh_d

Marsh once infamously wrote, "Queen isn't here just to entertain. This group has come to make it clear exactly who is superior and who is inferior. Its anthem, 'We Will Rock You', is a marching order: you will not rock us, we will rock you. Indeed, Queen may be the first truly fascist rock band . . . [I] wonder why anyone would indulge these creeps and their polluting ideas."[1] Previously, he had described lead singer Freddie Mercury as possessing a merely "passable pop voice."[2]

In the 1983 Rolling Stone Record Guide, Marsh called Journey "a dead end for San Francisco area rock" and accused them of having "made records perfectly calculated to be inserted into FM radio." He awarded every single Journey album released up to that point – seven studio albums, a compilation album and a live album – the minimum possible score of 1/5 stars.[3] In the same publication, he described fellow power balladeers Air Supply as "The most calculated and soulless pseudo-group of its kind, which is saying something."[4]

Along with Rolling Stone magazine publisher Jann Wenner, Marsh has been involved in organizing and maintaining the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland, Ohio. Regarding a possible induction for Kiss into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, Marsh said, "Kiss is not a great band, Kiss was never a great band, Kiss never will be a great band, and I have done my share to keep them off the ballot." Frontman Paul Stanley responded by calling the Hall "a sham" and "the creation of a group of industry people and critics who decide who they deem as qualified to be in their little admiration society."[5] In his 1980 review on Bob Seger's album Against the Wind, Marsh stated, "I'd like to say that this is not only the worst record Bob Seger has ever made, but an absolutely cowardly one as well."[6]

Marsh has published four books about singer/musician Bruce Springsteen. Some of these became bestsellers, including Born to Run and Glory Days. [1] Marsh is closely associated with Springsteen because his wife, Barbara Carr, is one of Springsteen's co-managers. Marsh is also closely associated with Jon Landau, a Springsteen manager and producer, for the same reason.

he's promoted a fairly self-aggrandizing idea of what rock oughta be.

It was on Addicted To Noise in '97 or '98. Marsh stopped voting in P&J that year, at least partly due to the obtuseness of Christgau's year-end essay. In the ATN piece he quoted a paragraph from the essay and said (I'm paraphrasing), "Do you know what that means? Me neither."

xp

yeah Marsh is undeniably very establishment and dogmatic, especially compared to his contemporaries, but i can't say i hate him for it, he is what he is

(Marsh's wikipedia page evidently edited by someone whose dog Marsh ran over and/or Fred Goodman)

"In 1997, Addicted to Noise and SonicNet were both acquired by Paradigm Music Entertainment, which in turn was acquired by TCI Music, which was then acquired by Viacom in 1999 and folded into MTV's online operation, MTVi."

Very inspirational.

Dave Marsh hates Neil Young because he supported Reagan, and because Marsh's father had to work until he died he blames Reagan too.

It's noted in Shakey that Neil killing Dave's dad didn't come up when Dave interviewed him in the '90s

Christgau has always been gnomic when inspiration fails him and maybe it has in the last three years. I never treasured him as a validator of my tastes because he loathed Duran Duran, Rush, Crowded House, Peter Gabriel, and other stuff. But for every one he despised he was lucid about Wire, Neil Young, Luther Vandross, Go-Betweens, Pavement, Sonic Youth, Womack & Womack, Lou Reed, Prince, and at least two dozen other acts whose relevance in my canon is due in no small part not just to his championing of them but how he taught how to think about them, or think about my tastes generally.

*how he taught me to think about them