sometime i read christgau and am amazed...

The pattern of the HMs here are "here's a witty one liner about the BAND, ALBUM or MUSIC CONTAINED THEREIN" not "here's a comment about one song I like, here's another comment about another song I like."

Hey, I only mentioned math in one post, which nobody even answered!! I guess Metal Mike's accounting career is old news or something...

But choice A above does not necessarily NEGATE choice B. The Blondie review was meant to be both, obviously -- a witty one-liner consisting of comments about two different songs. Sort of.

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I think it's pretty funny how not being terribly interested in writing with "personality" and not looking to writing primarily for its entertainment value is getting labelled "dumbing down" on this thread. I would have thought turning every discipline into a personality cult would be one example of "dumbing down."

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I honestly don't know why I am continuing to post to this thread. Apparently, I enjoy this sort of thing. I wish I didn't.

(To be honest, I didn't really like the piece - though I love dave q and Yes - on first skimming but without even rereading this thread is making me appreciate it more.)

I loved the Yes piece, personally.

"I'm assuming the "true summers" stuff is a reference to the chorus of Yes' hit "Roundabout": "Ten true summers we'll be there and laughing too/Twenty-four before my love and I'll be there with you"."

I hadn't caught that at first. But that was OK. The piece works even if you don't catch it. (I just figured it was an attempt to sound all fancy and literary - just like Yes.) And I think that's the key to making references, lyrical or otherwise.

I didn't know John Anderson was a milkman. If I were someday to find out he weren't, then I'd retroactively like the piece a lot less, because then it would read like pure fiction. But this mixture of fact and fancy is dead-on, particularly given its subject. And it solves the problem of "what the hell is there left to say about Yes?"

Just like Christgau pretty well solved the problem of what to say about the Blondie record, which, according to other reviews I've read in the past day and a half, sounds pretty Blondie-esque.

I also didn't think it was obvious that Christgau was talking about song lyrics. (I too assume "believes in reincarnation" was a reference to it being a comeback album.) And I also don't really get, even after having it explained, what the value of that blurb would be for someone reading it.

No Exit seems more appropriate.

-- sundar subramanian (sundar_subramanian200...), April 23rd, 2004.

It's in the Honorable Mentions, so he thinks it's pretty good, but not great. Picking a couple of lyric references = "otherwise, it's pretty much what you'd expect from a Blondie album."

Granted, I needed to have a little of that explained to me - the "reincarnation" bit does sound like a metaphor, which leads one to believe that "wishes the pope had a bigger dick" is also a metaphor. But apparently others got it, so what the heck.

Attaching this much importance, positive or negative, to one of many 10-word end-of-the-column reviews: C or D?

yes. especially when it rocks.

"Whatever other genre distinctions you want to make (and they're always fuzzy), it's a weird switch to act as if black music (whatever exactly that means) is not rock and roll. If Motown was rock and roll, then so are the O'Jays and Donna Summer; if Linda Ronstadt and Randy Newman are part of the tradition, then so are Natalie Cole and Gil Scott-Heron. Rock and roll is a direct descendant of rhythm and blues, and so are soul, funk, middle-class black pop from Linda Hopkins to Ashford & Simpson, Philly-derived disco, reggae (less categorically), and jazz fusion and Eurodisco (less categorically still, since both are genuinely interracial styles with disparate forebears). All these genres share formal and cultural presuppositions with white rock."

But yeah, sure, it's a matter of opinion, just like all genre classifications. But I'd say a lot of techno and country and teenpop (and maybe all hip-hop) are rock, too. Just like James Brown and the Platters and the Shangri-Las and the Coasters and Desmond Dekker.

http://www.villagevoice.com/issues/0239/allred.php

As a habitual user of the parenthetical phrase myself (which I trace to early and prolonged exposure to Pauline Kael), I stand in awe of Don Allred's barrage of asides, digressions, and (literally) inside jokes in his review of the new Dixie Chicks album, Home ["Goin' Out Walkin'," September 25-October 1]. Allred knows what he's doing. By frantically juggling language (I'm reminded of somebody working a shell game, or maybe three-card monte, same thing), sometimes going so far as to insert brackets within parentheses, he almost manages to conceal the fact that he has nothing to say. (He thinks that an argument set down in simple declarative sentences would be dull.) (Given his inability to describe music, it would be.) Add the steady barrage of puns, neologisms, and street talk (but where would we find that street?), and we just have to give up. The prose (and the reader) is (are) tortured beyond belief. We long to hear something, anything, about the Dixie Chicks, but Allred doesn't deliver (or, as he might have said [and I'm surprised he didn't]—the Chicks are in the mail).
Douglas Anderson
Middlebury, Vermont
Don Allred replies: The Chicks are also in the mall, and I suggest that you go reward yourself by purchasing Home, if you haven't done so already (or even if you have) (it gooood).

Not sure what "a rock perspective" (there's not just one!) might mean here, and sadly I don't know who Jammer are, but I should point out that "rock" can mean Tangerine Dream & Kraftwerk too (assuming "Kraut rock" is part of "rock"), not just Led Zeppelin and AC/DC...

As for reggae, I seriously doubt that words like "rockers" and "rocksteady" are entirely coincidental...

After reading Scott Seward's El-P review I wondered how such an absolute farce of an attempt to communicate anything, other than a masturbatory fascination with words and the self speaking them, got printed in the Voice. One would expect a reviewer to offer something more tangible than useless literary name-dropping and meaningless pop-culture references like "El-P's sound tries to come across like some William Burroughs cutup of the B-boy's Bhagavad Gita but turns out more like Nabokov's Lolita holding down a slab of Velveeta so it can get fucked by Chester Cheetah." The point of a review is to express cogent thoughts about a piece of work, not rhyme one's way through a gleefully nonsensical diatribe against music one clearly has not taken the time to listen to closely.
Dan Thomas-Glass
Berkeley, California

And now I have to turn off my computer and go home....