sometime i read christgau and am amazed...

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....

chuck, it wasn't an observation per se, it was an opinion. which is not my full statement on the matter; i have written other things, here and elsewhere, that you might find it a bit more challenging to respond to, though i suspect you could come up with a putdown just the same (or if not a putdown, a capital-letters rant full of expletives).

now i suspect you happen to not find it "highly informed" simply because you disagree with it, not because you happen to know or care to what extent i am familiar with rock criticism.

i learned a while ago that you don't respond to logic, or to anything that suggests criticism, except by snide remarks and putdowns. at least that is how it comes off on ilm.

please cite the name of one of these dumbed-down critics who i have professed to prefer to xgau, say; my arguments are not in favor of one vein of rock criticism over another, but a plea for an altogether new type of writing on rock, one modeled after writing that is.

the past few years do not demarcate, to me, some kind of decline in rock criticism. there would have had to have been some kind of golden age for there to have been a decline. i enjoy reading many critics from time to time, but on the whole i have been dissatisfied with rock criticism since always, and i don't find examples of it from the 60s and 70s, say, to be any better (possibly much worse) than what is being written now.

OTM

every time someone proposes an alternative, or indicates a preference, to the kind of criticism chuck specializes in, he retorts with the accusation that they want to be "spoon fed" some kind of shilling idiocy.

oh i'm sorry are we talking about who "rocks" and who doesn't again now?

''Was it just supposed to be an overview of their career as a build-up to the concert? If so, and it was written for a reader who doesn't know the band and get all the lyric and album cover references, I don't know what it would communicate to them.''

yes, I think it was build up to a concert. Just took another glance, and, as someone who has only heard one record from them, it did tell me quite a bit about the sound, the personalities within the band, the covers (context and more context) but it's done within this web of puns so I you might not know what would be true or not but I don't think criticism should be consumer guide all the time but I wonder if i loved it more than I should have done bcz I know dave from being on the board for a few years now and kind of have an idea of his online 'persona'.

I quite like the xgau review and 10-20 word reviews are a valid and workable format, again execution is the key (see stefan jaworzyn's 'scum list' but you prob won't find it, too damn obscure but a mix of the funny, informative, plain throw away stuff and phrases to chew on, that make you think about what you're listening far more than most 'proper' reviews).

i seem to have left out a big chunk of my sentence here, sorry.

i meant to say that i appreciate certain veins of music study of other kinds of music, and perhaps a better rock criticism could model itself after certain examples of same. that's all.

"This is why rock critics are morons. . ."

"The entire Voice music staff are a bunch of fucking nitwits. . ."

I wish I had disassociated myself from those sweeping comments before making any further response.

*I think one of the funniest things on this thread is the way someone, I think it was cinniblount, wanted to make a sharp distinction between music criticism and journalism. Meanwhile, chuck and others seem to want to blur the line between criticsm and art. To me, the line between music criticism (at least the sort that appears in newspapers) and music journalism is much less black and white than the line between criticism and art (though once again, I understand that criticism can be literature as well).

If you read Chris Ware you get both.

"The entire Voice music staff are a bunch of fucking nitwits. . .""

OK, i didn't notice these comments; I suppose this would nettle me too

Yes, obviously, if you are at all interested in understanding music in its social context. If you are primarily interested in being the music critic of Harold Bloom's* "strong poet," then maybe not.

*I think it was Bloom. Read about it in Rorty.

Has anyone else done this?