New Christgau Consumer Guide From MSN Music

This is true enough, but Christgau giving props to a gangsta rap album without tackling the moral issues is always going to come off as weirder than it would with most critics, because he worked more than most at putting these issues in the forefront of other reviews he's written (see his stuff on N.W.A., Dr.Dre.)

But hip-hop is now where rock was in the early '80s, when veterans such as Joni Mitchell, Randy Newman and Lou Reed were the equivalent of what the book trade called publishers' poets back when commercial publishers dealt poetry.

Not trying to take us back to Newsom, but I think this pretty much sums it up for me. If not for the big names involved and the genuinely promising debut album, I highly doubt as many critics would've reacted to Ys. as positively as they did. Impossible to know, though, of course.

I think with Xgau they're often almost an instrumental flourish, to strain a metaphor - if you read his stuff out loud and say the letter grade at the end, it puts a cap on the thing, like a more weighted "The End." Otherwise co-sign completely in re: both letter & number grades, they've been unhealthy for crit in general & I'm happy that the only place you see 'em in book reviews is in fucking People, which is exactly where they belong

This makes me realize that I've never actually read a review of the album before Christgau's! At least I don't think I have. I was almost going to say that he really goes out of his way to squeeze a vague art-rock square peg into an un-vague political protest hole to justify PBS-style his not disliking it as much as he did their debut, but then I re-read the review and Bob really does make a case for it as a protest record of sorts. Not that that makes me remotely more interested in going back and listening to the thing again.

x-post I'm glad he admits that a lot of the appeal is that its prettier. But yeah, political acknowledgement can be an easy bump to A- for him.

new one out
http://music.msn.com/music/consumerguide

OH SNAP! paris goes to jail, then gets a "dud" from xgau

(i feel his reviews are somehow less predictable now that he's on msn - not sure why.....)

The column seems more shallow this time around - not as densely layered. And is there really so little new music that he needs to review Girl Talk and Clap Your Hands Say Yeah?

I wish he tied the idea that the Girl Talk album is oppressive more to its never coalescing into something deeper rather than its proving filthy rappers are bloody good fun. And even more than that to the fact that Night Ripper is a mash-up album with all the significance and longevity that implies.

I top tened this record but with reservations. Something about it always disturbed me. And Xgau's review has now lead me to figure out why (however unwittingly). The obviousness of the samples only underlines our inability to escape information-as-commodity or at least to step outside of it (to whatever extent), perhaps even to make something, well, deep of it. This never bugged me with "The Payoff Mix" or DJ Shadow or The Best Bootlegs in the World Ever (though I never got what The Avalanches were doing) because mixology was never a career option for Double Dee & Steinski and because Shadow did something fathomless with his samples and because the mash-uppers on Best Bootlegs were so anyonymous and most of the song one-offs. But mixology IS a career option for Greg Gillis whose name is displayed in the review and whose face is displayed on the CD (or one of them, I forget). And I fear that no matter how much is renown increases, we'll never get to know who he really is which means we'll never get to know where HE stands in relation to his samples which means we won't discover a new, inventive relationship with information. Which means I may be transforming from a pomo yaysayer to a modernist crank.

how much HIS renown increases...

The 2006 Dean's List

http://www.robertchristgau.com/xg/pnj/deans07.php

Um, he dug the Burial album? I'm stunned. Is there a review anywhere?

Yeah, I was surprised, too. I best it will be reviewed in Feb's MSN Consumer Guide.

I bet

45. Daft Punk: Live 2007 (Virgin)

!!!

ditto. i guess i'm allowed to own that shit now.

No Age, too. Great record.

Goddamn that's a shitty list

lol on Lucinda Williams, a permanent member of his Unimpeachable Canon.

I'd be hard pressed to come up with 10 albums on that list that I enjoy.