Xgau Tastes Voice's Ax

From Dave Marsh, "The Critics' Critic, II" in the January 11th 1977 Rolling Stone

"Rock criticism is now often seen in many quarters as more important than rock itself. Many critics carry this one step further by superimposing their own, frequently arbitrary, standards upon performers.

A classic, sad example is Robert Christgau, whose "Consumer Guide" in the Village Voice was once a model of cogent, witty criticism. Lately, Christgau has grown arrogant and humorless--the raves are reserved for jazz artists, while even the best rock is treated condescendingly unless it conforms to Christgau's passion for leftist politics (particulaly feminism) and bohemian culture. While he is too shrewd to let his dislike for apolitical or middle-class performers affect his A plus to E minus rating of them, the tone of the writing is now snotty--it lacks compassion, not to mention empathy, with current rock.

The Christgau example is particularly dispiriting because when he lightens up on the ideology, he remains one of rock's most perceptive analysts. There are any number of parallel vices: the punk-rock critics, led by Lester Bangs and Richard Meltzer, celebrate cultural garbage--televised wrestling, franchised foods, Quaaludes--and often wander into racism and sexism. Unfortunately for the punks, some mass culture artifacts are just garbage--Bangs and Meltzer usually know the difference but most of their followers and fellow punk critics do not, as a glance at an issue of Creem, their main outlet, quickly shows."

THE IRONY THE IRONY THE GOGGLES DO NOTHING, ETC.

This is kind of fascinating in that, just a few years later, Bangs was acknowledging/addressing this sort of thing in The White Noise Supremacists.

As a Bangs fan, by the way, I would say that I think he was always a fairly serious and fairly normal critic and I'm not sure how often the alleged inability to take serious things seriously was ever that characteristic of his writing as a whole.

But, nabisco, even his Lou Reed essays/wrestling matches avowed the moralism of the Velvets over the easy chuckles of, say, Sally Can't Dance.

He's always struck me as a dull, predictable, and aesthetically conservative writer.
Yeah, and sententious, too.

Musically, Marsh's taste has always been narrower than Christgau's.