XGAU VS PITCHFORK – THE POLL

B+

Lol

I think "Earl Misogyny" might be my most proud moment on ilm.

it is a stellar contribution to the canon

(which, given the thread, is very appropriate)

I love reading his Consumer Guides on his site, fun tracking the evolution of music over such a long time frame. Personally, I prefer Stereogum.

so this is basically a deathmatch between the Dean of American Rock Critics and the Duke of Earl Misogyny, did I get that right?

Yepperoni.

"Nitsuh"; "Katherine"; "Brad"; "Philip"; "Alfred" ✂

. . .but what about earl's early misogyny?

Earl Misogyny’s Top 50 albums of all time

The Beatles, Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band L
The Beatles, The Beatles’ Second Album L
Chuck Berry, The Definitive Collrction L
Blondie, Parallel Lines L
James Brown, Star Time L
The Clash, The Clash
Culture, Two Sevens Clash
DeBarge, In a Special Way L
DJ Shadow, Endtroducing DJ Shadow
Bob Dylan, “Love and Theft” L
Bob Dylan & the Band, The Basement Tapes L
Eminem, The Marshall Mathers Album
Eno, Another Green World L
The Flying Burrito Brothers, The Gilded Palace of Sin
Franco & Rochereau, Omona Wapi (Shanachie version)
Girl Group Greats L
Gogol Bordello, Super Taranta! L
Grateful Dead, Workingman’s Dead L
Al Green, I’m Still in Love With You L
Guitar Paradise of East Africa L
Michael Hurley/The Unholy Modal Rounders/Jeffrey Fredricks & the Clamtones, Have Moicy!
The Indestructible Beat of Soweto L
Latin Playboys, Latin Playboys
John Lennon, Plastic Ono Band L
Jerry Lee Lewis, “Live” at the Star Club, Hamburg L
Lil Wayne, Tha Carter III
Little Richard, The Very Best of . . . Little Richard L
M.I.A., Kala
Joni Mitchell, Blue L
Van Morrison, Moondance L
New York Dolls, New York Dolls
Orchestra Baobab, Specialist in All Styles L
Public Enemy, It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back L
Ramones, Rocket to Russia L
Otis Redding, The Immortal Otis Redding L
The Rolling Stones, Exile on Main Street L
The Rolling Stones, The Rolling Stones, Now! L
The Roots, How I Got Over L
The Sex Pistols, Never Mind the Bollocks, Here’s the Sex Pistols L
The Shirelles, The Very Best of the Shirelles (Rhino)
Sonic Youth, Daydream Nation L
Dusty Springfield, Dusty in Memphis L
Steely Dan, Pretzel Logic L
Television, Marquee Moon
The Velvet Underground, The Velvet Underground L
Kanye West, Late Registration L
Wire, Pink Flag L
Wussy, Funeral Dress
Neil Young, After the Gold Rush L
Tom Zé, Brazil Classics 4: The Best of Tom Zé L

P4K’s Initial Release 10.0 albums

12 Rods - Gay?
Walt Mink - El Producto
Amon Tobin - Bricolage
Radiohead - OK Computer
Bob Dylan - The Bootleg Series Vol. 4: Bob Dylan Live 1966, The "Royal Albert Hall" Concert
Bonnie 'Prince' Billy - I See a Darkness
The Flaming Lips - The Soft Bulletin
Radiohead - Kid A
...And You Will Know Us by the Trail of Dead - Source Tags & Codes
Wilco - Yankee Hotel Foxtrot
Kanye West - My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy
Fiona Apple - Fetch the Bolt Cutters

💣 vs 0.0

I mean, if newspapers in the '70s had the technology, would xgau have embedded a video of a monkey pissing in its own mouth for a review?

Christgau, flaws and all. (Unfair vote--Pitchfork came along after my interest in reading any kind of rock criticism had narrowed to a few people I'd been reading for years.)

My taste probably overlaps about evenly with both (ie not that much), but Christgau is reliably more interesting to read, IMO.

idk if this counts as a hot take but I read music writing to learn of music I think I will enjoy and will enrich my life, not (primarily) to delight in sparkling prose or whatever, and for all its flaws Pitchfork has been a good resource over the years. I mean, Wussy are fine and all, but.

Essentially my position as well.

Pitchfork I've been reading loyally since Ryan Schreiber/Brent Dicrescenzo days, but they've consistently improved, and they've aged right along with me.
And as for Christgau, I've never understood his shtick. Is he still alive?

Real poll options:
Are you closer to 60 or closer to 40?

but I read music writing to learn of music I think I will enjoy and will enrich my life

Exactly why I read Christgau (discovering Wussy being a perfect example); actually not that big a fan of the way he writes. (By which I simply mean the way he puts words together.)

And yes--much, much closer to 60!

enchoroot - he is alive

in terms of sourcing music to enjoy, I find having a variety of writers more useful than having one guy whose sensibility/interest set seems to rarely overlap with my own

This must surely be a joke but xgau for his stubbornness and tenacity. p4k has some good reviews but the institution of "p4k" amounts to less than the sum of its parts- obsession with consensus is nauseating.
both execrable tbh

the idea of sourcing music through reviews seems a bit old fashioned.

obsession with consensus is nauseating
^ goes for this board too (ducks)

hipster canon building is tedious but horny old hippies are worse

I had seen Christgau's name before and, of course, had heard Lou Reed calling him a toefucker on "Take No Prisoners" but I had never read a word of his, so when I joined ILX (quite a while ago now) and his name kept being brought up like he was the fucking Pope I was quite taken aback. Then I realized I had fallen into a den of music critics.

Christgau's Rock Albums of the 70s book did get fairly widespread distribution in London bookshop at least, and iirc was even remaindered at one point. So that plus the Lou Reed and Sonic Youth mentions put him more on my radar than most US rockcrits.

the idea of sourcing music through reviews seems a bit old fashioned

what, I should be relying solely on the algorithm? fugouttaheeere

I’m all for virtual crate-digging; that’s how I found out about Let’s Eat Grandma. I am also all for people putting music through their own contextual spaces and describing what they’re hearing and what that means to them because it often sharpens and enhances what I do or don’t like about a piece of music, or makes me curious about something I normally wouldn’t have paid attention to.

oh forgot to mention that Pfork pays a bunch of good and smart writers to gush over music I would likely have glossed over otherwise and none of them subject me to their gross hangups in the process

hipster canon building is tedious but horny old hippies are worse

Poll needed.

I don't really source music through either of these (or Spotify algorithms) with any frequency tbh, although I can think of at least one album I discovered bc of Christgau (Gold Panda - Lucky Shiner). I imagine he was possibly responsible for putting some older music on the map in the first place.

For all its (un)intentional bouts of lulziness, Pitchfork has durably shaped my listenings habits, no doubt because I am a millennial. Xgau… not so much. The first time I came across his website (never read him in print, obv.) I remember thinking he had the worst, most offensive taste of any music critic I'd ever encountered up to that point.

I don't know anything about the "taste" of Robert Christgau because I find his prose offensively unreadable. Like others here, I only know of him because of ILX, otherwise I'd never encountered his "writing" IRL. RIP.

Haha, in the days when you could still read Christgau in print, there were a lot of critics with worse taste.xp

xgau for his stubbornness and tenacity.

see these are not key attributes i value highly in a critic. ive learned from xgau and discovered music through him (when ive been able to decipher his ridiculous prose), but the flipside of his stubbornness is reading him grind the same boring axes and exhibit the same boring blind spots over and over again, year after year after decade. thats also clearly a result of reading any individual critic cover the same beat for 40 years, but still. the variety of pfork has offered me much more over the years. obviously they have their own axes and blind spots and missteps, but at least those shift over the years as writers and regimes change.

he had the worst, most offensive taste of any music critic I'd ever encountered up to that point.

Examples? I'm curious.

one thing i like about reading xgau capsule reviews is that i can imagine the thoughts on the page passing through his head as he listens to the music

obviously there is also space in criticism for the poetry of "emotion recollected in tranquility" but i appreciate the dynamism of first-thought-best-thought

Examples? I'm curious.

Prog and metal are utter blind spots for him as is anything without a clearly defined and sustained backbeat (yet he doesn't care for electronic music). He also seems to have a bone to pick with 'artsy' and/or European bands unless they happen to jive with his resolutely materialist hardmanning. As for specific offenders, see, well, most of my favourite albums of all time when I was in my late teens/early twenties: OK Computer, The Dark Side of the Moon, In the Court of the Crimson King, Paranoid, Dummy, Violator, Laughing Stock (lol).

i think xgau’s taste and prose are the only two things i like about him

as much as his five-sentences-folded-into-a-fist capsule reviews can be dense and obtuse his longform stuff is pretty clear and well-written, cf. his old pieces about elton john and al green

however i never want to know what he thinks of any woman

He's into M.I.A.! And Joni Mitchell! And Dusty Springfield!

Prog and metal are utter blind spots for him as is anything without a clearly defined and sustained backbeat (yet he doesn't care for electronic music). He also seems to have a bone to pick with 'artsy' and/or European bands unless they happen to jive with his resolutely materialist hardmanning.

He was possibly less bad in these regards than a lot of rock critics from the 70s-90s. The secret they didn't tell you is that 'rockists' hated rock most of all.

http://www.roberthilburnonline.com/

He 'got' Zep sooner than the others, it's true. I can't think of a single prog band that won his favour, however, save for the odd LP or two.

yes, the revulsion toward "European" music/vibes/undertones, whatever the hell that meant, gets to me too.

I learned a fuck-ton about developing ideas in longform prose from him.

He's certainly a very distinctive prose stylist, there's no quibbling with that.

He wasn't an outlier there, sadly, including Pitchfork before some point in the mid-00s.2xp

xgau, 90% for style and 10% cuz occasionally i agree with him

yeah he definitely has that late-70s 'NY vs London' macho pose baked into his perspective more or less permanently

in terms of who shaped my taste the most over the course of my life, it's pfork, but my taste prob resembles xgau's more at this point. i'll let you know when pfork accept my pitch for a sunday review of in a special way though

The Process were more like a Scientology knockoff, manipulating the malleable; their "theology" was not Satanic so much as a warped Christian bothsidesism:

The Process Church preached the existence of four gods, who were regarded not as literal entities but as inner realities existing within each human personality. Accordingly, these deities were not worshipped. The names of its deities were drawn from traditional Judeo-Christian religion. They were known as Jehovah, Lucifer, Satan, and Christ, and were collectively referred to as the "Great Gods of the Universe." The Church stated that "Jehovah is strength. Lucifer is light. Satan is separation. Christ is unification."

There's a good documentary about them, Sympathy for the Devil; I have the DVD. They were really good at marketing, which made their public profile much larger than their actual membership deserved.

Xgau, no shame

I can understand someone with different taste not enjoying his takes but in terms of inclusiveness he was way ahead of the curve with pop, soul, r'n'b, hip hop, world music and yeah, female artists. there are great writers on pitchfork but in general the pitchfork perspective is incomparably duller and shallower than his. i'm closer to 40 btw

enjoyed rereading this 1976 longform piece abt rockcrit+springsteen (courtly overdecoration of its essential my-colleagues-are-dangerous-naifs thesis and all) this morning while listening to wild+innocent

In the early-'60s tradition of Del Shannon (a closer analogy than Roy Orbison even if he isn't named on Born to Run), Springsteen is a rather operatic rock star. Years of touring have formalized his histrionic tendencies, and now he risks getting tripped up in his own self-consciousness. Further, as Langdon Winner puts it, "Bruce has a real problem with rhythm"; when John Rockwell extols Springsteen's phrasing, I recall uncomfortably that Rockwell's roots are with Caruso rather than Ray Charles. For unlike the R&B-and-blues-influenced titans who are invoked as his predecessors--Presley, Dylan, Van Morrison--Springsteen shows no aptitude for the relaxed scat; he is obviously attracted to rhythm-and-blues as teen rather than black music. But this in itself is far from fatal. It simply means that in these respects the great rocker he resembles is John Lennon...

It was an assumption of most early rock critics, who tended to be young litterateurs on a paying gig, that rock and roll was in hibernation in the years preceding Beatlemania. This was flat-out wrong. The early '60s were a rich if somewhat silly period that nurtured both the soul style (irrelevant here) and a wealth of not-so-ephemeral pop rock and roll, consummated in the enlightened hedonism of the Beach Boys and the great production machines of Motown and Phil Spector. This is Springsteen's era--he may talk Berry and Presley, but his encore is Gary U.S. Bonds....

Like the early '60s, the mid-'70s are a myopic time, but they lack hope and innocence; our rock hero is Elton John, who makes up for his visionlessness with overwhelming studio perspicacity. I'm sure it will seem willful to Jon Landau, who can't stand Old Four Eyes, but on mornings when I feel like playing Born to Run real loud I often opt for Elton's Rock of the Westies as well. Both answer my need for monolithic, full-sounding, produced rock and roll--a need I indulge freely because I know I have other very different ones.... For like so many of the best American popular romantic/primitive formalists, Spector was a unique but very narrow artist. He had a vision, yes--but it was romantic to the edge of camp, barely adequate to his more innocent and hopeful time.

It's fine for Springsteen to set himself up as the boy Darlene Love is gonna marry, or to vouchsafe the Beach Boys some East Coast hustle--but only if he can transform the high fantasy content of those images into something more than another of the doomed-loser myths that have littered America's artscape since the frontier closed. Early rock and roll was energized by the class mobility and material transport of a genuinely expanding economy, and the fact that those stimuli have dissipated doesn't mean people don't still hanker after them. Springsteen does, and so do his fans. His aesthetic strategy on Born to Run is to duplicate that energy and then add a patina of tragedy, just to remind us things aren't so expansive anymore. His rebel adolescent hero can be jubilant or mournful, defiant or driven to self-deceiving, but one thing is certain--he can always feel sorry for himself. This is a high grade of sentimental escapism, indulgence of a sort that is anything but wise. There is nothing tough or new in it. The future, rock and roll version included, is going to be tough, and it had better be new.

American popular romantic/primitive formalism challenges moribund notions of culture and limns a psychological dynamic that anyone who wants to affect this country (or this world) had better not only understand but harness. Nevertheless, it misses an awful lot. Most significant, its purview--just like our establishment, fancy that--is entirely male. I'm not being prissy here; I'm not suggesting that Springsteen write songs to Susan Saxe or give up male chauvinism for Lent. But he might try to defeat the stereotyping that afflicts even Terry in "Backstreets" and Crazy Janie, both presumably people he has known. The women of Dylan, or Ferry, or Fagen and Becker are hardly heroic sisters, but they are at least considerable rivals; their autonomy goes beyond that of Peggy Sue and the ladies of "East of Eden."

Admittedly, the politics of class and sex are a tick of mine, one that may well disfigure my analysis of an artist who has moved my colleagues so profoundly.... Springsteen... has always played a winningly articulate kind of loser, and now he is rich as well as smart. And so my colleagues both thrill to a fellow winner and identify with his loser rebel persona, forgetting in the rock and roll moment how much the winner in them shares with what the fighter was fighting against....

Welles theorizes that Springsteen's success reflects "the psychological needs of those who operate the media" more than it does "the desires and interests of those to whom the media is [sic] directed," but this is massculture theory cant, the kind that can be plugged in anywhere. Obviously, Springsteen does fulfill the fans' needs and desires--that's why they buy him and not Randy Newman. This does not mean, however, that their experience of the artist doesn't differ from the critics'. For the most part, Springsteen the winner can provide them strictly vicarious delight; what they need and desire--ominously, I think--is an artist who romanticizes and even celebrates a defeat that is a lot more likely for them than it is for any establishment, rock and roll version included.

I like parts of that a lot, though it's got the condescention towards both the audience and his peers that turns me off on him

I guess I should read more of his long form stuff, the capsule reviews he's known for probably exaggerate the smug, cryptic side of him

this is uhhhh o_O

he is obviously attracted to rhythm-and-blues as teen rather than black music

For the most part, Springsteen the winner can provide them strictly vicarious delight; what they need and desire--ominously, I think--is an artist who romanticizes and even celebrates a defeat that is a lot more likely for them than it is for any establishment, rock and roll version included.

^this is kind of interesting given we know what's coming from springsteen - darkness, the river, born in the usa, springsteen felt the same I guess

Admittedly, the politics of class and sex are a tick of mine, one that may well disfigure my analysis of an artist who has moved my colleagues so profoundly

"Sometimes it can be a burden, this gigantic brain of mine..."

lol

tick

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PkBNBxQZbY4

78? Damn, I hadn't realized.

― pomenitul, Wednesday, November 11, 2020 12:51 PM (six days ago)

I thought he was older tbqh

Destroy (or Defund) both options in the OP

To be fair, Christgau is about as defunded now as a rock critic can be.

he says he's making more from his subscription model than he ever suspected.

I'm glad to hear that, but I assumed the previous poster meant that he should be "deplatformed" (without an official soapbox, since no-one is publishing him in a regular forum).

orig included a note loling at how unfortunate “tick” is so close on the page to prissily [sic]ing another writer over using “media” in the singular— but ended up having to admit that the monolithic concept the latter solecism betrays is actually relevant to building a case that a guy thinks in microwaved adornoisms. lol tick tho yeah

^booming post

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n-dpqVdKG9I

I can't remember which critic wrote about this (it was dated before 2006), but it was someone unaffiliated with the Village Voice and apparently Christgau called him up and badgered him to use a thesaurus. It was probably in response to a Pazz & Jop ballot.

Automatic thread bump. This poll is closing tomorrow.

I ain’t no boomer, I voted for the fork.

Automatic thread bump. This poll's results are now in.

loll

looooool

This poll's victor will take on Fanta in due course.

https://atothejay.files.wordpress.com/2010/06/52pickup.jpg

otm

oh cool they both lost

Next do john peel vs. wfmu