XGAU VS PITCHFORK – THE POLL

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

All in all, 'you have emotions, LOL' is the possibly the aspect of his shtick I find most off-putting.

It was sort of a turning point in pop crit when this happened: pfork reassess yes

*possibly the aspect

xp

Funny because Pfork still felt prog-skeptical to me until the turn of the 10s, more or less.

xp

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

― mellon collie and the infinite bradness (BradNelson), Tuesday, November 10, 2020 9:08 AM (one hour ago) bookmarkflaglink

this is correct. these are both in the Rolling Stone Illustrated History of Rock and are both great, as is his piece in there about the Stones.

His book reviews are my favorites of his recent publications.

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.

― DJP, Tuesday, November 10, 2020 1:00 PM (two hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

otm

Looking over their respective top 50s for 2019, there were three albums on the Pitchfork list I listened to multiple times and liked a lot (Blood Incantation, Weyes Blood, Big Thief; missed the Fennesz somehow?) and none on Christgau's (listened more to UFOF than Two Hands, except "Not"; need to spend more time with 75 Dollar Bill). Otoh, I do admire his chutzpah in ranking a Sonic Youth live recording from 2008 in the top 10 of the year.

https://pitchfork.com/features/lists-and-guides/best-albums-2019/
https://www.yearendlists.com/2020/01/robert-christgau-dean-s-list-2019

Blood Incantation

haha inzanejonny has made them such a meme i giggle when i think of them now

Idk what that is but album was great; never got around to buying it but I should.

Of the albums I heard from Xgau's top 50 of 2019, I enjoyed: Billie Eilish, Purple Mountains, Kim Gordon, Danny Brown, Tanya Tagaq, Jamila Woods. That's six.

p4k's: Angel Olsen, Fennesz, Weyes Blood, Purple Mountains, Jamila Woods, Billie Eilish, Kim Gordon, Burna Boy, MIKE, Nilüfer Yanya, Thom Yorke, Blood Incantation, Danny Brown. That's thirteen, and only Tanya Tagaq is missing if you set the two lists side by side.

So there you have it.

Nothing from my top 20 appeared on either list, I'm proud to report.

I put together an unweighted top 50 last year and Danny Brown is the only one who made it out of the lot.

I aspire to eventually put together EOY lists based entirely on the sounds of construction outside my apartment.

(Landlords are providing ample material this year.)

Mine will be all autotuned trap, courtesy of my downstairs stoner zoomer neighbours who are utterly incapable of uttering a sentence that does not begin with the word 'bro'.

For me, Christgau's Record Guide: Rock Albums of the Seventies was very useful: he understood that the post-Beatles, post-Woodstock Age of Rock, as it was actually called then by some writers, incl. the guy who put together the rock writing anthology of that title, a supergenre which fed on all other genres, subgenres, outliers etc, was not just lowest common denominator/giving it up to our new overlords, but created, via bigger market(s), Boomers getting a little older and having more of their own money, also more weed etc, but the opportunity for musicians, DJs, listeners, dancers, people who were all of the above and more, to make their own subgenres, niches, record collections, responses in other art forms, other media, and other parts of their lives.
His tastes and interests were pretty varied, seemed like, across the genres and subgenres, though now I'm struck by the canonical cohesiveness of his personal faves of the decade, published in mid-Dec. issue of the Voice:https://www.robertchristgau.com/xg/list/decade70.php
So that was formative for me, along with Creem; the 80s guide was helpful, with some things I'd missed in that decade, but also these first two collections were more varied in terms of the range of good, less good, mediocre, bad, and dogshit albums covered, and his saying why and how they so this and that and the other---90s guide introduced the icons, ways of dismissing anything that wasn't good or less good (might have been a few comments on the Cs). Also, by the 90s, I was less and less reliant on anybody else's judgment, in part because of what he'd led me to in and from the 70s.
Good and bad, he's always written short and long, while Pitchfork writers seem always to be locked into writing kinda long, incl. about some albums that I know are best described in 100 words or less, and the padding can be pathetic. But sometimes the reviews are pretty reasonable, helpful, even otm, and there is a potentially refreshing appeal in the they, however much of a consensus is attached---as w Creem, heyday Voice etc---rather than a single voice, over and over and over.

"mid-December" *1979* issue of the Voice, I meant.

But yes, there were always huge blind spots, jumping from England, mostly London, and never mind rest of the UK, over to Plastic People of Prague, and that's it---also, in the 80s guide, as more music from all over becomes more available in the States, he's mostly into Africa, too bad, other continents. A little bit of metal, Reign in Blood and some Motorhead, also some albums by Henry Cow, Art Bears, Wyatt-era Soft Machine, and that's about it for prog.

But before he simply dismissed everything he didn't like, his descriptions could be more appealing than he meant them to be; I knew people who only bought the hard-rockin Cs and on down, for instance.

On the old rec.music.progressive group, people talked about searching for prog gold by checking out anything described as "pretentious" or "self-indulgent" in the Rolling Stone record guides.

Yeah, that was handy too! Nowadays I'm more likely to find out about good music I hadn't heard of via ILM, more than any review site per se. Also books via ILB.

Same here.

ILX helped guide me towards rap music I hadn't previously appreciated. metal too, but I tend to forge my own path more there (but I still find stuff I love via the threads, like Putrescine).

I did try one time going to metal-archives.com and bouncing around using the Similar Artists tool until I found a weird-assed band that had decent reception but wasn't huge and would grab something by them. not always fruitful but a fun exercise.

otm

oh cool they both lost

Next do john peel vs. wfmu