XGAU VS PITCHFORK – THE POLL

Carducci did fill the lacuna in prog and hard rock appreciation among rock writers but took the Europhobia and machismo into cartoonish overdrive.

over and above its poll rival

Tbf, there's a perpetually-updated thread dedicated to Pitchfork, or at least its dumbness.

Carducci is a genuine kook libertarian

I haven't read Rock and Pop Narcotic in years. He's a rockist, but like he owns it, he likes a certain strain of rock music and thinks that it's the best music ever made.

Can be a really amazing writer about the things that he loves. Can be ugly at times.

Enter Naomi: SST and All That is by far is great work, really touching and kaleidoscopic reflection on LA punk, California itself through the lens of one of the great (and overlooked) rock photographers of all time. But it was written much later than R&tPN and feels more elegiac and wistful. he talks about a lot of the people who didn't live, a lot of the people who got lost on the way.

he makes you think about how he feels about them. Which just isn't as interesting.

Those two reviews side by side are a funny comparison.

Astor Piazzolla: "I dont know or care an iota about this kind of music. That being said, I happened to hear it, so here's my opinion.
Born Again: "Why should the world be so fascinated by what THIS guy thinks about? Boooring!"

I'm a 78-year-old white man who favors radical police reform and hopes you in particular get everything you want from politics and life. But I'm also a veteran editor who knows an unfortunate turn of phrase when he sees one. "Defund the police" does more harm than good. Period. https://t.co/dIwyiUDwX8

— Robert Christgau (@rxgau) November 11, 2020

Well, I'm certainly glad the dean has weighed in on this one.

78? Damn, I hadn't realized.

has this guy’s political outlook changed even slightly since he was chiding funkadelic for letting the black community down or whatever. entitled liberal dickhead

what is even he doing there, pairing or opposing his whiteness/maleness with his seniority & supposed lefty credentials. gross attempted power move

"radical police reform" uh huh

What he disliked about Funkadelic were their ties to the Process Church of the Final Judgement, a quasi-Satanic occult group. He wrote a review of Ed Sanders' book on the Manson Family and other cults of the era, and swallowed a lot of the author's dubious claims about these occultists.

I didn’t know about that, I was just going off his fymayawf review which seems to epitomise his weird race politics

Lefty cred not very impressive, and he was pretty soft on Bush Wars (as Merle Haggard called them, and not as a compliment), at least when they started (incl. First Gulf War), but I have heard liberal Dems saying that "defund the police" was a gift to Republicans--"radical police reforms" is not much better, just not as catchy, not as likely a gift: if he means something about police unions, who tend to defend even the worst police, then yeah, but he should say so (lots of investigative journalism on this subject, esp. in past year or so).
However dangerous they may or may not have ever been, The Process were (hopefully mostly past tense) Satanists, yeah, though with their own take. a few years ago, I got a promo of one of their songbooks performed by Wooden Wand and friends: hymns to Jesus and to Satan, like If you love X, give Y a try. No idea how closely or how long any of Funkadelic were ever tied in with them, but it was worth mentioning in the post-Manson era, when several cults were becoming more noticeable via bad behavior.

George Clinton apparently read Process Church literature when he was living in Toronto. The church members, hooded and robed, would hand out their pamphlets to passers-by on Yonge Street. Clinton reprinted some of their writing as the liner notes to Maggot Brain and America Eats Its Young; I don't think he was really a hardcore adherent of their philosophy.

Yeah, think you're right, judging by the records.

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