New Christgau Consumer Guide From MSN Music

The-Dream haters? Go suck an egg!

Love,
Matlock

I am going to be soooo bummed when the CG eventually ends.

Chuck, he's just saying that (allegedly) some netcrits didn't even get it was a joke while the friends he plays it for "giggle." Giggle is not rolling on the floor.

This is gonna make me revisit No Age (whose lyrical and emotional content really passed me by) and Burial (though "not quite Maxinquaye" equals "not quite I barely care when my co-workers throw this on every few months").

I love how the CG comes out on the first of the month even if the first is a sunday.

Maybe he's just lazy -- it's not like he's a work ethic guy.

haha

He's got his little traps and his foibles and his insular references (most good guitar rock bands wanna be the Voidoids you know) and any artist that has ever personally criticized him is honored with As to A-s for life, but he's a sixtysomething who says sharp, insightful, atypical stuff about music by twentysomethings. That's outstanding.

i hate how the CG comes out on the first of the month, rather than the 31st or the 30th or the 29th or...

are you busy depositing checks or something?

You know something, anthony is right.
(xpost)

Cute, I guess, but it's hard to see why it would leave anybody rolling on the floor.

True, but Xgau never said it would leave anybody rolling on the floor - he said it made the people he played it for giggle - which sounds about right to me.

And it is funnier with the music.

Nellie McKay is funny!

She is - though her sense of humor is pretty far down the list of things I would cite as her best qualities though - somewhere below her sense of melody, knack for an unsual arrangement, wide-open ears, formal playfulness, lovely voice, etc.

xgau is obviously less of a woman-hater than i am, but i think he's missing that those netcrits look at her funny because the line signifies as 'nellie mckay don't have no sense of humor'. she's the girl who thinks she's put upon because she's a girl, not because she's a nerd. randy newman had less self-regard and a smaller stuffed-animal collection.

oh i missed this part

I agree -- she's scattered, unfinished, self-indulgent. But she's also ebullient, funny and political.

maybe I should seek out more of the latter, but the former put me off doing so

I have nothing against her or her stuffed animals, and Anthony and O. Nate are right -- xgau said giggle, not rofl. I guess the line doesn't even make me giggle, at least not on paper. Though right: with music attached, it well might. (On the other hand, maybe the netcrits -- who I haven't read -- just didn't think the joke was even worth giggling about.)

[One of those records -- they abound in "post-rock" -- that get nothing but raves because only believers bother to listen.

And yeah, this is great -- The metacritic fallacy in a nutshell. (Assuming Stars on the Lid scored high there.)

randy newman had less self-regard and a smaller stuffed-animal collection

And a much squeakier voice.

yup, haha -- 88% "universal acclaim" (xpost)

Assuming Stars on the Lid scored high there.
They did — #4 in 2007, behind Burial, The Field and Radiohead.

And a much squeakier voice

kinda like the yelp of fellow jew ezra koenig. i haven't studied carefully the loveliness of her voice, but someone who's really looking for that sort of quality might prefer, say, kelli o'hara, at least in her more tasteful operatic mode. i realize that xgau's writing in the contexts of a) rock and b) subbacultcha, but i'm not gonna give him too much ground there if he's puzzled at why a generation of kids for whom 1985 rather than 1955 is retro haven't rushed to crown her their queen.

she's likely smarter and more interesting and probably more tuneful than fiona apple, but the latter simply deploys her talent rather than saying 'look at me, i'm so talented' at every turn.

oh, the voice comment was you, not xgau, i see

I'm not surprised that the youth generation hasn't rushed to crown her either. And I agree that her sensibility is more 1950s than it is 1980s or 2000s or whatever. I actually don't care too much whether she garners mainstream success, and judging by the fact that her albums are getting weirder, I don't think she does either.

yeah, i noticed the getting weirder part too, which i think was part of what put me off her

i'm kinda disappointed xgau didn't uncharacteristically laud technical skill - i was all set with my petitions on behalf of mariah carey and the indigo girls and hair metal

any artist that has ever personally criticized him is honored with As to A-s for life

Who else beside Lou Reed? He also likes artists who are married. But yeah, he is one of the greats.

Whoops, make believe those are italics, not a hot link.

Sonic Youth have gotten a lot of good reviews from him, but didn't start getting consistent A's for every album until about 5 years after "I Killed Christgau With My Big Fuckin' Dick."

i.e. when they started improving.

Except after that, they stopped improving. And he kept giving them A's anyway. (Of course, he wouldn't agree that they stopped improving.)

Either way, I think there are enough differing opinions about SY's catalog that it's not fair to just say "of course Sister was the first album that got an A, they weren't very good until then."

Also, I think Xgau started liking Pavement/Malkmus more after they gave him a coded shout-out on "Embassy Row":

Old intuition, on your dock we’re fishin’,
Come on now, give us a grade,
A for effort, and a B for delivery,
C for devotion, when the world starts encroaching on your plans.
Where is the savoir, where is the savoir -- he’s not here right now.
Where is the savoir, where is the savoir-faire?

I don't think that necessarily refers to him, and the grades seem to have worsened after it

http://image.listen.com/img/170x170/8/2/7/9/279728_170x170.jpg
You believe it or not
I wanted to play football for The Dean

I think the Xgau interpretation is most likely. And, fwiw, the albums worsened after that - but Malkmus is still getting consistently favorable Xgau reviews for his wilderness-years solo career.

xpost

i don't know the solo stuff so can't judge how much the falloff, but he's getting honorable mentions to A-'s rather than consistent A's with a few A-'s

I just think that the B+'s and A-'s now, for a solo career that is increasingly ignored by other critics, stand out more than A to A-'s did for a band that was a widely-hailed critical darling. Perhaps it just shows Xgau's loyalty.

I don't think Xgau does much following of other critics

That SOTL review kind of sums up much of what I like, dislike, and find puzzling about him. The first sentence is classic. The review (like his AFI review) basically summarizes what I like about an album he doesn't (though I don't think it's their best in this case). Then he ends with a snide quip, indicating that it's not his cup of tea.

Holy shit, I just noticed that Nine Inch Nails is on his list!

(I admire the eclecticism of his list. I'm mildly curious, though, whether he's even still writing for an audience that's bigger than the kind of people who read this board. Are there a lot of people out there going "Holy shit, I better pick up Nigeria Special, Fountains of Wayne, a new Public Enemy album, Girl Talk, and Los Campesinas!"? For this, he's classic.)

(Actually, the SOTL review is completely readable as straightforward grammatical English so it doesn't sum up the things I dislike about him.

I don't think Xgau does much following of other critics

-- gabbneb, Friday, February 1, 2008 1:56 PM (13 minutes ago) Bookmark Link

Really? It seems to me like a whole lot of what he writes about records is in reaction to what other critics have already said (or at least about whether it's generally been getting good or negative reviews).

The SOTL review would surely seem to suggest that.

Really? It seems to me like a whole lot of what he writes about records is in reaction to what other critics have already said

What I said (i.e., I mean "following" in the sense of tuning opinions to, rather than keeping up with)

xp

Depends what you mean by "following." He's obviously very curious about what other critics are saying (hell, he ran a critics poll for a few decades and wrote a lengthy essay about it every year, and he quotes or refers to plenty of critics all through that Consumer Guide), and he's pretty meticulous about keeping up with most of the albums that score in the Pazz & Jop (and now Idolator) polls (and on metacritic, apparently.) So he's certainly not oblivious to what other critics are saying; far from it.

or maybe I misunderstood that nate meant that the sum of other critical opinion might be more likely to be correct than xgau, a thought that would never occur to me

He's stated in the past that he reviews albums that he's missed that charted in P&J. I think he likes to correct the balance on albums that he feels are unfairly maligned or praised at the time of these year-end things.

One of his good qualities is that he is not a bandwagon-jumper. He also seems willing to seek out the new work of artists he's liked in the past, regardless of their current status in the music world.

it seems to me that he mentions critical responses to albums more than most critics and i think it has a lot to do with the fact that he doesn't have any deadlines for reviewing things for the consumer guide so he's constantly reviewing things that have been through their critical cycle

The A-list perennials that have complained about his shizz include Lou Reed, Sonic Youth, Public Enemy (that whole thing with tate) and Sleater-Kinney (Corin Tucker evidently wrote to him taking offense at some reference to kiss-blowing during an early show or something). I think I heard Billy Joel used to read one of his reviews on stage and then tear it up, so there's the exception that proves the rule.