New Christgau Consumer Guide From MSN Music

http://noisey.vice.com/blog/expert-witness-listen-to-more-jazz

It's always good to get more people to listen to Last Exit.

That Esoteric Circle album is great too

cool that non-heavy-metal'er xgau has read xhuxk's heavy metal book.

Assuming Xgau must've edited and run tons of xhuck's stuff at the voice?

Yeah, so not surprised at all

Also It is among the greatest & certainly most fun to read music books ever, its definition of "metal" is shall we say idiosyncratic

yeah xhuck hates most of the metal xgau hates so not that odd

Fave discovery via recent xgau review: Zoy Zoy by Tal National: could call it Afroprog, in terms of compulsive complications, setting up the problems and knocking 'em down---xgau: "moving parts"--- o hell yes. His African picks are always worth checking.

Iron Path is great, but still think The Noise of Trouble is the one to start with.

Oh, I totally disagree. The Noise of Trouble is their weakest - the last thing they needed was special guests. (Except for the bootleg with Diamanda Galas and Billy Bang; that's pretty choice.) My vote goes to the debut, or Cassette Recordings '87.

What's the title of the boot with Galas and Bang??

Various titles; look for Moers Festival 1986.

Thanks! Makes me wonder what else is still out there.

When I interviewed Laswell a few years ago, he said there's more stuff, but that nobody's willing to put up the money to do anything with it:

Going back even further, are there any plans to consolidate the Last Exit discography? I feel like if you could get the rights together, a limited-run boxed set would be great, especially if there were more live recordings in the vaults that could be included.
There are a lot of live recordings, but they have to be tracked down. As far as getting the rights, that would be easy. What would be hard is trying to figure out who would actually finance manufacturing and packaging and who would distribute it. Getting the rights wouldn’t be difficult, but the other part, as far as creating it, you would need someone who had a passion about it. I couldn’t do it myself. I would certainly sign off on it, but you’d need somebody to come in and say, ‘I wanna do this.’ Anybody that wanted to could do it. Obviously, it takes a little funding to do it. It wouldn’t be a hassle to get rights to it, because there’s nobody involved that knew what they were doing or had a real company, and there was certainly never any money involved.

Really enjoying the Arab rap comp in the latest: http://noisey.vice.com/blog/middle-eastern-rap-expert-witness

Critic/author and musician Greg Tate writes:

Looking forward to our convo tonight up at City College with Mr Bob Christgau and Mr Greg Thomas on ''Jazz and Rock''.Two of the most fraught, hotly contested words in the history of race and music. And recorded race-music. 7pm Shepherd Hall, Room 95. 140th and Convent. Harlem USA. Sponsored by The National Jazz Museum of Harlem.

So far, the xpost Arab rap comp (on Spotify) sounds surefooted, straight forward and low-key---not enough like the challenging sometimes dazzling twists and levels of the translated words, available as .pdf download on stronghold.com. But I'll listen some more.
Recent xgau pick that's grabbed me the most: Tal National's Zoy Zoy. I think of it as Afroprog, "prog" in the sense of something compulsively complicated, which can work, when it's a matter of setting up probs/props for yourself (which, in some cases, can also stand for those imposed by the outer world) and knocking 'em down, kicking out more than one kind of jams (I relate). xgau: "moving parts"---o hell yes.

Oops already posted that, sorry! Got that album in perpetual head-rotation these days. Fairly often, though, I like his picks to a greater or lesser extent than he does, apparently: I'd def give Algiers' s/t more than asteriks, ditto Wussy's Public Domain Vol. 1: folk-rock-noise, roiling ballads x respectfully, adeptly, unstintingly applied homemade rocket fuel, c'mon! Who does this? The female-sung tracks on the recent Trembling Bells, okay, but these are better songs.

That Esoteric Circle album is great too

― Comme Si, Kamasi (upper mississippi sh@kedown), Saturday, November 7, 2015 2:55 PM (1 week ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

pulled out this record as a result and holy moly this is a scorcher

x-post to Dow-- Yes Tal National are impressive. They can be busy, but they're so propulsive and energetic especially live. If its Afro-prog, and I would not call it that, its played fast. They merge aspects of Sahel desert rock with speedy Congolese and rhythmic dance stuff. Great female dancer/vocalist helps out with the live show. Have seem live 3 times now. A good time

Yeah Tal National are my second favourite group from that region now, after Ngoni Ba. Tinariwen et al sounded fresh at first but never went anywhere.

dow I'm such a dilettante with non-English rap that I can't help but praise mediocrity; Arabic is just so punchy.

Agree with Esoteric Circle... that jazz post probably gave me the most listening time from his recent articles.

Xgau's and my tastes have a high correlation when it comes to making the A-List (A minus and higher)... Within the As, though, r-squared may well be zero. Example Wussy and Anderson are both A-minuses for me.

https://scontent-lga3-1.xx.fbcdn.net/hphotos-xfa1/v/t1.0-9/12308551_10154363966222137_9016311220788738742_n.jpg?oh=a1bde8397822775eff1103d82cce2ef6&oe=56D5B80A

https://scontent-lga3-1.xx.fbcdn.net/hphotos-xft1/v/t1.0-9/12294922_10154363967962137_1651958627154234140_n.jpg?oh=62dda3e36e0bf5fc0b8b841589d01f4a&oe=56AC8D8E

you should send a copy of that to the webmaster at his website (who i think is tom hull?). they're trying to put together a bibliography.

I do this for money as well as love. So just in case this is the last Expert Witness not just at Noisey, which I'm sad to announce it is, but anywhere, it sticks to albums I'm way late on and albums I wanted to be sure to weigh in on. Enjoy. Consume, even. https://t.co/G12GQcSKav

— Robert Christgau (@rxgau) June 28, 2019

Possibly he and I retire the same day--we can join a bridge club. (He'll be back, I'm sure...this thread is 12 years old.)

new subscription-only newsletter:

://robertchristgau.substack.com/

did that link not work? it's here:

https://robertchristgau.substack.com/

Not sure where to post this, but this podcast with Christgau and his wife, fellow critic Carola Dibbell, talking about the new and revised Rolling Stone 500 Greatest Albums of all time poll is a fun listen:

https://robertchristgau.substack.com/p/auriculum-ep-5-bob-and-carola-and

That was a good listen (and I don't think I've ever heard Carola with Bob on any type of podcast/interview before, so that was especially nice). He does make a good case built of logical contradictions - i.e. don't believe in "canons," but personal canons make quite a bit of sense, and the difference between taste and judgment (and knowing how to balance those as a critic).

And that DeBarge album is good...but I would say Christgau's overrating it. I've listened to it several times in a row, and there's a long list of of '80s R&B albums that do a lot more for me.

Excellent call on The Rolling Stones Now!, I'm Still in Love with You, With the Beatles (not the album mentioned, but it's got the track he gushed over) and Wild Honey, all great albums typically overlooked - understandably but not deservingly so.

With Chuck Berry, I would've cheated on gone with The Chess Box. It's like 85% great, but that's still an amazing percentage for a three-CD box set, and most of that 15% is on the last disc.

if the debarge record is in a special way, xgau is not overrating it

Joe Levy? And Sandy Smallens? Taking me back, way back.

You go, Carola, for choosing Here, My Dear.

Looking forward to a listen, though I wish I could download (can I?).

Btw, just glancing at his best of the last decade list essay, I've got to admit, I'm pretty impressed *and* perplexed that so many decades down the line he still puts the New York Dolls on par with, say, Thelonious Monk as far as his personal favorites go. Like, even if you like the Dolls a lot, that's just two records (I suppose three, if you include the "reunion," which Xgau also gives an A+), and if it was between those first two and, say, the first four from the Ramones, I'm still surprised anyone would pick the two Dolls, even if they loved them.

idk I have certain albums that have travelled list to list for 25 years (The Hissing of Summer Lawns, Technique, Hearsay.

For sure. I've had albums that have stayed favorites since I was 13! I guess I've just never quite understood the Dolls as much more than a concept, let alone as a band anyone would say is vying to be their absolute favorite. Those albums are good, I just don't think they're *that* good. Maybe you had to be there.

what does Christgau mean about metal's connection to European notions of grandeur?

Europe bad iirc.

Wagnerian?

Oh so like German Romantic?

If we're going to play the faux profound generalization game, he could also talk about metal's connection to American anti-intellectualism.

I think the "New Yorkness" of the Dolls has a lot of resonance of Xgau that many wouldn't share. His feature on their comeback album is the final piece in his collection Is It Still Good To Ya?, he seems to see David Johansen as an avatar of eternal vitality.

"Yurrupean" = pretentious and racially prejudiced, see his ABBA review: "I'm sure their disinclination to sing like Negroes reassures the Europopuli". However, "musically, all Americans are part African".

The Dean of 'Murican Rock Critics indeed.

I didn't listen to the podcast but the idea that metal is "classical music for dummies" (iirc his words, from a Fucking Champs review) (and thus not real rock n roll) is a recurring one in his writing.

Disdain for classical music also a recurring theme.

he could also talk about metal's connection to American anti-intellectualism.

And this is connected ime (he isn't Lester Bangs; he has no love for anti-intellectualism) - the fact that the American lumpenproletariat went for prog and metal, with all its dated fantastical tropes and bombast, as opposed to literate songwriters or pomo ironists or whatever, didn't redeem it, I don't think. (Rush made a killing on the zonked-teen circuit, Ian Anderson was the small-town free-thinker lost in the big city, etc.)

Could it be that he's ultimately a bit of an American exceptionalist asshole who should stop projecting his racist essentialism onto continents he knows jack shit about?

i'd take the dolls albums over the first four ramones albums, easy. and i've got a copy "ramones leave home" that they signed for me at free being records on 2nd ave (right near the gem spa where the dolls posed on their 1st album) that you'd have to pry from my hands. they're both great but the dolls resonate through more dimensions of emotional and humanistic and even conceptual space.

wait are we calling xgau racist because he doesn't like european music because it *doesn't* have that thread of african-descended music running through it? that's next level, man.

That's not what I had in mind specifically (see, for instance, his comments about Hendrix as a 'psychedelic uncle Tom', or, as discussed in another thread, Shakira's 'belly dancer genes'), although the implication that European music is 100% white is pretty fucking bizarre as well and eye-rollingly US-centric.