Christgau's Consumer Guide Grade List: A+

this ole bloke finds this sy discussion to be utterly enrapturing

I already owned copies of Dirty and Experimental Jet Set when I bought A Thousand Leaves around when it came out but ATL is what made Sonic Youth my favorite band at the time and prompted me to go buy all their albums. I still think of it as their best album, possibly tied with Sonic Nurse.

A Thousand Leaves, excepting two standout tracks,

curious about which tracks are being referred here btw (if I had to guess: "Sunday" and "Wildflower Soul").

I'm perfectly willing to accept that ATL is a great album. There are bits that I like but they are too spread out for my taste. It does have lots of interesting textures. Maybe Murray Street took some of the ideas from that album and expressed them more concisely, although there is something about Murray Street that does feel like they've given up on some restlessness that was part of their identity, so I can understand people finding it disappointing. I just think it has pretty songs.

Christgau claims he was an enormous fan who was disillusioned in the '80s:

"The relatively stylish and passionate sex songs Peter Townshend wrote for 1981's Face Dances sounded forced from the aging pretty boy who mouthed them, and between the synths and the chorales and the writing in parts and the book-club poetry, 1982's It's Hard was the nearest thing to classic awful English art-rock since Genesis discovered funk. After that they broke up, thank God, but for me it was ruined--I could barely listen to the outtakes and arcana they continued to feed their fans, some of which I'd hoarded on tapes and U.K. pressings for decades, and their CD-market best-of made me sad. After that they staged a reunion."

I have a hard time going along with this sort of thing. Plenty of great artists go to shit for a variety of reasons, and unless it casts their other work in some horrible, sordid light, I never bought the idea that their worst work somehow devalues their best.

With the Who, they were originally a washed-up nostalgia act to me. Before I ever heard one of their songs end-to-end, I knew all the jokes about them getting back together yet again. But I still didn't think that devalued their older stuff, and before the 2000 Royal Albert Hall DVD surprised me (they really were that good after Starkey joined and before Entwistle died) I thought highly of their old work even though I never thought of catching up with their current tours.

it's okay if an album isn't great. It can be good or okay too.

A reminder that the link at the top takes you to the page I pasted from, where each album is linked to its review. This page doesn't have such links, but it overlaps with the A+ link-list to some extent (if the others don't turn up in his site's Consumer Guide search box in the lower part of the Left rail, can try the one below it, which searches the whole site).
What we have here is a failure to communicate the Core Collection of his Rock Library Before 1980, incl. pre-Consumer Guide picks, going back to for instance several Dylan LPs that might well have gotten A+ if they'd come out in '68='68, when the grading started:
https://www.robertchristgau.com/xg/bk-cg80/rocklib.php

Be sure to scroll down to Gone But Not Forgotten! (I dunno why he put them there)

it's okay if an album isn't greatA+. It can be goodA or okayA- too.

I knew a guy who claimed it was downhill after Shelley joined.

Yeah, there was at least one guy on the old alt.music.sonic-youth group who complained that Steve Shelley "turned them into REM" and led them to betray their no wave roots.

good album, m.A+.A+.d. critics

xpost I dunno even at their noisiest I hear a tendency towards being a more conventional band that I don't hear in DNA or Teenage Jesus

Yeah, there was at least one guy on the old alt.music.sonic-youth group who complained that Steve Shelley "turned them into REM" and led them to betray their no wave roots.

I remember somebody complaining in the late 90s (possibly on alt.music.sonic-youth) that he is still waiting for them to do another "I dreamed I dream"

he gave SMiLE such a high rating partly because he believed the record would motivate boomers to return to their youthful idealism and vote Bush out in 2004

oh my god that’s adorable. he still believes in The Movement man. now listen here people we all know McGovern isn’t quite hip enough but dig this,

he gave SMiLE such a high rating partly because he believed the record would motivate boomers to return to their youthful idealism and vote Bush out in 2004

That's pretty rich. Anyway, the A+ seemed ridiculous coming from a guy who trashed the officially released SMiLE recordings as overrated (among many other things) since the very beginning. I admit that hearing the stuff edited into a proper album was surprisingly enlightening - suddenly, it wasn't a jumbled mess, there really was something close to a finished album sitting in those bootlegs. But I was never convinced that Wilson's modern-day vocals were transformative, at least not in the way Christgau said they were.

thanx to this thread I’ve been listening to Tabu Ley Rochereau’s Voice of Lightness all evening (just started Vol. 1/Album 2), so thanx, thread! (and rob in particular!)

gorgeous stuff, eh?

oh yes

there is probably more good than bad here on balance but rme @ merritt, AF, VW, shadow, moby, all the boomer icons

at least he kept listening to jazz unlike many others but did he only follow people he already liked in the 60s?

I’m assuming his love for the dead was an acid thing since they don’t fit in very well with his later preferences

I have a hard time going along with this sort of thing. Plenty of great artists go to shit for a variety of reasons, and unless it casts their other work in some horrible, sordid light, I never bought the idea that their worst work somehow devalues their best.

Yeah, I thought that was weird. “The old records I used to love are now bad because the new records are bad.”

xp
oh that's great! Vol. 1 is super high on my list of go-to music to put on when I have people over, just absolutely charming music. The Francophonic collections are also very worth your time

I suspect you know this one already, breastcrawl, but just in case King Sunny Ade: The Best of the Classic Years [2003, Shanachie] is rad too, though more intense than the Congolese stuff

Be sure to scroll down to Gone But Not Forgotten! (I dunno why he put them there)

Those were records that were out of print when he was compiling the Core Collection list (circa 1990 apparently). The Core Collection list seems much more conventional rock canon than his A+ list. Perhaps just by virtue of being out of print the Gone But Not Forgotten list is a bit more idiosyncratic.

you’d be surprised how unfamiliar I am with so many of the African old school classics. my knowledge of KSA is very shallow as well. I mean, I love it when I do hear it (Yondo Sister’s “Wapiyo” felt like the best song ever when I played it last week after it was posted on the Old School Afropop thread, for instance), I just prefer listening to current stuff most of the time.

xp to rob

(I feel like I’ve written similar posts on these threads more than once before)

that makes sense, and your service in that dept is much appreciated!

Be sure to scroll down to Gone But Not Forgotten! (I dunno why he put them there)

Those were records that were out of print when he was compiling the Core Collection list (circa 1990 apparently) That's what I thought, 'til I noticed Station To Station, although *possibly* there was a Bowie-mandated hiatus between the RCA and RKYO editions?? And possibly, I guess One Nation Under A Groove(1978) and Into The Music (1979) were already cut out.

Dunno if it was a Bowie-mandated hiatus, but Station To Station was definitely out of print in 1990; the Ryko CD came out in mid-‘91.

RCA shenanigans. Most of his catalog was hard to find outside used record store in the late '80s, I keep hearing.

it's so weird how some stuff that is totally canon now was hard to find

i know the cowboy junkies cover of "sweet jane" by velvet underground is that way because it's based on the slow and mellow version from the 1969 live comp that was apparently the only thing you could really find back when they were in school

Jeff Rougvie of Rykodisc actually posted about this several years ago. It's an interesting read for Bowie fanatics. In short, RCA seriously undervalued the worth of Bowie's catalog (which Rougvie discovered when looking over their sales projections), and Bowie could probably tell from the way they were handling things, which is why he took back his catalog to license elsewhere. It took a while (a full year?) to get Bowie's inventory at RCA shipped to Rykodisc in Salem, MA and properly sorted out and accounted for, and I imagine that's when the Bowie catalog was allowed to fall out-of-print. RCA no longer had the rights, so they wouldn't be pressing any more copies, and Rykodisc wasn't going to put out a shoddy product (the old RCA CD's were NOT done from the masters, far from it), so they needed time to audition and track down every tape and then properly master it, as well as all the other shit like picking out bonus tracks, designing artwork, etc.

Yeah. Hell, the Feelies based their sound on the "What Goes On" riffing in that live version.

Ziggy Stardust appeared on so many best-of lists through the late '80s (including Rolling Stone's) because it was one of the few Bowie albums RCA kept in print. The reputation of the Berlin Trilogy and STS came later.

Weird, I thought I had heard that Loaded was the one VU album that was never out-of-print.

I started buying Bowie Rykodisc editions at mall record stores in the summer of '93 and the moment was for sure a wtf thing: this dude had THIS catalog?

The Rykos are what I still own.

I bought Live 1969, VU & Nico, and Loaded, all new, in the summer of 1981 (I think, maybe it was 1982) in Tuscaloosa.

don't the audio maniacs on the hoffman forum prefer the early rca bowie cds? they're not easy to come by.

Weird, I thought I had heard that Loaded was the one VU album that was never out-of-print.

don't the audio maniacs on the hoffman forum prefer the early rca bowie cds? they're not easy to come by.

Yes, they collectively drove up the value of those CD's to ridiculous prices. I've come across two and copies of the others...there's no way in hell I'd recommend them to anyone, especially for more than a few dollars each.

The Rykodisc reissues aren't perfect - they shaved off the bass cloud and they're too trebly for my tastes - but you can at least re-EQ them. The Virgin reissues from the late '90s and early '00s are terrible. The new Parlophones are hit-or-miss because they used very different approaches in mastering on different albums (partly because they were done by different mastering engineers over six or seven years).

So I was right about Bowie-mandated hiatus, b-but y-yall it's Rock Library: Before 1980, not 1990, which is why I was like eh,One Nation Under A Groove(1978) and Into The Music (1979)? although, yeah, maybe they were already gone, as Glenn and Don would put it.

Bowie took the masters back, as basis of this:
Bowie Bonds

Bowie Bonds are asset-backed securities of current and future revenues of the 25 albums (287 songs) that David Bowie recorded before 1990. Bowie Bonds were pioneered in 1997 by rock and roll investment banker David Pullman.[1] Issued in 1997, the bonds were bought for US$55 million by the Prudential Insurance Company of America, or about $88.7 million in today's dollars.[2][3][4] The bonds paid an interest rate of 7.9% and had an average life of ten years,[5] a higher rate of return than a 10-year Treasury note (at the time, 6.37%).[4] Royalties from the 25 albums generated the cash flow that secured the bonds' interest payments.[6] Prudential also received guarantees from Bowie's label, EMI Records, which had recently signed a $30m deal with Bowie.[4] By forfeiting ten years worth of royalties, Bowie was able to receive a payment of US$55 million up front. Bowie used this income to buy songs owned by his former manager.[5] Bowie's combined catalog of albums covered by this agreement sold more than 1 million copies annually at the time of the agreement.[4] Shortly after launching, however, the rise of MP3 sharing caused music piracy to rise, and music sales to drop,[7] which was one of the factors that led Moody's Investors Service to lower the bonds from an A3 rating (the seventh highest rating) to Baa3, one notch above junk status.[8][9] The downgrade was prompted by lower-than-expected revenue "due to weakness in sales for recorded music" and that an unnamed company guaranteed the issue.[10] Despite this, the Bowie bonds liquidated in 2007 as originally planned, without default, and the rights to the income from the songs reverted to Bowie.[11] from "Celebrity Bonds," though "Bowie Bonds became the general term at least for a while: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Celebrity_bond

yeah that was a huge story in 1999. It mattered more than hours

he Rykodisc reissues aren't perfect - they shaved off the bass cloud and they're too trebly for my tastes - but you can at least re-EQ them. The Virgin reissues from the late '90s and early '00s are terrible. The new Parlophones are hit-or-miss because they used very different approaches in mastering on different albums (partly because they were done by different mastering engineers over six or seven years).

It's especially noticeable on Young Americans, on which every instrument has a resonance I hadn't heard: a transformed album.

In a good way? I've never heard any version of that album.

I want to, though never liked the title hit---"Win" is a lot better though, right? (Must check that new DB trib w We Are KING et al)

wait, after all these years? It's one of his best!

I didn’t like Young Americans when I first heard it, which was the Ryko reissue. I didn’t dislike it, I just felt neutral towards it, so I ended up selling it. Some years later, I bought the Parlophone reissue, and now I love it. I dunno how much of that is due to the mastering, or how much is due to how my feelings about it have changed over the intervening years, but I find it thrilling in a way I definitely didn’t before.

(Also, the Ryko CD was hilariously packaged in a CD holder/display unit, coupled with a “bonus” CD of “Fame” remixes, which were all essentially worthless.)

so many damn rhythm guitars recorded!

"Fascination," my favorite album track, is essentially transformed.

Cool, I'll try it, thanks! A strange gap for me, but yknow 70s and here came all the young dudes, flooding the news, and I was ballin' on a budget (though I did manage to buy or hear everything else from that era, mostly for better, sometimes for worse)

Every other Bowie album from that era, I mean.