I looked up the article and it’s not poorly written (the Lol’z are mainly in the headline, and in retrospect). As for pitting two female artists against each other... I feel like this was a standard thing the NYT did — reviewing two albums at once and comparing/contrasting — but maybe it’s true they didn’t do it as often w/male artists (or didn’t make the contrast as stark or critical, etc.)
― empire bro-lesque (morrisp), Friday, 10 August 2018 01:42 (five years ago) link
if you dorks don't think "The Solo Beyoncé: She's No Ashanti" is funny, idk what to say
― 5th Ward Weeaboo (Whiney G. Weingarten), Friday, 10 August 2018 01:47 (five years ago) link
The solo Paul Simon: he's no Leonard Cohen
― Pirate's booty call (Ye Mad Puffin), Friday, 10 August 2018 01:49 (five years ago) link
xp I said the headline was funny, dude
― empire bro-lesque (morrisp), Friday, 10 August 2018 01:52 (five years ago) link
Senator, you are no Ashanti
― Paul Ponzi, Friday, 10 August 2018 02:09 (five years ago) link
Investigating Beyoncé, NY Times Sees No Clear Link to Ashanti
― empire bro-lesque (morrisp), Friday, 10 August 2018 02:22 (five years ago) link
Xgau stays weird about women:
Amanda Shires: To the Sunset (Silver Knife) Although premier violinist and respected singer-songwriter Shires comes by most of her current swell of fame as Jason Isbell's wife, bedrock, and babymama, you wouldn't guess it from the advances she's made in these 10 coolly autonomous, acutely turned, observantly experienced songs. Her soprano incisive over arrangements longer on echo and electronics than you'd expect from tradmaster Dave Cobb, she deals more candidly with attraction ("Parking Lot Pirouette"), lust ("Leave It Alone"), personal rivalry ("Break Out the Champagne"), and even suicide ("Wasn't I Paying Attention?") than supportive domestic partners are expected to, and hardly plays her violin at all. That's how you end up with an album that takes some getting used to not just because it's unexpected but because it's halfway to sui generis. A MINUS
― evol j, Friday, 10 August 2018 18:06 (five years ago) link
jesus christ how is he still getting work?
― the Joao looked at Jonny (Noodle Vague), Friday, 10 August 2018 18:07 (five years ago) link
uhh wtf
― mh, Friday, 10 August 2018 19:12 (five years ago) link
goddamn, this guy
― empire bro-lesque (morrisp), Friday, 10 August 2018 19:14 (five years ago) link
dang brother, it's tough to even see you up on that high horse from this here ditch. and i'm fresh outta fucks.— sarahshook (@sarahshook) August 11, 2018
― omar little, Friday, 17 August 2018 23:26 (five years ago) link
Re:
Sarah Shook & the Disarmers: Years (Bloodshot) If only she could light up the melancholy of "Good as Gold" with the dawning consciousness of "What It Takes," she might be able to figure out how to duck men's meanness without drinking herself into the ditch ("Parting Words," "Lesson") **
― omar little, Friday, 17 August 2018 23:28 (five years ago) link
this fucking gau
― mookieproof, Friday, 17 August 2018 23:31 (five years ago) link
He's clearly not gonna change, I blame anybody paying him for it nowadays
― Noodle Vague, Friday, 17 August 2018 23:33 (five years ago) link
Why would he write that blurb as his “review”? Besides being very difficult to parse, it’s meaningless to the uninitiated reader (...never mind how it strikes the artist, as nicely illustrated by the above pushback). xpostLike, yeah, imagine a “newcomer” in the rock crit game turning in reviews like this, and expecting to be published
― stan in the place where you work (morrisp), Friday, 17 August 2018 23:35 (five years ago) link
difficult to parse, meaningless to the initiated reader is pretty much his mission statement afaikt
― The Desus & Mero Chain (upper mississippi sh@kedown), Friday, 17 August 2018 23:54 (five years ago) link
^^^
Exactly. I couldn't pinpoint the specific moment when he disappeared completely up his own ass, but it was definitely sometime last century.
― grawlix (unperson), Friday, 17 August 2018 23:59 (five years ago) link
i remember reading defenses of that indecipherability on ilx lol
not that it wasn't an interesting challop but this guys stuff has always been like this!
― Listen to my homeboy Fantano (D-40), Saturday, 18 August 2018 01:22 (five years ago) link
he's not difficult to parse lol
― mark s, Saturday, 18 August 2018 09:38 (five years ago) link
(a lot of the parsing xgau thread seems to be me proving that momus was misreading something: This is the thread where you ask for help in parsing one of Robert Christgau's sentences. )
― mark s, Saturday, 18 August 2018 10:28 (five years ago) link
If you were able to understand the above “review” (on just a syntactical level — never mind the content, which seems pretty useless in the context of a “consumer guide”) without slowly reading it four times, then you’re a better Xgau reader than I.(^I deliberately tried to make this sentence as confusing as his, and don’t think I even succeeded)
― stan in the place where you work (morrisp), Saturday, 18 August 2018 14:21 (five years ago) link
Although premier violinist and respected singer-songwriter Shires comes by most of her current swell of fame as Jason Isbell's wife, bedrock, and babymama,
Even though Shires is famous now mostly because she's married to this guy [I've never heard of]
you wouldn't guess it from the advances she's made in these 10 coolly autonomous, acutely turned, observantly experienced songs.
you might think listening to this album that she's famous because she makes good music.
Her soprano incisive over arrangements longer on echo and electronics than you'd expect from tradmaster Dave Cobb,
She has a soprano singing voice and uses it in more inventive ways than you'd expect from a Dave Cobb production. Also Xgau thinks that incisive is a verb.
she deals more candidly with attraction ("Parking Lot Pirouette"), lust ("Leave It Alone"), personal rivalry ("Break Out the Champagne"), and even suicide ("Wasn't I Paying Attention?") than supportive domestic partners are expected to,
Good domestic partners don't often have much interesting things to say about hot button issues like attraction, lust, personal rivalry and suicide
and hardly plays her violin at all.
she only plays her violin a little bit on this album.
That's how you end up with an album that takes some getting used to not just because it's unexpected but because it's halfway to sui generis.
So it's an unusual album because it's so candid and she doesn't play violin much and because you wouldn't expect it from someone most famous [to Xgau] for being married to someone else and that makes it halfway unique, a thing you can apparently be in percentages.
― Mordy, Saturday, 18 August 2018 15:59 (five years ago) link
incisive is an adjective there. he's dropped the "is" in trademark annoying telegram stylee. and to pick a nit with you, he's saying the arrangements are more inventive than you'd expect, not the way she uses her voice. i can't believe i finished writing all that without collapsing in ennui but there you go.
― illegal economic migration (Tracer Hand), Saturday, 18 August 2018 16:05 (five years ago) link
(FTR, I was talking about the one-sentence Sarah Shook review.)
― stan in the place where you work (morrisp), Saturday, 18 August 2018 16:09 (five years ago) link
if she could stop being so depressed by tapping into a higher consciousness then she wouldn't let men get to her enough that she's driven to drink to excess
― Mordy, Saturday, 18 August 2018 16:12 (five years ago) link
Yeah — so did you have to read it four times slowly first, like me?Is the “drinking into the ditch” thing from one of the songs (the “melancholy” one); or something he’s adding/projecting? I would have assumed the former, but the artist’s tweet seems to belie that.
― stan in the place where you work (morrisp), Saturday, 18 August 2018 16:27 (five years ago) link
Btw — I’m not saying the dude has to write like the AP style guide. But I don’t see the “payoff” to his approach, after taking the trouble to parse it out, as a reader interested in actually knowing something about the album.
― stan in the place where you work (morrisp), Saturday, 18 August 2018 16:30 (five years ago) link
i don't find it particularly abstruse and generally i prefer more cryptic complex content but that's generally bc the obscurity is in service of relating esoteric secrets and not just the sloppy syntax of a lazy lecher
― Mordy, Saturday, 18 August 2018 16:33 (five years ago) link
it would've been better that he did mean incisive as a verb at least that would indicate an inventive use of language but i think tracer is right that he is just dropping 'is' presumably bc he's educated to know that using passive verbs makes for poor writing but he's too lazy to write the sentence in a more dynamic way so he just dropped the offending verb making it incoherent rather than obviously poorly written
― Mordy, Saturday, 18 August 2018 16:38 (five years ago) link
i don't find any of these examples incoherent at all!
― illegal economic migration (Tracer Hand), Saturday, 18 August 2018 16:57 (five years ago) link
*two friends flip thru CD rack*— Hmm, the new Sarah Shook album... what did Christgau say about it?“He said one of the songs doesn’t have the same “consciousness” as another song, and gave it 2 stars. Also, apparently she’s an alcoholic who can’t handle men’s meanness, but she could fix these problems if she elevated her thinking and her songwriting.”— Uh, ok... guess I’ll... pass?
― stan in the place where you work (morrisp), Saturday, 18 August 2018 16:57 (five years ago) link
― mark s, Saturday, 18 August 2018 09:38 (seven hours ago) Permalink
Ok, annoying to parse?
― Listen to my homeboy Fantano (D-40), Saturday, 18 August 2018 17:00 (five years ago) link
he enumerates the songs in which she drinks herself into a ditch in the parentheses immediately after. (otherwise what would that be?)i don't partic find much insight from the guy and haven't for awhile but i don't mind if a review sounds different from the way people talk
― illegal economic migration (Tracer Hand), Saturday, 18 August 2018 17:01 (five years ago) link
Mordy otm, that’s a bad review but perfectly coherent
― jeremy cmbyn (wins), Saturday, 18 August 2018 17:02 (five years ago) link
When a board populated by a lot of writers and musicians has a thread devoted to parsing a writer's syntax, I think "difficult to parse" (as opposed to "impossible to parse" or "incoherent") is fair.
― The inexorable rise of identity condiments (Sund4r), Saturday, 18 August 2018 17:04 (five years ago) link
Difficult-to-parse prose has its merits and I even like the creativity and distinctiveness of his writing style. What can be frustrating is that, after the writing has been parsed, I don't always feel like I have gained much insight into or knowledge about the music.
― The inexorable rise of identity condiments (Sund4r), Saturday, 18 August 2018 17:08 (five years ago) link
he enumerates the songs in which she drinks herself into a ditch in the parentheses immediately after. (otherwise what would that be?)I assumed they were “key tracks” from the album, and listing a few of those is per the format of these little reviews (but I haven’t clicked over to Vice to see)
― stan in the place where you work (morrisp), Saturday, 18 August 2018 17:11 (five years ago) link
Yeah I mean the aphoristic style requires something from the reader, but not that much in term of rendering it legible - beyond that it does require a leap of faith that christgau absolutely doesn’t deserve
― jeremy cmbyn (wins), Saturday, 18 August 2018 17:11 (five years ago) link
that was an xp
― jeremy cmbyn (wins), Saturday, 18 August 2018 17:13 (five years ago) link
There’s something that Xgau has done historically (and not just him; but he does it more often than some) and that’s to basically wonder why a female musician lets guys get her down and how it shouldn’t affect them and the implicit suggestion if often that maybe their music suffers for it. It’s the “hey you should smile” of music crit.
― omar little, Saturday, 18 August 2018 17:18 (five years ago) link
*is often
that’s a perfect way of putting it xp
― maura, Saturday, 18 August 2018 17:19 (five years ago) link
another shitty review along those lines was a partic vile Brian Howe Pitchfork review of an Edith Frost LP.
― omar little, Saturday, 18 August 2018 17:20 (five years ago) link
That’s what the problem is to me.. if the labor is rewarded then I don’t mind... Brad nelson’s Prose (not to make this a blow smoke up an ilxor’s butt thread) sometimes takes its time getting to its point via vivid or detailed imagery but I feel like I come away w a greater understanding of the project under the microscope afterwards; xgau’s work now seems to bank off credibility he’s earned from listening to so much more than everyone but I feel like it’s at the zone of fruitless intensification point
― Listen to my homeboy Fantano (D-40), Saturday, 18 August 2018 17:20 (five years ago) link
That was XP’s to wins although omar’s Point seems good also
― Listen to my homeboy Fantano (D-40), Saturday, 18 August 2018 17:21 (five years ago) link
It takes the barest amount of effort to see what xgau’s at, then you do and realise “fuck this guy” and move on
― jeremy cmbyn (wins), Saturday, 18 August 2018 17:22 (five years ago) link
thanks deej, floating on a cloud of buttsmoke rn
― princess of hell (BradNelson), Saturday, 18 August 2018 17:35 (five years ago) link
I'm not surprised he learned nothing after patting Tracey Thorn on the head for recording her feminist bangers.
His obsession with women who love their husbands and can enjoy great sex reads like the admission of a man continuously amazed that women are as awesome as he thinks he is.
― morning wood truancy (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Saturday, 18 August 2018 17:44 (five years ago) link
I assumed they were “key tracks” from the album, and listing a few of those is per the format of these little reviews (but I haven’t clicked over to Vice to see)
― stan in the place where you work (morrisp)
Full disclosure — I just checked and seems i was wrong about this
― stan in the place where you work (morrisp), Saturday, 18 August 2018 17:45 (five years ago) link
Still, the fact that Shook seems pissed by the “ditch” reference suggests that it may not be an accurate characterization of those songs? (Not that a reviewer should necessarily worry about pissing off an artist, if his aim is true and he’s writing in good faith — but I question his reliability here)
― stan in the place where you work (morrisp), Saturday, 18 August 2018 17:50 (five years ago) link