OK, is this the worst piece of music writing ever?

this fucking gau

He's clearly not gonna change, I blame anybody paying him for it nowadays

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).

xpost
Like, yeah, imagine a “newcomer” in the rock crit game turning in reviews like this, and expecting to be published

difficult to parse, meaningless to the initiated reader is pretty much his mission statement afaikt

^^^

Exactly. I couldn't pinpoint the specific moment when he disappeared completely up his own ass, but it was definitely sometime last century.

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!

he's not difficult to parse lol

(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. )

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)

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.

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.

(FTR, I was talking about the one-sentence Sarah Shook review.)

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") **

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

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.

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.

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

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

i don't find any of these examples incoherent at all!

*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?

he's not difficult to parse lol

― mark s, Saturday, 18 August 2018 09:38 (seven hours ago) Permalink

Ok, annoying to parse?

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

Mordy otm, that’s a bad review but perfectly coherent

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.

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.

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)

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

that was an xp

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.

*is often

that’s a perfect way of putting it xp

another shitty review along those lines was a partic vile Brian Howe Pitchfork review of an Edith Frost LP.

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

That was XP’s to wins although omar’s Point seems good also

It takes the barest amount of effort to see what xgau’s at, then you do and realise “fuck this guy” and move on

thanks deej, floating on a cloud of buttsmoke rn

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.

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

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)

I didn't have the faintest idea who Robert Christgau was or what he was meant to be until I started going on the internet for the first time back in the '90s. He kept seeming to crop up - usually in musical discussions with Americans - as someone who's opinion was worth reading, even though I'd never heard of him ever, so I checked a few of his reviews out.

From that moment on, I've never been interested in a single word the guy has written or his opinion on anything and I'm amazed that people ever were.

As for Brad's writing - well, I'll keep my opinions to myself on that one, other than reading some of it often involves a flask of coffee and a sleeping bag.

Xgau also sometimes writes like someone who has no idea women read music criticism.

Christgau's been around long enough to let you know this ain't his first rodeo, and his reviews read like he forgot to do his taxes. Still, the question remains: is he the cowboy or the clown? As far as funkless wonk goes, it beats fishing. B-

i generally always found xgau's longform essays good -- his chuck berry essay is a classic -- but i always found the short reviews that everyone else seemed to love kind of frustrating and glib. tbh he's written reviews i found even grosser than the ones referenced here -- his review of pj harvey's stories from the city has a line so creepy i don't even want to quote it here.

His best essay of the last five years wasn't on music; it led me to an obscure Christina Stead novel. Maybe he should concentrate on books:

https://www.robertchristgau.com/xg/bn/2013-12.php

xpost, jeez I just read that and his Rid of Me, yuck

Just looked them up, too... O. M. G.

It wasn't too hard to locate the exact sentence J.D. was on about, it kinda leaps out at you from the screen, that!

Working a hunch, I looked up his Liz Phair reviews. Let me annotate this one:

Exile in Guyville [Matador, 1993]
She's a rebel, and if all goes well, also a pathfinder, which isn't certain mainly because the acts and attitudes that make her a rebel are so normal. (weird negging move?) Her number of partners may be over toward the right side of the bell curve. (says who? and why’s he gotta be shaming?) She may have commitment problems. But for at least two decades, bohemian women of a certain age have displayed this much desire, independence, bitchiness, self-doubt, and general weirdness (the negging continues: “female artists older than her have been doing the same thing for years”)--while continuing to pin down the unmanly emotional apercus that make "Dance of the Seven Veils" and "Divorce Song" so gender-specific (I’m honestly lost now... is the subject of the sentence still “bohemian women of a certain age”? what does this clause mean?). They can behave this way if they want--they're just not supposed to come out of the closet about it. And while Phair knows more than enough about tunes and guitars to challenge the taboo (if she were a lesser artist, would she not be allowed to challenge the taboo?), the weirdness level of her spare, intuitive, insinuating demos-plus is bohemia-specific. (...OK?) Which is apt for sure. (Huh?) But not necessarily pathfinding. (a final, summary neg!) A

To be fair, a lot of the initial press for that record had similar slut-shamey qualities. The '90s! They were a different time!

yeah to be fair if you struggle with his writing - he's not on trial. did he invent misogyny in music journalism? obviously not - is he still out there being employed to write mysogynist shit? yeah apparently, stop paying him