Record Guide Shootout: Rolling Stone vs. Christgau Consumer Guides vs. Trouser Press vs. Spin Alternative

Dark horse vote for the "Psychozoic Hymnal" section of Joe Carducci's Rock and the Pop Narcotic.

I remember working in the library in college (this was 1995 ok) and going through the Trouser Press guide in the reference section and making a list of all the obscure records by obscure bands that looked interesting. I don't think I got past M. I don't know what happened to the actual list, so I only had my memory of the list.

xpost -- yeah, for me, Xgau really excels at 250-300 words per subject
Agree with this.

I’m old so I Vote RS Record Guide (Red). Read Trouser Press the magazine more than the TP guide and Xgau in the VV more than his guidebook, although I did find it useful.

I do remember years of looking for some of those records -- for about 2 or 3 years, I could not find a James Chance record anywhere -- that time seems totally irrelevant now.

I'm with the consensus, I think. Xgau, TP, and RS in the last place. Never got to read the Spin one.

I find the RS Encylopaedia much more interesting than the guide. The guide gets weaker as it gets nearer to what was the present back then. I'm not sure if this is due to the proximity, or if it was related to being written by JD Considine.

And the XGau stuff is the only one I still go back to.

Voted RS, since red/blue and yellow (jazz) were the ones I spent the most time with, but I don't think they're the best in retrospect. The differences between red and blue did teach me that critics hauled a fair bit of personal baggage around with them and that I should just treat the books more as discographical references than guides. I wish Cook/Morton's Penguin Guide to Jazz had been an option, definitely would have voted for that.

Voted RS. The blue guide steered me through a lot of my listening as a kid (and later), but the in print/out-of-print inclusions/exclusions meant a lot of one-star reviews for mediocre one-album artists, and no reviews at all for, say, Big Star or the MC5. But RS also used experts in reggae/dub, gospel, and other areas. I recently picked up a few records from the Music In The World Of Islam series based on the RS blue guide recommendations.

The Trouser Press guide (the first two, maybe three editions) filled in some of the gaps of the RS guide, but I seem to remember weird shit like Ira Robbins flatly dismissing the entirety of dub as a genre/movement (in his Sandinista! review).

I didn't care for Ira's judgments very much... and at least Marsh's weird judgments (like the Led Zep hate) were usually entertaining to read.

Basically agree with the last two posts.

Think one of the most idiosyncratic and enjoyable features of the RS Guide (Red) has thus far gone unmentioned: the pictures of the five star albums scattered throughout.

Marsh didn’t hate Zep, nor did he write the RS guide entries on them (Billy Altman did, and they were generally laudatory).

xp

Maybe it was Sabbath?

I think I had all of these except TP. The one I liked reading the best by far was the Spin Guide

Marsh didn’t hate Zep, nor did he write the RS guide entries on them (Billy Altman did, and they were generally laudatory).

The way I remember it is that Marsh hated Zep, and BA sort of punched up those entries. Do I have it backward? I'll have to look back at those books tonight.

Marsh didn’t write the Sabbath one, either (I think that was Ken Tucker?). But as co-editor, yeah, he could’ve chosen someone somewhat attuned to metal to write the Sabbath entry.

xxp

I wish Cook/Morton's Penguin Guide to Jazz had been an option, definitely would have voted for that.

Agree with this 1000%. The final (sixth?) edition was incredible.

As it is, I'm voting TP. By the time I got around to reading books like this I was already deep into trawling for weird shit and didn't need to know about the classic rock canon, having grown up listening to it on classic rock radio. I already knew about Jim Morrison; I needed to know who Jim Thirlwell was.

I don’t think Marsh was a massive Zep fan, but he didn’t hate them: two of their songs are in his 1001 singles book (and there’s no hint of backhanded praise or anything along the lines of “they suck except for these two songs”).

Maybe you’re thinking of the Doors? Altman’s praise for them in the red guide was absurdly over-the-top, so Marsh panned them in the blue guide.

I already knew about Jim Morrison; I needed to know who Jim Thirlwell was.

yep!!

Roxon's Rock Encyclopedia from 1969 is an amazing snapshot of a very small world, even compared the world of the red RS just a few years later, all written by one person.

i had this one which in retrospect just completely blew:

https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/51TK9CCM8EL._SX323_BO1,204,203,200_.jpg

i never owned any of the others mentioned here but would skim them periodically in bookstores. The SPIN one was my speed at the time. I also owned an All Music Guide from the mid-'90s and it was a vv good resource.

I didn't mind this one! The New Order section is wack, though.

The first two editions of the Trouser Press guide were invaluable for me. And remarkably solid critically, for my taste.

This is my most dog-eared reference, salvation (along with an enlightened guitar teacher loaning me records) in a benighted junior high year in Alabama:

https://ia800801.us.archive.org/view_archive.php?archive=/18/items/olcovers662/olcovers662-L.zip&file=6620858-L.jpg

Trouser Press >>>>>>>>> Spin > RC=RS

I didn't mind this one! The New Order section is wack, though.

― TikTok to the (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Friday, August 23, 2019 11:21 AM (thirty-eight minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

it gave me a truly misguided notion regarding the importance of the '80s solo work of Robbie Robertson, is what i remember. i should amend it to admit that it was pretty decent on blues music, but at the same time it only covered the obvious artists and then only the big Chess guys and the old timey Blind Lemon Jefferson types.

I got pretty much nothing from the RS guide, and I think I only ever saw xgau's '90s guide, by which point he was well on his way to desiccation (imo). Trouser Press and Spin, however, both had in inestimable impact on the expansion of my musical tastes (even as some of the reviews in the latter made me furious). Really need to track down fresh copies of those things.

first couple solo Roberton albums are pretty good, imo

kinda bruce hornsby esque

"Somewhere Down the Crazy River" is some all-time-worst boomer post-Peter Gabriel crap, though.

I'll include some non-poll options:

1. Red RS Guide, Stranded, Christgau's '70s book

Basically a tie. I can point to dozens and dozens of the records I bought in the late '70s/early '80s and tell you which book prompted me to buy them. There are phrases from each, especially the first and third, I can recite from memory.

2. Lilian Roxon's encyclopedia, the Logan/Woffinden encyclopedia pictured above, Paul Gambaccini's first Top 200 Albums book, the Rolling Stone Illustrated History of Rock & Roll (second edition, I think--the 1980 edition edited by Jim Miller)

These shaped my record collection too. I have great affection for the Lilian Roxon book, though I wouldn't seriously advise anyone to use it as a guide--that's how you end up with Sons of Champlain albums.

I have the Trouser Press book, but it came later and didn't have much influence on me. Triple that for the Spin guide--I've flipped through once or twice, otherwise it just sits on the shelf. It's all a matter of timing.

Ok, Montgomery was right and I was wrong about Zeppelin — their entries in both volumes were written by Altman, and most of the albums are highly rated (even though Physical Graffiti is underrated and glossed over in a single sentence that only mentions “Kashmir”). Weird, what was I thinking of?

Haha, Marsh definitely is no fan of the Doors (entry begins: “Unlikely as it may seem, given the obnoxious and insipid cult that now surrounds Jim Morrison...”).

His slam of X’s two (at the time) albums even begin with a guilt-by-association move (noting that Manzarek has produced the group).

Yeah, Marsh really hates X with a passion, which is a little mystifying. Part of me wonders if it’s meant to serve as a corrective/response to Christgau’s occasionally over-the-top X love.

Assume you guys are taking about the Blue Guide, can’t find that in the Red.

Ah! I was thinking of the Grateful Dead — whose catalogue Marsh eviscerates in the blue book (“one assertedly major oeuvre that’s virtually worthless except for documentary purposes”), awarding most of the albums only a single star. What an asshole! Listen to the music play, Dave!

The Dead’s entry in the red book, written by John Milward, was entirely different, and at least gave the albums a fair shake (even though 3 stars was their ceiling).

Altman's description of "Black Dog" as "indescribably chaotic" is one of those phrases that has stayed with me for 40 years. I'll never forget it because that's exactly what "Black Dog" is.

Marsh gave a couple of Dead albums three stars (Live/Dead, which he said has a “freshness that feints toward vitality,” and Europe ‘72). But yeah, he never wavered in his hatred for them, once calling them “the worst band in creation.” Until relatively recently, I found little to disagree with in that judgement (though there are certainly shows that conform to that assessment).

FYI, the Doors entry in the red guide was written by Altman, and it’s glowing. (Begins: “Brash, courageous, intelligent, adventurous, and exciting. The Doors were all this—and more.”) Four of the albums get 5 stars, and another five get 4 stars.

It was such a dick move, IMO, for Marsh to replace appreciative reviews (by others) of major bands he hated, with self-penned slams in the next volume. Isn’t it better to default to positivity? It’s not like these earlier reviews were poorly written or ill-considered.

The red volume has a few entries by Bart Testa, a guy who taught me a couple of film courses in the early '80s. One of them's prominent...maybe the Mothers of Invention?--too lazy to go downstairs and check right now.

(Marsh is off the hook, thanx to his famed one-liners:)

JOHN VALENTI
* I Won’t Change / RCA (NA)
Pop singer who’d be better off if he did.
— D.M.

xp Yeah the Mothers entry is by B.T.

The Trouser Press guide changed my life. I devoured each new volume starting when I was 17. It was so influential that some of the strong opinions took years for me to overcome. I will still occasionally look something up.

Spin Alternative Record Guide was formative for me. Rolling Stone red guide too, but mostly by dint of proximity when I was 12 (my parents bought it a couple years earlier). The Spin one was mine though, and I could always reread it and find something new. I even met Eric Weisbard in a vaguely embarrassing moment at an academic conference in 2010 and told him how much it meant to me as a teenager.

Trouser Press here. I lugged it around the mall, even, when hitting all the shitty local chain record stores because what even was mail order.

^Uh, when I said "red guide" I actually meant the 1992 RS guide - the one which "in retrospect completely blew"

Never got past skimming the Trouser Press one. Christgau's collected CG reviews were massively important to me as a twentysomething, but then almost entirely in indexed form online - on his website rather than as collected decade-by-decade in the published guides.

For a while, CMJ had all their historical trade-mag reviews in a searchable database on their website — which was awesome (I was a big CMJ guy). But in the late 2000s, a new owner wiped all that stuff away, in favor of only new/recent reviews. (And then CMJ went under entirely.)

FYI, the Doors entry in the red guide was written by Altman, and it’s glowing. (Begins: “Brash, courageous, intelligent, adventurous, and exciting. The Doors were all this—and more.”) Four of the albums get 5 stars, and another five get 4 stars.

It was such a dick move, IMO, for Marsh to replace appreciative reviews (by others) of major bands he hated, with self-penned slams in the next volume. Isn’t it better to default to positivity? It’s not like these earlier reviews were poorly written or ill-considered.

I worked w/Altman for a brief time, years ago; I should have asked him what he thought about his Doors review getting deep-sixed between editions.

(Actually now that I think about it, I do remember discussing the RS guide with him in some way, but it’s lost in the mists of time.)

Is Spin Alternative the one with Rollins on the cover?

― Stevolende, Friday, August 23, 2019 2:30 PM (yesterday) bookmarkflaglink

https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1348450171l/604083.jpg

Are you thinking of this one? I remember getting this out from our local library.

yeah that's the one.

huh I see Marcus and Xgau more as opposites

didn't see this but would have also voted for Trouser Press

huh I see Marcus and Xgau more as opposites

Is there a thread for just discussing some of Xgau ratings? I was checking his dud scores and was surprised to see Aphex Twin's 'Come to Daddy EP' in there but I don't think he usually dignifies albums he considers duds with a blurb.

That said even if you hate the title track, "Flim" and "IZ-US" are good enough to at least warrant the choice cut rating and both stand as clear highlights in his discography.

I also feel personally offended that he has two Broadcast albums in the dud category.

There are over sixty threads with Xgau or Christgau in the total, so one of those probably

Even better, you can write him directly and give him hell.

http://www.robertchristgau.com/xgsezm.php

Excellent, hope he replies.

serious question here, honestly not trolling. why do people care which records this guy likes / doesn't like?

I don't care whether he likes what I like. I read him for the quality of his writing, and if it alerts me to a good record I haven't heard, that's a bonus.

He hasn't served as a consumer guide for me since, oh, 2004 at least, but, like a friend, I check in on his taste.

Both of these posts otm. Lorde knows he has lots of annoying tics, but he had a few things going for him. For one, he always seemed to spend much more effort keeping up with the times than the rest of his cohort, for another he didn’t mythologize or cozy up to the big stars quite the way those others might.

I switched to the past tense there but presumably he still treads the same path.

Like most of these guys there was a time when I had to, um, rebel against some of strictures, but it still nice to stumble across some recent act we both like, fun to discover a shared appreciation for Wussy, to name one. Clemenza to thread!

Wussy, Imperial Teen, the Shoes...He's had almost zero percent influence on my writing, but lots of influence on my listening (or at least did for about a decade).

But I don't think you ever actually care if your tastes diverge. You might find that interesting, but it's not like you're going to stop liking something because he doesn't. I didn't listen to Schoolly-D's first album any less because of his basic indifference.

xp

I read him seriously for a very short while in the '80s because other writers whose opinions I respected (and whose ranks I wanted to join) worshipped him, so I figured, as the joke goes, that there had to be a pony in there somewhere. Plus, I was reading the Voice anyway for Gary Giddins and Greg Tate. Soon enough I realized that our tastes were so divergent as to be basically on two different sonic planets, and I didn't even like his writing on a phrasal level, so I stopped reading him except for the occasional hate-read, and that was without even getting into the issues of his repellent, patronizing sexism and the way he'd put his thumb on the scale for musically shit acts with whom he agreed politically. At this point I'm so totally disengaged from/uninterested in pop that he's completely irrelevant to me. I mostly wish Gary Giddins would come back.

his repellent, patronizing sexism

Don't forget the racism (see: Hendrix as 'psychedelic Uncle Tom', which we talked about in another thread).

I don’t really care about the records he likes or doesn’t like but as a fan of Broadcast I would at least like to read why he thinks they are duds. Just saying “this albums sucks imho” is valid for a comment section or an entry on a forum but for a review site it’s a bit frustrating. It’s perfectly valid to only want to talk about music you love, but if he has nothing but indifference towards those albums, then why have the dud section at all?

tbh I can understand a certain generation and taste configuration hearing only muzak in Broadcast, hence "dud"

Xgau was very formative for me because he gave A+ to all of my favorites at the time (Star Time, 69 Love Songs, Maxinquaye, Public Enemy, Steely Dan, Lil' Wayne) so I read him a lot and it helped me explain my own taste to myself.

You definitely piqued my interest with Broadcast. So two duds and zero words, I see. Ouch!

Was about to say that I'm not sure I've ever cared what he thought about non-American acts but then remembered that he's definitely 'got' the likes of the Pet Shop Boys, Go-Betweens and Saint Etienne over decades. (Though, amusingly, on rechecking I see he basically alternated 'dud' and A-, with almost nothing in between, for Saint Etienne. Haha. Madness.)

he got me into Pet Shop Boys and Go-Betweens for example (Saint Etienne too but I don't love them as much)

Christgau uses emoticons to indicate, "I put in time listening to this, but have nothing to say about it". I agree that it's useless from a reader's standpoint.

Critic and historian Robert Palmer actually reviewed the second edition of the Rolling Stone Guide and Trouser Press back in the day (January 4, 1984):

''The New Rolling Stone Record Guide'' is a partially successful attempt to redress the critical imbalance and poor fact-checking that made the original guide such a mixed blessing. The new volume has some value as a source of information on currently available rock, pop, soul, country, blues, folk, gospel and reggae albums. The new guide is much easier to use. But its rating system, one to five stars as in the jazz magazine ''Downbeat,'' and the prejudices of its editors make its critical evaluations impossible to trust.

The guide is heavily weighted in favor of rock's mainstream traditionalists - artists such as Bruce Springsteen, Bob Seger and Tom Petty, who are portrayed as ''working- and middle-class Middle Americans struggling against their emotional circumstances, not always winning but never ceasing to fight.'' Even second- string Springsteen and Seger imitators like the Iron City Houserockers get ratings for excellence, while artists who have been far more innovative and influential - the Doors, David Bowie, and most punk and new-wave bands - are rated mediocre-to-good. Mr. Bowie is faulted for something called ''lack of faith in rock''; Mr. Springsteen is praised for making ''no concessions to nonrock.'' These are empty sophistries, characteristic of the book's rear-guard action against new ideas, redolent of a fan-club mentality that penalizes originals for daring to be different while taking the cynical posturings of arena-rock ''populism'' at face value.

''The Trouser Press Guide to New Wave Records'' makes up for at least some of the Rolling Stone guide's willful distortions. It provides carefully even-handed evaluations of disks by newer artists and bands, and of important recorded work by new-wave predecessors such as David Bowie and the Velvet Underground. There are no ratings; the more impressive disks are simply ''highly'' or ''very highly recommended.''

Yes to writer Robert Palmer ( except for the Doors defense)

I love that, never read it before but it speaks to me deeply as someone who found that RS guide very bewildering when I was 15 and was finally able to get the big picture a few years later with the Trouser Press Guide.

Feel like the original was still the greatest, critical imbalance and poor fact-checking aside. Nothing can replace the magic of the randomized five star album cover placement, for one thing.

Trouser Press guide came a little too late for me. I was still missing the magazine but it didn’t fill the void.

Mr. Bowie is faulted for something called ''lack of faith in rock''; Mr. Springsteen is praised for making ''no concessions to nonrock.''

can't stop laughing at this

It’s pretty funny

What I love about Palmer was that rock, for him, was just a beloved bend in the river of American musical forms.

Mr. Bowie is faulted for something called ''lack of faith in rock''

This about the guy who sang "Rock and Roll With Me"!

oh man Iron City House rockers I spent money on some comp once

“Crazy Little Thing Called Lack Of Faith In Rock”

This about the guy who sang "Rock and Roll With Me"!

Dave Marsh loves his second-string Springsteen imitators. He wrote an article where he asserts that because John Cafferty and the Beaver Brown Band had a hit single, "no-one is comparing them to Bruce anymore". Of course, now they're only remembered as the Boss's most shameless copyists.