Since 1969, Village Voice rock critic Robert Christgau has been sorting through the stacks of albums that get sent to him by record labels both major and minor, and he’s distilled his opinions about the most noteworthy of those releases into one pithy paragraph, capped by a simple letter grade from A to E (no Fs in his cosmology). He’s called these handy columns of bite-sized criticism his “Consumer Guide,” and once a decade, he rounds up all of his capsules, alphabetizes them, and releases a book. His Rock Albums of the ’70s: A Critical Guide and Christgau’s Record Guide: The ’80s are seminal works for budding rock critics, who can learn from them the art of concision and the virtue of wielding strong opinions backed by a general spirit of enthusiasm. Now that the decade has turned, Christgau is ready with a new compendium, Christgau’s Consumer Guide: Albums of the ’90s, and a cursory glance through its contents confirms something that many fans of the critic have suspected for some time now:
Robert Christgau has lost his mind.
Not that anyone could blame him. With the proliferation of independent labels in the ’90s, as well as the glut of compilations, tidal wave of dance remixes, and overflow of “B-sides and rarities” collections, it has become harder and harder for even a diligent critic to keep up with what’s going on. This general unwieldiness—especially compared to the neatness of the previous decades, when even the cult bands were few and easy to track—has been reflected in Christgau’s writing in the Voice. His year-end “Pazz & Jop” essays have become rambling, obscure, and only intermittently relevant, while his Consumer Guide capsules alternate between incisively personal dispatches—of Counting Crows’ Adam Duritz, he wrote, “[He] sings like the dutiful son of permissive parents I hope don’t sit next to me at Woodstock”—and hard-to-penetrate prose poems. (On Chan Marshall: “She’s an honest heroine of the new indie staple—not noise-tune and certainly not irony, both as passé as the guilty pop dreams they kept at bay, but sadness. Slow sadness. Slow sadness about one’s inability to relate. And not to audiences. Hell is other people.”)
This agenda of resignation has worked its way into the previously jaunty and useful grading system. No longer content with A to E, Christgau now combines letter grades with a Turkey symbol (to indicate a well-received record that he thinks is overrated), or he abandons letter grades in favor of a one- to three-star rating (for OK albums with more than a few good songs). When the star rating isn’t dismissive enough, he brings out the Baked Ham symbol (which indicates a choice cut on an otherwise mediocre record) or he chimes in with a Bomb symbol (generally bad) or a circled “N” (for a record that may be better than Christgau thinks it is, but that he doesn’t have the inclination to sort out).
On one level, the newly arcane method of grading makes sense: It’s been well-noted that the album as an art form has been debased in the CD age, and cherry-picking the ripest fruit on a dying tree may be the only reasonable way to keep one’s spirits up. On the other hand, what does a comment-free “N” for Vic Chesnutt’s The Salesman & Bernadette really indicate, other than that Christgau is aware of the album’s existence? Or how about the comment-free Bomb for Creeper Lagoon’s I Become Small and Go? It’s as if Christgau were afraid that if he didn’t at least acknowledge he’d heard these records—both held in high regard by many of his colleagues—he’d be dismissed as out of touch. But what value does a grade have without any context?
Elsewhere, Christgau bravely comes out against intentionally sloppy and/or overly pensive indie rock, which would be convincing if the author didn’t seem less than knowledgeable about an important handful of top-drawer indie rockers. Red House Painters, Idaho, Swell, The Sea and Cake, and The Wedding Present are ignored entirely. Superchunk, The High Llamas, Neutral Milk Hotel, and Lilys garner a few comment-free “N”s, Bombs, and Baked Hams. Versus is mentioned only in the context of reviews of other bands, and then negatively; if Christgau knows enough about them to be derisive, why can’t he muster even a comment-free Bomb for one of their albums?
Granted, it’s difficult for any rock critic to stay on top of everything. Still, Christgau’s gaps and biases are a little less defensible this time around. He freely admits that he’s not versed enough in dance music, worldbeat, or rap, and yet he takes a deferential stance toward those genres, as though the fact that they don’t entirely work on him were his own fault, not the music’s. When it comes to rock, though, he acts as though he’s heard it all and had it—which, though it may well be true, is hardly helpful to someone looking to a critic to discern the artful from the amateur.
Christgau is likely set in his ways, and given that he still provides moments of stunning clarity, it would be presumptuous to ask that he change. Nevertheless, it would make more sense for Christgau to abandon all pretense of comprehensiveness, to spend more time with fewer albums, and to write more insightfully about the topics he finds most interesting, rather than wasting his time (and the consumer’s) with music he’s too exhausted to engage. In these cluttered times, we need someone to sort through the pile, not embrace it.
