Spiderland [Touch and Go, 1991] Out of Squirrel Bait by Hunglikealbini,

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>>73748508

>There's no rock album as much unlike all other rock albums as Spiderland is. Only Trout Mask comes close, and...it really doesn't. Beefheart is copyable. He's a (difficult) music lesson. Spiderland isn't. It's just there, like the Great Void, mocking us.

>It can't be overrated. There's only one.

>But when every liar says that, I understand it's really hard to believe.

Why are Slint fans so pretentious? I swear. If you replace Slint in this Reddit post to Linkin Park or MCR. That user would be mocked. But for some reason. Shit like this is accepted.

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>>73748508

>tfw too stupid to understand what he's saying in these fucking reviews

Why did this guy get so famous in the first place? People shit on fantano but at least he talks about the music.

>>73748673
It's pretty easy to understand once you get past all his stupid metaphors n shit.

not even a fan of the album but scaruffi is better than this guy

>>73748707
He's Avant pseudo

>>73748536
Christgau is the greatest troll to ever walk the face of the Earth. He posts shit like this, dumps all over classics, and personally edits his reviews onto wikipedia pages.

>>73748536
He has to be trolling. That is sad.

>>73748536
This can't be real.

>>73748673
>>73748695
literally all he's attacking in this review is slint's image. not the music at all

also the lyrics are objectively good.

but i'm sure nicki minaj and soulja boy are somehow better

>>73748536
>(Deluxe Edition)
kek

He only likes catchy, upbeat music that contains a message he agrees with.

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>>73748508
>they're art-rockers without the courage of their pretensions
I love how he's not sure how to criticize them so he just compares them to a genre he doesn't like

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>>73748536

>>73750350
>art-rockers without the courage of their pretensions

it's just such an incredibly inane thing to say. it's almost totally meaningless, like most of his reviews

the most annoying thing to me though is his lack of consistency. he'll bash slint but he praises television even though he hates long solos and prog sort of stuff

i like both but still

>>73750350
They are art rockers. Learn 90's Post Rock and you'll get it.

>>73750517
yeah, and what's wrong with that?

>>73748635
Slint deserves more autistic accolades than Linkin Park or MCR.

>>73750539
Art rock is a redundant oxymoron.

>>73750429
And he gives the Rolling Stones and Aerosmith a pass for misogynistic lyrics, something he normally always complains about.

I was on an 80s binge lately and honestly, Motley Crue, AC/DC, Van Halen, etc are a lot more fun than whatever punk bands Christgau was jerking off back then. At least they just made fun rock-and-roll instead of some three chord rant about Ronald Reagan.

It's too bad he was more interested in inane politics back then than having fun.

>>73748673
Things accidentally coalesced onto him in the late 1960s, he figured out how to get reactions in publications, and he got lucky enough to have publishers in the bad old days allow his writings to get published above everybody else, guaranteeing that his opinion was heard because it was really hard to publish material back then.

But yes, he is a talentless freak who would have an unvisited blogspot or RYM account if he had been born 45 years later. And this is the reason why he is actually interesting: he is the primary case study for how people back in the bad old days before the internet could basically do nothing of any merit and be considered "talented" just by dint of the sparsity of what they are doing. Namely, not many writers got regularly published to a wide audience. Now, in retrospect, we realize this because there are literally hundreds of random guys on 4chan and other forums who say more worthwhile things than Christgau has ever said, multiple times per day, and yet Christgau is famous for his writings over and above everybody else because he got lucky enough for someone else to decide that his writings should be published back when it was sparse.

The same thing is happening to any pre-internet thing, like Hollywood for instance. My friends and family, a bunch of random people, regularly pitch funnier, more innovative, and more interesting movie ideas than 99 percent of all Hollywood releases

In the realm of comedy, I think everybody in this thread probably has seen dozens of people who aren't "comedians" who could blow any "comedian" out of the water in funniness. We've all seen youtubers and shitposters who are ten times funnier than any joke written in almost any large budget comedy film or show on a regular basis.

The common thread is that all of these pre-internet celebrities got LUCKY in a dinosaur, monolithic system, at the mercy of some higher-up suit-and-tie and Christgau is interesting because he is a huge example of that.

>>73750836
>The same thing is happening to any pre-internet thing, like Hollywood for instance. My friends and family, a bunch of random people, regularly pitch funnier, more innovative, and more interesting movie ideas than 99 percent of all Hollywood releases
>
>In the realm of comedy, I think everybody in this thread probably has seen dozens of people who aren't "comedians" who could blow any "comedian" out of the water in funniness. We've all seen youtubers and shitposters who are ten times funnier than any joke written in almost any large budget comedy film or show on a regular basis.

this is blatantly untrue and you know it. but i agree with you about christgau

>>73750819
>>73750836
Everyone in the New York punk scene back then wanted to kill him at some point. He made a lot of enemies because he used his influence as the top music critic in NYC to control what artists got noticed and what didn't.

>>73750884
What? Who do you hang out with? This is definitely my experience. Comedy films are a litany of fucking crap in terms of laughs compared to me and my friends dicking around for a couple hours.

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This is his top 30 list for 1988, the year I was born. There's one, maybe two albums in here I would listen to.

>>73750884
You must hang with some boring people.

>>73750944
i mean yes i laugh way more with my friends, but that's because there's a social aspect to humor.

i guarantee if any of your friends went onstage at an open mic night at a comedy venue they'd bomb horribly the first time. it's just a very different skill. one is observational/situational humor in a group setting with not a lot of pressure and the other is stringing together a bunch of incredibly good jokes in a high pressure setting in front of a lot of people

>>73750992
But that's kind of the point: stand-up comedy is a bad form of mass produced comedy that is charisma dependent. In other words, it's a skill that's distinctly different from being actually funny. There are a litany of stand-up comics who suck ass and are famous anyways because they are charismatic and know how to publicly shake off heckling. And the "good" ones are routinely unfunny. The entire stand-up industry is basically a swindle.

>>73750836
Saved.

>>73751037
>stand-up comedy is a bad form of mass produced comedy that is charisma dependent. In other words, it's a skill that's distinctly different from being actually funny.

that's an interesting point.

i mean i agree that there are a lot of professional stand ups that are extremely unfunny. they just know how to work a crowd and shake off hecklers

but then again, really think about it; is there a way to get people to fake laugh? i don't know if there is. it's very very easy to bomb in such a high pressure situation. it's probably the most stressful kind of performance there is to be honest. if you're a shitty musician you get courtesy claps and you leave and that's it. if you're a shitty comedian you know immediately. you just can't fake it

that said, a lot of people have shit senses of humor

>>73748508
does he like any music?

>>73750945
Cripes, how many black politics albums can you listen to? That's not my idea of fun rock-and-roll.

>>73751116
He does have a pretty big bias in favor of punk rock and Afropop so you have to account for that.

I get the feeling he lets his wife influence him a little too much.

>>73751145
>>73750819
It helps to understand that he was writing for the Village Voice which targets bohemian New York lefties, not suburban white America where the core Van Halen fanbase was. That's why he doesn't like metal, because it doesn't represent the values of the Voice's target audience, while some banned anti-apartheid record does.

>>73750836
To be fair, it's not as if Millenial music critics like Fantano are better.

This is the man who gave four Sleater-Kinney albums As. I struggled to make it through one.

>35 minutes of some atonal bitch screeching about nothing over basic chords that a high school kid could play

>>73751297

Maybe, but Fantano also doesn't have influence. And he's better than Christgau. Scaruffi, a random guy with a random website, has captured far more influence in the internet age than Christgau, whose influence predictably tanked during the internet age.

>>73751297
Critics are failed artists of the medium they critique..

>>73751392
Most critics do not even attempt to produce art in the medium they critique. They are also too subjective. It would be interesting if they were like historians who described interesting technical aspects of the makings of the art, but they mostly aren't that way and just say all sorts of dumb fluff about the subjective experience.

>>73750900
After a substandard September concert in New York, another critic from The Village Voice panned it. Gordon wrote a scornful letter to the newspaper, criticizing it for not supporting its local music scene, to which Christgau responded by saying they are not obligated to support them. Moore retaliated by renaming the song "Kill Yr Idols" to "I Killed Christgau With My Big Fucking Dick", before the two eventually sorted out their differences amicably

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The fact that he's the one who decided who gets exposed in New York was sort of getting on our nerves. Christgau started getting bugged by people like Tim Sommer, who really wanted to write about us. And Christgau says "Yeah, I don't see it." So finally he decided to do an article on us, and he gets this guy named Picarella, and it was a really nasty thing they wrote about us. I wrote him a letter that was a diatribe, and his letter back said that it didn't matter. After that I wanted to do a song about slicing up Christgau, and it turned out to be the advice-to-the-lovelorn "Kill Yr Idols". So we put that out and people started digging on it. And I was getting calls from people like Giorgio Gomelsku, who wanted to put on an anti-Christgau festival. My feeling was that we'd said our piece; there was no need to keep attacking the guy. One night he went to see the Replacements and some kid tried to light him on fire. He blamed it on us. "Bands like Sonic Youth are telling kids to kill me." he wrote. And he was getting really paranoid. He wrote me a letter saying "Don't ever expect to see your albums in 'Christgau's Consumer Guide', and I wrote back 'Boo fucking hoo.'"

>>73750900
Yeah like when Michael Gira mailed him a bag of cum.

>>73751412
People who are involved in a certain field (or at least aspired to be) often aren't really equipped to critique it. I mean a critic's job is to think about how music relates to everything else, not to provide a musician's insider view.

Lester Bangs did some recordings, though.

>>73751390
>fantano better than christgau
the low IQ here is gross

>>73751627
>Gordon wrote a scornful letter to the newspaper, criticizing it for not supporting its local music scene, to which Christgau responded by saying they are not obligated to support them. Moore retaliated by renaming the song "Kill Yr Idols" to "I Killed Christgau With My Big Fucking Dick"
wow so cool and edgy
why didnt christgau support a genius like that

>>73751675
>>73751657
Was there anyone from that 80s New York no wave scene that wasn't a complete scumbag?

>>73751390
At least Scaruffi is aight with metal.

>>73748673
He's saying Slint are pretentious, when he's the real pretentious one for obsessing over image.

happy to see any mention of Squirrel Bait tho

>Cuckgau

Master of Puppets [Elektra, 1986]

I feel at a generational disadvantage with this music, not because my weary bones can't take its power and speed, but because I was born too early to have have had my dendrites rewired by progressive radio. The momentum of this band can be impressive, and as with most fast metal (as well as some sludge metal), they seem to have acceptable political motivations--antiwar, anticonformity, even anticoke--fine. Problem is, the revolutionary heroes I envision aren't male chauvinists too naive to know better, they're not Arnold Schwarzenegger as Conan the Barbarian--all flowing hair and huge pecs. That's the image Metallica calls up and I am no more likely to invoke their strength of my own free will than I would the 1812 Overture's. B-

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mama mia

>>73751108
People will fake laugh, or at least laugh at jokes that could never be considered funny by anyone. In live shows though it is just easier to laugh whether you are faking it or not.

>>73754597
Holy shit why can't this guy just review the music and stop obsessing over image.

>their music is good, but they remind me of Arnold Schwartzeneggar too much

ChristGOD destroying /poo/tants yet again

Street Hassle [Arista, 1978]

I know Lou worked his ass off on this one, but he worked his ass off on Berlin, too--like so many of his contemporaries, maybe he's better off not aiming for masterpieces. The title sequence honors Eros as much as Thanatos, a heartening development, and I'm a belated convert to "I Wanna Be Black," which treats racism as a stupid joke and gets away with it. But the production is muddled and the self-consciousness self-serving. B+

>>73755227
You do realise his discussion of image relates to how the music feels to him, right?

>>73755293
>I know Lou worked his ass off on this one, but he worked his ass off on Berlin, too--like so many of his contemporaries

This was Christgau having a mild guilt trip after listening to Take No Prisoners.

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Spiderland is a masterpieces in rock history. Leveraging from experiments of preceding years, Slint is now completing a more sophisticated search on rhythm and resonance, culminating in an almost transcendental quality.

The last piece, Good Morning Captain, acts as a small resurgence of all of these lofty techniques, alternating itself with tones of a wearied guitar, neglected percussion tempos and haunting vocals. The effect is exactly that of erecting an iceberg for tragic suspense. It constitutes one of the most upsetting musical narrations in the history of modern rock.

This is what makes Spiderland a monumental work, in its capacity to construct rock music without reconstructing the stereotypes of its genre, without recourse to iconic sounds or prefabricated codes, that have always constituted the principle channels of rock expression.

9/10

>>73755335
Literally the most bland, vapid sentences ever written in human history

Fresh Fruit For Rotting Vegetables [Cherry Red, 1980]

I want there to be more punk rock, I do, I do. I want there to be more left-wing New Wave. By Americans, I swear. But not from an out of work actor with Tiny Tim vibrato who spent the first half of the '70s creating rock cabaret. And it sounds as if, although I'm being generous here, that Jello Biafra started listening to the Stooges in 1977. C-

>>73755506
Christgau is right about one thing: Dead Kennedys is absolute shite.

>>73755506
That review is all wrong. He mixed up Jello Biafra with the openly gay singer of some completely unrelated San Francisco punk band. Jello was 13-14 in the early 70s, he couldn't have possibly been creating rock cabaret or whatever back then.

Atomizer [Homestead, 1986]

This is the brutal guitar machine that thousands of lonely adolescent cowards have heard in their heads. Its creators were moved to make this awful racket by the pain of the world, which they learned about through fan mail and bondage magazines. They deserve credit for finding each other and making their obsession a reality. But not for anything else. B+

Gish [Caroline EP, 1991]

if you can dig art-rock fantasia (and hey, why not?) this has a nice, witchy wail to it ("Crush", "Daydream") **

Siamese Dream [Virgin, 1993]

*choice cuts* "Geek USA"

Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness [Virgin, 1995]

*choice cuts* "1979"

Adore [Virgin, 1998] *bomb*

Machina [Virgin, 2000]

Galloping in from over the horizon to save us from an onslaught of meaningless pop, it's a genuine Rock Band here to caterwaul about the things that truly matter, like the first girl you had a crush on, the death of God, and hearing your favorite song on the radio. Billy Corgan's proclamations are almost as interesting as Al Gore's, with the exception that the latter's might actually affect our lives. But what can it mean that his vocal cadences are sexier? C+

Zeitgeist [Martha's Music, 2007] *bomb*

>>73755652
This is correct though, Smashing Pumpkins are objectively shit.

>>73751657
>see replacements
>kid tries to light you on fire
get wrekt christgay

>>73755538
>not being in a rock cabaret band in middle school
get a load of this fucking loser

>>73755769
Not like Thurston Moore is a sterling example of a human being either.

>>73755784
alright

>>73748536
Christgau accused Gira and Thurston Moore of telling the crowd to attack him I'm pretty sure.