Christgau's Consumer Guide: July 1969 - July 2010

During my sophomore year in college, perusing the bookshelves somewhere on the third floor of the Seeley G. Mudd Library as I so often did in those days, I stumbled across a fat, red hardcover book bearing the moderately authoritarian title Christgau's Record Guide. Inside, I found 470 pages of dense script featuring capsule reviews of 1970s albums/records/recordings, followed by letter grades. Being a sucker for rock criticism at the time, I checked it out and began toting it with me to the cafeteria, campus benches, and local restaurants. I quickly discovered this volume was far more than just another collection of slapdash record reviews or some type of supplement to the likes of The Rolling Stone Album Guide (in either its Dave Marsh or Anthony De Curtis manifestation). Even a hurried glance at any page confirmed my initial suspicion that this Christgau character wasn't interested in offering biographical details or even placing the individual artist into easily-digestible frameworks. He expected you to show up with a functioning level of appreciation and awareness, he wouldn't dare insult your intelligence, and he expected you to do some close reading. In this respect, he resembled favorite writers and critics from my current studies in the English Literature department more than any "mere" music critic. In fact, it was Christgau who alerted me to the possibilities available to any gifted writer - that subject matter counts less than compositional ability.

It was only later that I realized this record guide was no mere one-off but a collection of monthly "Consumer Guide" columns that ran in The Village Voice and, to a lesser extent, Newsday and Creem throughout the 1970s. What's more, he had never stopped - I discovered a 1980s Record Guide at the Menasha Public Library that summer and came across electronic editions of the current Village Voice running new monthly columns throughout 1998 and 1999. This was no small discovery, because it offered a second revelation of sorts - the possibility of cultural critics remaining engaged with mass and popular culture long after the individual writers had ceased playing any sort of immediate role within a so-called youth culture. By 1998, Christgau was clearly on the wrong side of twenty, or thirty, or forty (I wasn't sure exactly). But he was writing about contemporary music, including teen pop and hip-hop, with an enthusiasm and (this is key) an awareness that transcended age. It's startling now to look back at myself at age twenty-one and see how easily I might have become locked into an ossified critical credo that rejected certain basic strands of musical creativity while foolishly elevating minor variations on niche genre experimentation at the expense of others. I've since met otherwise intelligent individuals whose musical tastes run unfailingly across strictly demarcated lines of "good' and "bad," in which the "bad" often encompasses huge swaths of black pop or contemporary rap, or the "good" barely acknowledges anything not 1981-1988 era hardcore. While it may sound hyperbolic, the cultivation of an encyclopedic musical knowledge has become something like a moral necessity in my mind.

But all that's neither here nor there. My appreciation of Christgau ultimately stems from the fact that his writing caught my fancy and continued to hold my interest as I matured and journeyed forth from the Midwest to the Northeast and the West Coast. Even more importantly, his reviews helped introduce me to a wide variety of music, both old and new, that might otherwise have never come my way. When Christgau's tastes during the mid-1980s took a decisive shift to include the world of Afropop, I'm sure he confused and even alienated many followers who couldn't see the connection between American-based r&b and, say, the Bhundu Boys. I recall skipping over many of those reviews myself as I raced to find opinions on Gang of Four or The Replacements. But when my own interests started wavering in the direction of the melodic, insistently rhythmic, and gently propulsive offerings that is Afropop's gift to the world (sometime in my late twenties, and especially so in my early thirties), it was Christgau's treasure trove of insight on the matter that helped fill my shelves with the likes of King Sunny Ade and Luambo Franco.

So it came as bittersweet news yesterday that Christgau was pulling the plug on the Consumer Guide once and for all, after 41 years of near-continuous monthly appearances. Much of the work has been collected in individual volumes dedicated to decades, but perhaps a better way to experience the full breadth of his accomplishment is to visit his website, which features, among many other things, complete Consumer Guide columns in chronological order going back to the very first, in the July 10th edition of the Village Voice. Taken together, these Consumer Guide reviews offer as studied and as rewarding an investigation into popular culture as any one critic could muster. As I've written before in this space, they deserve to one day be collected within the pages of The Library of America. At the very least, his Consumer Guide mini-reviews should enjoy healthy circulation among electronic-based enthusiasts who may well marvel at the possibilities available once upon a time to a school of writing and criticism - dense, erudite, refined yet profane, scholastic, unapologetically political, witty, acerbic, fearless and often quite kind - that has little place in our increasingly post-literate cultural landscape.

Anyway. In brief recognition of forty-one years of work, may I offer an attempt at a tribute? The opening pages of Christgau's Consumer Guide: Albums of the 90s includes this dedication:

This book is dedicated to everyone who's ever written to thank me for turning him or her on to a record. If I haven't responded, I'm sorry. It always means a lot - in fact, it helps keep me going.

Now might be as good a time as any to thank him for fifteen recordings that might otherwise have never entered heavy-rotation in our house.

Gogol Bordello - Super Taranta!
Buck 65 - Talkin' Honky Blues
Old 97s - Fight Songs
DJ Yoda - Fabriclive.39
Randy Newman - 12 Songs
Orchestra Baobab - Pirate's Choice
Brakes - The Beatific Visions
The Go-Betweens - Before Hollywood (or all of them, really)
Orlando Cachaito Lopez - Cachaito
Steinski - What Does It All Mean?
Mountain Goats - Tallahassee
Sonny Sharrock - Guitar
Mekons - OOOH! (out of our heads)
Franco & Rochereau - Omana Wapi