Christgau's Record Guide: Rock Albums of the Seventies

Christgau's Record Guide: Rock Albums of the Seventies
The cover of the book, showing information and details in different font colors, superimposed against a white background.
Author Robert Christgau
Country United States
Language English
Subject Albums, capsule review, discography, music journalism, popular music, rock music
Published 1981 by Ticknor & Fields
Media type Print
Pages 472
ISBN 089919026X
Followed by Christgau's Record Guide: The '80s

Christgau's Record Guide: Rock Albums of the Seventies is a music reference book authored by American music journalist Robert Christgau and first published in October 1981 by Ticknor & Fields. It compiles approximately 3,000 capsule album reviews, most of which were originally written by the journalist for his "Consumer Guide" column in The Village Voice throughout the 1970s. The reviews cover a variety of genres related to rock music, and are noted for his opinionated tastes, analytical commentary, pithy language, and critical quips. Many of the older reviews were rewritten for the guide to reflect his matured stylistic approach and changed perspective on the music.

The book was critically well received, with praise given to its extensive discography, Christgau's judgment, and colorful writing. It later appeared on several expert lists of popular music literature. A staple of rock-era reference works, Christgau's Record Guide has been reprinted several times and became especially popular with specialist record collectors and music shops. Two more "Consumer Guide" collections have been published, compiling Christgau's capsule reviews from the 1980s and the 1990s, respectively.

Background

In 1969, Robert Christgau began reviewing contemporary album releases in his "Consumer Guide" column, which was published more-or-less monthly in The Village Voice, and for brief periods in Newsday and Creem magazine during the 1970s.[1] His method to the column selected some 20 or so albums to assess in capsule review format, averaging approximately 50 words each, before assigning a letter grade on a scale of A-plus to E-minus.[2] This was a product of The Village Voice's deal with Christgau—allotting him one 2,500-word piece per month—and his desire to provide prospective buyers with ratings of albums, including those that did not receive significant airplay.[3] Some of these columns were reprinted in Christgau's first book, Any Which Way You Choose It, a 1973 anthology of essays previously published in the Voice and Newsday.[4]

Among the most revered and influential of the earliest rock critics, Christgau wrote the "Consumer Guide" with confidence in his tastes, conviction that popular music could be consumed intelligently, and interest in finding new understandings of the aesthetic and political dimensions in popular culture's intersection with the avant-garde.[5] As a journalist, he wanted to convey his findings in a way that would entertain and provoke readers.[6]

Content and scope

"I conceived the CG as complementing my monthly essay. It was criticism with an immediate, undeniable practical function—criticism in a pop form, compact and digestible."

—Christgau's Record Guide, p. 4[3]

Christgau's Record Guide collects approximately 3,000 "Consumer Guide" reviews of albums through the 1970s.[7] The reviews are arranged alphabetically by artist name, with annotations for each record. Some older albums were regraded to reflect Christgau's changed perspective, while other records and text from the original columns were omitted in favor of new material.[8] Many of the original reviews were expanded and extensively revised by Christgau for the guide, more than half of which consequently features material in previously unpublished form.[9] He later said, "much of the early CG material was rewritten for the book for a reason—I didn't evolve my current high-density stylistic approach until 1975 or so".[10]

The book covers albums from a variety of rock-related genres including hard rock, heavy metal, punk rock, funk, disco, soul, blues, country, and reggae.[11] With regards to its scope, Christgau said he "tried to grade every '70s rock album worth owning".[12] The reviews often feature analytical commentary on the aesthetic or cultural significance of the music, as well as critical one-liner jokes; his review of the 1973 Leonard Cohen album Live Songs states Cohen "risks turning into the Pete Seeger of romantic existentialism", while the Doobie Brothers' Takin' It to the Streets (1976) is panned in a single sentence: "You can lead a Doobie to the recording studio, but you can't make him think."[13]

The book is appended with introductory essays by Christgau, including a historical overview of rock and an explanation of his grading system; an A-plus record is defined as "an organically conceived masterpiece that repays prolonged listening", while "E records are frequently cited as proof that there is no God."[14] The last section of the book, titled "A Basic Record Library", has individual listings of what he regarded as the essential records of the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s, respectively.[2]

Publication history

Christgau's Record Guide: Rock Albums of the Seventies was first published in October 1981 by Ticknor & Fields in New Haven.[15] It was released at a time when bookstores saw an influx of rock music reference books as publishers competed with one another for the market.[16] The book saw publication again the following year through the London-based Vermilion imprint, and was reprinted in 1985 by Houghton Mifflin in New York.[17]

In 1990, Christgau's Record Guide was reprinted by Da Capo Press under the title Rock Albums of the Seventies: A Critical Guide.[18] It was followed by Christgau's Record Guide: The '80s that same year and Christgau's Consumer Guide: Albums of the '90s in 2000, forming a three-volume series of books compiling the capsule reviews.[19] The contents of all three "Consumer Guide" collections were made available on Christgau's website after it went online in 2001.[20]

Contemporary reception

Reviewing for The New York Times in 1982, Robert Palmer said Christgau's Record Guide "stands out" in the recent slew of rock reference publications "because it is both obsessively complete and caustically outspoken". Palmer acknowledged Christgau's maturity, intelligence, and humor as a rock critic and wrote in sum, "although one won't always agree with Mr. Christgau, his book is a useful reference source for anyone with a serious interest in recent rock. It's a bit too cantankerously opinionated to deserve an A-plus, but it certainly repays reading and rereading."[21] Choice magazine highly recommended the guide, arguing that it functions superbly as a read for spontaneous pleasure and a reference to rock's "major and minor classics" while highlighting the last section for "any librarian building a rock music collection".[22] Illinois Libraries, the journal publication of the Illinois Library Association, advised AV librarians to consult the guide for help in selecting music recordings to archive. The journal's reviewer called Christgau "a senior critic if rock music has such a thing" and suggested readers focus more on his enthusiasms than dislikes: "As a record selector, you shouldn't care that Christgau looks down his nose at John Denver, but his praise for Eno, The Ramones, and Terry Garthwaite is well-founded and meaningful."[23] Lee Ash, general editor of the Haworth Press's Special Collections journal, reviewed it as among books recommended to library special collections. The guide's "quality, content, scope, and evaluative notes" impressed Ash, who had a greater familiarity with discographies of early chamber music and only a mild enthusiasm for rock music. He concluded it was "an indispensable book" for music collection and providing "critical material for argument".[24] In Year by Year in the Rock Era (1983), Herb Hendler named it among the books and magazines "relevant to youth and the rock era".[25]

"Christgau's reviews are evaluative in a way that few rock and roll record guides have been. He not only describes his personal likes and dislikes, but he evaluates style, influence, quality of lyrics, and musicianship as well as recording quality. He preserves all the evaluative quality of classical music record reviews while at the same time using to advantage the informal, colorful, and humorous side of the rock and roll industry."

—Choice: Current Reviews for Academic Libraries, 1982[22]

Inspired by Christgau's writing in the early 1970s to pursue a journalistic career, Steve Simels ended up reviewing the book for Stereo Review in 1982, with qualified praise. He regarded Christgau as an indisputably well-written reviewer of fair-minded critical judgment, impressive witticisms and one-liners, and deeper interest in black music than most other white critics; but expressed reservations about what he perceived to be a mawkish sense of feminist conscience, knee jerk liberal politics, and a predilection for conceptual music, as exemplified by "A" grades for all four Ramones albums. After laboring through the entire guide, Simels found himself "surprised to discover how even-handed [Christgau]'s been over the long haul", and summed the book up as a "worthwhile", if not entirely reliable, reference work.[26] In Library Journal, P. G. Feehan found Christgau to be a rigorous and smart critic while deeming the book an excellent companion to the contemporaneous Rolling Stone Record Guide, particularly because of Christgau's extensive coverage of albums from fringe and import record labels. Feehan's one cavil was "his four-letter-word-studded, hip/smart style, which may turn oft readers from west of the Hudson River".[27] David Browne shared a similar sentiment in High Fidelity, believing some of Christgau's musings would be too complicated for newcomers to rock journalism. "But he remains one of pop's most astute critics", Browne concluded, adding that the guide functions best as a way of discovering good records—such as Bill Withers' Still Bill (1972)—obscured by the complex discography of 1970s popular music.[28]

Some reviewers were more critical of the book. Fellow rock journalist Dave Marsh, who had cited the "Consumer Guide" concept as an influence on his own Rolling Stone Record Guide, gave the collection a B-plus in Musician.[29] He found Christgau "concise, contentious, condescending, provocative and pedagogic" with a shrewd sense of judgment and sharp insight, but complained of gratuitous, off-topic commentary and possible attempts to keep up with fashionable consensus, as there were no clear indications which reviews had been rewritten in retrospect for the book. Marsh ultimately questioned whether Christgau's tough-mindedness and ideological rigidity made him ideal for a guide book and asked what it means if "the most influential rock critic has never written a book that wasn't an anthology".[30] A response by Christgau was published in the magazine a few months later, in which he expressed appreciation for Marsh's "kind words" about the book and referred back to its introductory essay to answer questions posed in the review: "Though I don't indicate which reviews are newly written, I do state that I've reconsidered every record I had doubts about and stand by every judgment. As the co-editor of a competing consumer guide, Dave knows that the most important thing to do when you're reviewing records is to listen to them first."[31] British music scholar Paul Taylor issued different complaints about the book in his 1985 guide to literature on popular music, Popular Music Since 1955. He called Christgau's Record Guide "an odd collection" for several reasons. "Included are certainly the best albums", he observed, "but it is the way in which the bad examples are selected that is dubious, and simply mediocre records are avoided."[7]

Legacy

Christgau's Record Guide and similar review collections played a role in the rise of rock critics as tastemakers, promoters, and cultural historians in the music industry, whose standards were being reinvented by the genre.[32] These critics constructed their own versions of what popular music academic Roy Shuker called "the traditional high/low culture split, usually around notions of artistic integrity, authenticity, and the nature of commercialism". As with The Rolling Stone Record Guide, Christgau's Record Guide became popular with music aficionados, collectors, and both secondhand and specialty record stores, who kept copies of different volumes on hand. Christgau's guides to the 1970s and 1980s were "bibles in the field", as Shuker described, "establishing orthodoxies as to the relative value of various styles or genres and pantheons of artists".[33] While reviewing the 1980s volume for the Chicago Tribune in 1990, Greg Kot said Christgau's Record Guide and Ira Robbins' Trouser Press Record Guide had been "the bibles of my existence as a rock critic".[34] Christgau believed the 1970s guide to be the most "authoritative" in the series because the decade's smaller music market was easier to process, and also "a kind of canon-defining work, making the case for Van Morrison and, say, the McGarrigle sisters, and against Black Sabbath and, say, Donny Hathaway."[35] In Eric Weisbard's opinion, he "wasn't so much canonizing as using the endless listening party to find new wrinkles in his, and popular music's, unsummarizable aesthetic".[36]

Three white men sat behind a table holding microphones and place cards
Robert Christgau (right) and Chuck Eddy (left), one of several critics to officially recommend the book; photographed in 2010 at the Museum of Pop Culture's Pop Conference

Christgau's Record Guide was published in an era when popular music studies were the domain of non-academic sources such as journalists rather than music departments and classical academics. It became widely popular in library catalogues by the late 1980s, along with other anthologized works of rock journalism by critics like Ellen Willis and Lester Bangs. The "Consumer Guide" reviews collected in the book were cited by Weisbard as part of rock and popular music's reinvention of critical standards. The end of the 20th century saw a paradigm shift, however, as paid journalism declined and academic departments gradually embraced popular music studies.[37] In 1997, the Music Library Association used the book as a reference to prepare select rock recordings for A Basic Music Library: Essential Scores and Sound Recordings, published by the American Library Association as a guide for librarians and other specialist collectors.[38]

Literary academic Cornel Bonca has called the "Consumer Guide" books "go-to record guides", but singled out the 1970s volume as "essential rock writing".[39] Chuck Eddy included it in his buying guide to books on rock music, while Jon Savage recommended it as a useful discography of that decade's punk rock.[40] In 2006, the guides were collectively ranked fifth on The A.V. Club's list of the 17 essential books about popular music; in the website's opinion, Christgau "made a sublime art of the capsule review, packing pithy observations and heartfelt appreciation into 150-word boxes".[41] Michaelangelo Matos, a staff writer for the website, was greatly influenced by Christgau and said the first two volumes were books he had read most frequently as an adult. He highlighted Christgau's humor, ability to extract the essence of an album in a few sentences, and punctuating of reviews with letter grades, "a cunning rhetorical device as much as simple judgment".[42] Fellow critic Rob Sheffield named the 1970s guide among his six favorite books in a list published by The Week, believing other "obsessive music freaks" likely own it too. "This book is the all-time rock-'n'-roll argument starter", he said, "and I'll be arguing with it for the rest of my life."[43] It was also read by novelists Dylan Hicks and Jonathan Lethem when they were young adults; Lethem later revealed that "for years, I calibrated my record collection against the grades ... jotting dissenting views in pencil in the margins".[44] In 2016, Billboard placed it at number 47 on a list of the 100 greatest music books; an accompanying blurb read: "His '70s collection offers a fantastic primer on rock and soul's most fruitful decade. Whether or not you share Christgau's passion for Al Green's 'Let's Get Married' or his disdain for all things Eagles, you'll love his pith and wit."[45]

See also

References

  1. ↑ Wolk 2010; Applegate 1996, p. 49.
  2. 1 2 Wynar, Littlefield & Holte 1982, p. 524.
  3. 1 2 Applegate 1996, pp. 49-50.
  4. ↑ Salzman 1986, p. 967.
  5. ↑ Shepherd et al. 2003, p. 306; Locher & Evory 1977, p. 118.
  6. ↑ Locher & Evory 1977, p. 118.
  7. 1 2 Taylor 1985, pp. 50-51.
  8. ↑ Taylor 1985, p. 51; Wynar, Littlefield & Holte 1982, p. 524.
  9. ↑ Wolk 2010; Christgau 1982, p. 10.
  10. ↑ Anon. 2002, p. 1.
  11. ↑ Simels 1982, p. 28; Super & Irons-Georges 2006, p. 432; Wynar, Littlefield & Holte 1982, p. 524; Feehan 1981, p. 2126.
  12. ↑ Manzler 2000.
  13. ↑ Super & Irons-Georges 2006, p. 432; Palmer 1982, p. C00020.
  14. ↑ Palmer 1982, p. C00020; Ash 1985, p. 44.
  15. ↑ Anon. 1981, p. 12.
  16. ↑ Anon. 1981, p. 12; Marsh 1981, p. 18.
  17. ↑ Taylor 1985, p. 50; Inge & Hall 2002, p. 1528.
  18. ↑ Anon. 1991, p. 7556.
  19. ↑ Robins 2016, p. 277; Wolk 2010.
  20. ↑ Matos 2011; Anon. 2002, p. 1.
  21. ↑ Palmer 1982, p. C00020.
  22. 1 2 Anon. 1982, p. 1374.
  23. ↑ Anon. 1983, p. 456.
  24. ↑ Ash 1985, p. 44.
  25. ↑ Hendler 1983, p. 328.
  26. ↑ Simels 1982, p. 28.
  27. ↑ Feehan 1981, p. 2126.
  28. ↑ Browne 1988.
  29. ↑ Marsh & Swenson 1979, p. xiii; Marsh 1981, p. 18.
  30. ↑ Marsh 1981, p. 18.
  31. ↑ Christgau 1982, p. 10.
  32. ↑ Shuker 1994, p. 70; Weisbard 2018, p. 38.
  33. ↑ Shuker 1994, p. 70.
  34. ↑ Kot 1990.
  35. ↑ Cartwright 2001; Anon. 2002, p. 2.
  36. ↑ Weisbard 2018, p. 38.
  37. ↑ Weisbard 2018, pp. 27–28, 38.
  38. ↑ Davis et al. 1997, pp. xi, 576.
  39. ↑ Bonca 2014, p. 155.
  40. ↑ Eddy 1997, p. 366; Savage 2002, p. 559.
  41. ↑ Murray et al. 2006.
  42. ↑ Matos 2011.
  43. ↑ Sheffield 2010.
  44. ↑ Hicks 2017; Lethem 2005.
  45. ↑ Anon. 2016.

Bibliography

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  • Anon. (June 1982). "When Only a Balanced Selection of Reviews Will Do...". Choice: Current Reviews for Academic Libraries. 19.
  • Anon. (1983). "Cavemen's Club". Illinois Libraries. 65 (6–10).
  • Anon. (1991). "Subject Index". Paperbound Books in Print (Fall 1991 ed.). 5–6.
  • Anon. (2002). "Answers From the Dean: Online Exchange with Robert Christgau". RockCritics.com. Retrieved August 21, 2018.
  • Anon. (September 16, 2016). "100 Greatest Music Books of All Time". Billboard. Retrieved August 20, 2018.
  • Applegate, Edd (1996). Literary Journalism: A Biographical Dictionary of Writers and Editors. Greenwood Publishing Group. ISBN 978-0313299490.
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  • Davis, Elizabeth A.; Bristah, Pamela; Gottlieb, Jane; Underwood, Kent David; Anderson, William E., eds. (1997). A Basic Music Library: Essential Scores and Sound Recordings. American Library Association. ISBN 978-0838934616.
  • Eddy, Chuck (1997). The Accidental Evolution of Rock'n'roll: A Misguided Tour Through Popular Music. Perseus Books Group. ISBN 978-0306807411.
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  • Super, John C.; Irons-Georges, Tracy, eds. (2006). The Seventies in America. 2. Salem Press. ISBN 978-1587652301.
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Further reading

  • Nugent, Stephen L. (January 1984). "Christgau's Guide: Rock Albums of the 70's by Robert Christgau; The Rock Who's Who: A Complete Guide to the Great Artists and Albums of 30 Years by Brock Helander; Dictionary of American Pop/Rock by Arnold Shaw". Popular Music. 4: 307–11. (Subscription required (help)).
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