bill_altreuter's Full Review: Robert Christgau - Grown Up All Wrong: 75 Great Ro...
Although I listen to a lot of different sorts of music, the music I still like to read about the most is rock'n'roll, and nobody writes about rock more intelligently, or more amusingly, than Robert Christgau. A collection of his longer reviews has been long overdue. No one has done more with the capsule review than has Christgau with his "Consumer Guide", and his annual "Pazz and Jop" Critic's Poll is the only worthwhile venture of its sort that I am aware of. Grown Up All Wrong collects Christgau's longer writings, in some instances mashing together shorter reviews taken from over a period of years in order to make up a fuller review of an particular musician's carrier. It is every bit as useful as the (sadly out of print) Consumer Guide for the '70's and its companion for the '80's.
In a way, it's odd that Grown Up All Wrong should speak to me the way it does. I really stopped being an avid follower of rock'n'roll sometime around the mid-80's. Like a lot of people my age, I began delving into jazz and the blues, and my studies in those territories are far from complete. The CD revolution had something to do with this, I think: when going out and buying a stack of vinyl meant dropping twenty or thirty bucks, you could take a chance on a side that might only have one decent side (a Consumer Guide "B" or maybe "B+"). Sometimes, what the hell, maybe there were only a couple of good cuts, and maybe some decent filler, but it was worth it to follow a band from the beginning. When the necessary investment put a big bite on a $20 bill, however, suddenly getting 45 minutes of quality became much more important, and taking a flyer became much less appealing. Of course, that was always the value, and the premise, of Consumer Guide, and over the course of the years I really came to rely on it, but sometimes the capsule reviews failed to tell me that the recording in question held music that would be important to me.
I've been reading Christgau since his Newsday days, and I have learned that anything with an "A" is something I should have in my collection. When I was a particularly avid collector/follower/whatever of this sort of music I usually already had the A records on my shelves when the Consumer Guide validated my taste. But pop splintered, and for a while there Christgau's grades in the B to B+ range at least seemed to be reflecting as much sociopolitical importance as musical enjoyment. Better to go out and buy a Thelonious Monk side.
The thing is, as important as jazz and the blues are, the third member of this trilogy is still just as important, and still speaks to some of us. Blues is the original American music, and it tells us of our roots in the soil, and the blood of slavery, and the journey to the city that are central parts of the American story so deeply that no one can deny its power. Jazz represents the triumph of the American will to improve; to hope and failure; to optimism and defeat. Like the blues, jazz is full of commentary about a democracy that had as one of its formative concepts the notion that black people were to be counted as 4/5ths of a person, and even the name "jazz" contains controversy: lots and lots of musicians resent the appellation as a form of musical apartheid. "It's just music," they say. "Why does it have to have its own name?" Of course they are right, in a way. Jazz is about as many things as music can be about, including the sexual act that gives it its name, and like America, (and the blues) it is out there for all of us, not just for black or white. The same is absolutely true of rock'n'roll, and rock deserves this book.
Christgau writes, "There really is a crisis of meaning in this culture, especially for white males who regret at whatever level of conscious intellection their complicity in an ideology of domination they're at least half ashamed of." Damn right, and rock'n'roll speaks to this crisis-- this particular crisis-- in a way that the other members of the trilogy simply do not. Part of the value of this volume is that it puts together in one place a sort of a start towards a cannon. Christgau denies this in his introduction, and, to be sure, there are gaps. Still, the table of contents is a hell of a list: Nat King Cole, George Gershwin, B.B. King, George Jones, Emmett Miller, Chuck Berry, Elvis Presley, Janis Joplin, The Rolling Stones, Eric Clapton, Led Zeppelin, Jimi Hendrix, Aretha Franklin, John Lennon and James Brown in the first two chapters, and that's barely a quarter into the book, before things start getting really interesting. Lots of critics have written well about Punk, and lots have written about Pop, and god knows that lots have had lot to say about Rap and Hip Hop. Not too many can tell the story of each as well as this man, though, and here Christgau really has a chance to stretch out.
Christgau's Consumer Guide capsules have, in the past, sent me out to buy sides as diverse as, oh, Fear of A Black Planet, and Car Wheels on a Gravel Road. I went back and checked-- he's been saying to pick up on Lucinda Williams for years, and I missed it. Then I checked some more on some of the other things he writes about here that I never got around to, and he's been right there all along. Even if you read the Village Voice religiously, you have probably missed some of these essays, and since some have been reworked to provide a career overview, they're still worthwhile. There is a lot here that I've heard of, but not heard; things that I've wanted to look into, but lacked a starting place, and stuff I've never heard of that I'm going to go out and track down as soon as this is posted. If rock ever meant that much to you, this is a book you should have. And I haven't even talked about how funny it is. A grade is obligatory, even though it would certainly make him cringe. A+, of course.
The textbook, Grown up All Wrong, by Christgau, available in Paperback. Published by: Triliteral. Edition: . ISBN10: 0674003829. ISBN13: 97806740...More at Textbooks.com
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