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And It Don't Stop on Substack
Robert Christgau's newsletter And It Don't Stop
appears three (or four) times a month on Substack. Subscribe
here.
Robert Christgau's Big-Hearted Theory of Pop
Book Reports features reviews of not only the pop-music
tomes you'd predict but also literary fiction, Marxist-adjacent
cultural commentary, feminist debates over pornography, and even books
about the past decade's financial crisis. It follows a collection that
Christgau published last year, Is It Still Good to Ya? Fifty Years
of Rock Criticism, 1967-2017, which includes Christgau's takes on,
among many other things, classic rock, Kanye West, the music of Desert
Storm, Lollapalooza, Ladysmith Black Mambazo, and so-called guilty
pleasures--a category that Christgau rejects, since, for rock critics,
as he puts it, "pleasure is where meaning begins." Together, these
collections make the sneaky case that Christgau is not just the Dean
of American Rock Critics, his self-awarded and perhaps slightly
off-putting nickname, but one of America's
sharper public intellectuals of the past half century, and certainly
one of its most influential--not to mention one of the better stylists
in that cohort. Fun is a big part of why.
--David Cantwell, The New Yorker
News
Ornette Coleman Robert Christgau reviewed Ornette Coleman's last live performance
(he believes) for Billboard almost exactly a year ago:
Ornette Coleman in Prospect Park,
June 12, 2014.
[posted by Webmaster on 2015-06-11] Website Charset Errors UPDATE: I believe that the following problem has been fixed.
Please let us know if it hasn't, or if you see other problems. Thanks.
The website was recently migrated to a new server with more recent
software releases of PHP, MySQL, etc. The effect of this change is that
the software now defaults to the UTF-8 character set, instead of the
previous default, ISO-8859-1 (Latin-1), in effect way back when the
website was originally built. All of the text/data in the website is
encoded according to the old standard. However, when the new software
processes the old data, it tends to drop strings when encountering
characters that are encoded differently (mostly characters with accents
used in French, Spanish, German, and other West European languages).
[posted by Webmaster on 2015-06-02]
New in Expert Witness:
- Parkay Quarts: Content Nausea (What's Your Rupture?) A-
- Slutever: Almost Famous (self-released) A-
- Wire: Wire (Pinkflag) ***
- White Lung: Deep Fantasy (Sub Pop) **
- Total Babes: Heydays (Wichita) **
- Spider Bags: Frozen Letter (Merge) **
[posted by Webmaster on 2015-05-29]
New in Expert Witness:
- Tamikrest: Adagh (Glitterbeat '10) B+
- Tamikrest: Toumastin (Glitterbeat '11) A-
- Tamikrest: Chatma (Glitterbeat '13) A-
- Imarhan Timbuktu: Akal Warled (Clermont Music) ***
- Tamikrest: Taksera (Glitterbeat '15) *
Other recommended links:
[posted by Webmaster on 2015-05-22]
New in Expert Witness:
- Cracker: Berkeley to Bakersfield (429) A-
- The Mountain Goats: Beat the Champ (Merge) A-
- Sun Kil Moon: Benji (Caldo Verde) B+
- Modest Mouse: Strangers to Ourselves (Epic) ***
- Clem Snide: Girls Come First (Zahpwee) **
- Mac McCaughan: Non-Believers (Merge) *
Other recommended links:
[posted by Webmaster on 2015-05-15]
New in Expert Witness:
- Young Fathers: Dead (Anticon) A-
- Young Fathers: White Men Are Black Men Too (Big Dada) A-
- White Mandingos: The Ghetto Is Tryna Kill Me (Fat Beats) A-
- Death Grips: The Powers That B (Third Worlds/Harvest) B+
Other recommended links:
[posted by Webmaster on 2015-05-08]
New in Expert Witness:
- Huey "Piano" Smith: Rockin' Pneumonia and the Boogie Woogie Flu (Hallmark) A
- James Booker: Gonzo (RockBeat) A-
- Cracking the Cosimo Code: 60s New Orleans R&B and Soul (Ace) B+
- Huey "Piano" Smith: That'll Get It (Even More of the Best) (Westside) **
Other recommended links:
[posted by Webmaster on 2015-05-01]
New in Expert Witness:
- Sunny Sweeney: Provoked (Thirty Tigers) A-
- Sturgill Simpson: Metamodern Sounds in Country Music (High Top/Thirty Tigers) B+
- Steve Earle & the Dukes: Terraplane (New West) **
- Sturgill Simpson: High Top Mountain (High Top Mountain) **
- Corb Lund: Counterfeit Blues (New West) *
[posted by Webmaster on 2015-04-24]
New in Expert Witness:
- Courtney Barnett: Sometimes I Sit and Think, and Sometimes I Just Sit. (Mom + Pop) A
- Nellie McKay: My Weekly Reader (429) A-
[posted by Webmaster on 2015-04-17]
New in Expert Witness:
- James McMurtry: Complicated Game (Complicated Game) A
- Terry Allen: Bottom of the World (self-released) A-
- Gurf Morlix: Eatin' at Me (Rootball) ***
Recent links for Robert Christgau's Going Into the City:
Recent links for Carola Dibbell's The Only Ones:
[posted by Webmaster on 2015-04-10]
New in Expert Witness:
- Kendrick Lamar: To Pimp a Butterfly (Top Dawg/Aftermath/Interscope) A-
- Rae Sremurrd: Stremm Life (Eardrum/Interscope) A-
- Drake: If You're Reading This It's Too Late (Cash Money) ***
- Far East Movement: K'Town Riot (Cherrytree) **
- J Cole: 2014 Forest Hills Drive (Roc Nation/Columbia) *
Recent links for Robert Christgau's Going Into the City:
Recent links for Carola Dibbell's The Only Ones:
[posted by Webmaster on 2015-04-03]
New in Expert Witness:
- The Paranoid Style: The Power of Our Proven System (Misra cassette '13) A-
- The Paranoid Style: Rock and Roll Just Can't Recall (Worldwide Battle) A
- The Close Readers: The Lines Are Open (Austin) A-
Recent links for Carola Dibbell's The Only Ones:
Also, note that
Nylon Book Club picked The Only Ones as one of "the
two books you need to read this month." The other one was by
Kazuo Ishiguro.
[posted by Webmaster on 2015-03-27]
New in Expert Witness:
- Heems: Eat Pray Thug (Megaforce) A
- Lupe Fiasco: Tetsuo & Youth (Atlantic) A-
- Sisyphus: Sisyphus (Asthmatic Kitty) B+
- DJ Rashad: Double Cup (Hyperdub) ***
- Common: Nobody's Smiling (Def Jam/Artium) **
- Serengeti: Kenny Dennis III (Joyful Noise) *
Excerpts from Robert Christgau's Going Into the City:
Also, a few choice links:
-
Mark Athitakis: Going Into the City (BN Review, Feb. 25, 2015)
-
Jack Dickey: How to Survive 13,000 Album Reviews (Time, Feb. 24, 2015)
-
Joanna Scutts: Going Into the City by Robert Christgau review -- lessons
from the 'dean of rock criticism' (The Guardian, Feb. 20, 2015)
-
Arum Rath: Robert Christgau Reviews His Own Life (NPR, Mar. 1, 2015)
-
Devin McKinney: Guts on the Page: Notes on the Absolute Unity of Robert
Christgau (Critics at Large, Feb. 28, 2015)
[posted by Webmaster on 2015-03-20]
Robert Christgau's memoir,
Going Into the City: Portrait of a Critic as a Young Man, was
published by Dey Street Books and released on February 24.
Carola Dibbell's novel,
The Only Ones,
was published by Two Dollar Radio and released on March 17.
[posted by Webmaster on 2015-03-17]
New in Expert Witness:
- Angola Soundtrack 2 (Analog Africa) A-
- Aby Ngana Diop: Liital (Awesome Tapes From Africa) A-
- Ata Kak: Obaa Sima (Awesome Tapes From Africa) A-
- Les Ambassadeurs du Motel de Bamako: Les Ambassadeurs du Motel de Bamako (Sterns Africa) ***
- The Rough Guide to the Best African Music You've Never Heard (World Music Network) ***
- Monoswezi: The Village (Riverboat) ***
- Lala Njava: Malagasy Blues Song (Riverboat) **
- Dieuf-Dieul de Thiès: Aw Sa Yone Vol. 1 (Teranga Beat) **
- Alpha Blondy: Mystic Power (VP) **
- Afrobeat Airways 2: Return Flight to Ghana 1974-1983 (Analog Africa) **
- Seun Kuti + Egypt 80: A Long Way to the Beginning (Knitting Factory) **
- William Onyeabor: Who Is William Onyeabor? (Luaka Bop) *
- Mark Ernestus Presents Jeri-Jeri: 800% Ndagga (Ndagga) *
Recent articles:
[posted by Webmaster on 2015-03-13]
New in Expert Witness:
- Kate Tempest: Everybody Down (Big Dada) A
- Wormburner: Pleasant Living in Planned Communities (Dive) A-
- Paul Heaton and Jacqui Abbott: What We Have Become (Virgin EMI) ***
- Pet Shop Boys: Electric (X2) **
[posted by Webmaster on 2015-03-06]
New in Expert Witness:
- Willie Nelson and Sister Bobbie: December Day (Legacy) A
- Ladysmith Black Mambazo: Always With Us (Uyohlale Unathi) (CDBaby) A-
- Loudon Wainwright III: Haven't Got the Blues (Yet) (429) A-
- David Greenberger & Dozens: Near the Edge of the Penny Jar Spill (Pel Pel) ***
- Chuck E. Weiss: Red Beans & Weiss (Anti-) **
- Oscar Brown. Jr. & Maggie Brown: We're Live (ESP Disk) *
- Willie Nelson: Let's Face the Music and Dance (Legacy) *
- Scott Ramminger: Advice From a Father to a Son (Arbor Lane) *
[posted by Webmaster on 2015-02-27]
New in Expert Witness:
- Ex Hex: Rips (Merge) A-
- Allo Darlin': We Come From the Same Place (Slumberland) A-
- Alvvays: Alvvays (Polyvinyl) B+
- Shilpa Ray: It's All Self-Fellatio (Bad Seeds, Ltd.) ***
- Courtney Barnett: The Double EP: A Sea of Split Peas (Mom + Pop/Milk!) **
- Girlpool: Girlpool (Wichita Recordings) **
- Potty Mouth: Hell Bent (Old Flame/Marshall Teller) *
[posted by Webmaster on 2015-02-20]
New in Expert Witness:
- Sleater-Kinney: No Cities to Love (Sub Pop) A
- tUnE-yArDs: Nikki Nack (4AD) A-
- TV on the Radio: Seeds (Harvest) A-
- The National: Trouble Will Find Me (4AD) ***
- Thurston Moore: The Best Day (Matador) **
- St. Vincent: St. Vincent (4AD) **
[posted by Webmaster on 2015-02-13]
New in Expert Witness:
- Taylor Swift: 1989 (Big Machine) A-
- Shakira: Shakira (RCA) A-
- Katy B: Little Red (Columbia) ***
- Tove Lo: Queen of the Clouds (Island) ***
- Haim: Days Are Gone (Columbia) **
- Lorde: Pure Heroine (Lava/Republic) **
- Sia: 1000 Forms of Fear (Puzzle/RCA) *
[posted by Webmaster on 2015-02-06] Most Recent -- More Recent -- More Ancient
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