The Village Idiot

The Village Voice is celebrating its 50th anniversary this week. I don’t know if this has always been the case, but I’d like to thank the legendary NYC alternative paper for at least the last five years of borderline-incomprehensible music writing. My feelings about Robert Christgau and the rest of the paper’s critics would require a longer post and more time, so I’ll leave it to David Segal to paint the picture. He wrote the following during an online chat with Washington Post readers a couple of years ago:

Before we open the phones, has anyone read Robert Christgau’s essay for the Village Voice’s 2002 Pazz & Jop poll? If yes, did you understand it?

If yes again, can you pretty please explain it to me?

Here’s the second sentence of Christgau’s piece:

"The year was so bad it quashed a worthier worst one-two finish and continued on to a worst one-two-three, so bad that a worse finish yet could come in a worse year yet--namely the 2003 this worst year sets up."

I think I see a point here -- Christgau is disappointed by the top vote getters, Wilco’s "Yankee Hotel Foxtrot" and Beck’s "Sea Change." But where a simple stride would do, the guy always leaps for the triple sowcow, or just pirouettes into a 100 mph, grammar-hashing blur. You’ll assume I dropped a word from the following quote, but it’s verbatim:

"The producer as auteur is an idea whose time has come and then some; having gotten to where what are called beats sometimes reject, sometimes exploit, and sometimes just are what are called hooks, we need figureheads with more rebop than Jeff Tweedy."

What the hell is rebop? And where can Jeff Tweedy, Wilco’s lead singer, get more of it?

"How I tell them apart," Christgau writes of the gold and silver finishers, "is that Wilco is the one I tried to hate and ended up respecting and Beck is the one I tried to like and ended up walking around the room until it could get home on its own."

Is he saying that the Beck album was drunk but then sobered up? Sure, friends don’t let albums drive drunk, but if Christgau really waited for "Sea Change" to dry out, does that mean that he ultimately enjoyed it? Or at least gave it cab fare?

Your guess is as good as mine. Maybe better. ... Pop writing should be distracting and illuminating and a little provocative and if possible it should make you laugh and maybe run out and buy an album. That’s about it.

None of this would be worth noting but for Mr. Christgau’s apparent spot at the head of the pop-scribe class. I fear there might be aspiring writers out there who read this P&J essay and assume that rock journalism is actually about pretense and convolution, rather than clarity and chuckles. He could be creating hordes of Little Roberts! Think of it!

I’d rather not.