Christgau Word of the Day: Nouveau-Jug

Reading Robert Christgau's reviews can make you smarter. (I'd like to believe that reading my blog posts about them will enhance your intelligence as well.) Not only will you impress your friends with your increased knowledge of music, you'll also alienate them by using some of the big words that the Dean of American Rock Critics employs in his reviews.

Today we look at not an actual word, but a compound, though for the purposes of this post I'll call it a word, though you can split hairs on the linguistic terminology and argue that it's a lexeme: nouveau-jug.

The word is quintessentially Christgau. According to my search on his site, nouveau-jug appears in four reviews. He first ("first" according to the order of album release, which is usually also the order in which the reviews are written) employed it in a 1973 review for the self-titled album by Maria Muldaur, making her solo debut recording:

Maria's nouveau-jug music (two songs each from Wendy Waldman and David Nichtern, one each from Dr. John and Kate McGarrigle) is intelligent and attractive. But the overall effect is just slightly aimless and sterile. Maybe it's Muldaur's quavery voice, which only rarely has driven me to attention, or the low-risk flawlessness of the Lenny Waronker/Joe Boyd production. Or maybe it's just the curse of the jugheads--not knowing how to make good on your flirtations with nostalgia. B+

From the context, you could probably assume what nouveau-jug means, especially if you watched the 2005 Bob Dylan documentary No Direction Home, which features clips of several of Dylan's early-60s Village contemporaries (I won't say peers) and would make a folk-y double-bill for fans of Inside Llewyn Davis.

In this brief clip of Muldaur, from a few years earlier, an actual jug sound is prominent:

In Long-Overdue-Update News...

Holy crow, it's been a while. I have to start listening to some music again. I went through the entirety of 2013 without a single post. Meanwhile, that year brought a single new addition to the exclusive A+ list:

Vampire Weekend's Modern Vampires of the City is the first album to make the list since Franco's Francophonic Vol. 2 in 2009. This also means that there's been only one new A+ album since my last post in 2012, so at least I haven't fallen much further behind!

Christgau Word of the Day: Lugubrious

You need not be a Homestar Runner fan
to guess that Strong Sad is lugubrious.

Reading Robert Christgau's reviews can make you smarter. (I'd like to believe that reading my blog posts about them will enhance your intelligence as well.) Not only will you impress your friends with your increased knowledge of music, you'll also alienate them by using some of the big words that the Dean of American Rock Critics employs in his reviews.

Today we visit a word I misspelled in a Google search, which led me to a different word, because I botched the spelling of the original word so badly that the Google spelling suggestion function was like, "Uhhh...is this supposed to be English? Do you know how to type? Are you missing fingers as the result of losing the hand-grenade version of 'Hot Potato'?"

But that unexpected detour inspired me to write a post about that "new" word instead. The "new" word was lubricious. The original word, the subject of today's post, is lugubrious.

I found it amusing that when you click the little volume icon for the pronunciation (on the Google page, not the screenshot itself), the voiceover guy recites the word in quite the chipper fashion. Anyway, now that you know what lugubrious means, what band or singer first comes to mind?

Christgau vs. Steven Sills, Part 1

As a Facebook timeline cover photo, this is worth an A+.
(photo credit: NNDB)

Let's face it: Robert Christgau has his favorites, and he'd probably be the first to admit that.

Every critic, every person who consumes anything (that is, you), we all have our favorites. If I could buy advance tickets for the next Coen Brothers movie, whenever that'll be, I would, even if it turns out less like Miller's Crossing and more like The Ladykillers.

Likewise, there are artists of every medium whom you probably can't stand: nothing they do is worthy of acclaim, even if they sell millions of tickets or albums. (Sometimes 50 million Elvis fans can be wrong.)

Based on Christgau's reviews of Stephen Stills, known to many as the "S" in CSN and CSNY, the Dean of Rock Critics is not a fan.

IT'S AS IF HE JUST GAVE UP ON HIM AFTER 1975
To be fair — that is, to be accurate — Christgau's site contains reviews for only four albums that could be categorized as "solo Stills," none after 1975, and one of those, Manassas, is the first of two albums by a Stills-piloted band of the same name, a band described by whoever wrote its Wikipedia page as "[p]redominantly a vehicle for Stills' artistic vision":

STEPHEN STILLS: Hey man, I'm starting a band. Wanna join?
MUSICIAN: What's the band gonna be about? Like, what kind of songs are we playing?
STEPHEN STILLS: Well, the band is being constructed predominantly as a vehicle for my artistic vision.
MUSICIAN: Predominantly as a vehicle for your artistic vision, you say? When do we rehearse?

But I'm already getting ahead of myself. Let us relish the four reviews, one at a time, starting with, well, the first one.

Christgau Word of the Day: Lubricious

This photo covers both definitions of
the word lubricious. And then some.

One of several features I plan to include in this blog is the Christgau Word of the Day. (No, I don't plan on having a Christgau Word of the Day every day.)

The point of this feature is to find words, usually those classified by the less-literate (like myself) as "S.A.T. words" (regardless of whether they would actually appear on an S.A.T. exam), that Christgau uses and which might be one reason his reviews infuriate so many people.

For this post I found the Christgau Word of the Day by somewhat happy accident. I was using Google as a spell check, as I often do out of laziness because the search engine rarely lets me down in the "Did you mean to use this word which you spelled incorrectly, dummy?" department. The word I was looking for, in order to pull up the definition for which I make a screenshot, was lugubrious, but the stew of letters I entered returned a different word, a word that sounded pretty cool and Christgau-like, so I went with that instead.

That word is lubricious.

Such a delicious word. If you click on the little audio button next to the word above (on the search result, not on the screenshot), you'll hear the word pronounced correctly by a vanilla radio-announcer guy and not, alas, Kathleen Turner. What a waste.

The Online Etymology Dictionary notes that, at least in English, as the two meanings can be traced to the middle of the 17th century. The "offensively displaying or intended to arouse sexual desire" definition sounds rather subjective, though; it could mean anything from wearing too much Polo cologne before heading out to a club to wearing no pants to said club.

Anyway, I'd assumed that Christgau would use a word like lubricious, and I was correct.

An A+ Album: Randy Newman, 12 Songs

Truth in advertising.

I'd taken some time off from blogging for a few reasons, one of which has to do with my choice of album. I've listened to it several times and still am not sure how to write about it, but finally I decided to just dive in, prodded by some recent news about the artist.

THE BASIC DETAILS
Artist: Randy Newman
Album: 12 Songs
Label: Reprise
Release Year: 1970
Length: 29:51
Producer: Lenny Waronker

What the songs on this album might compel you to do: Move to Los Angeles and wish it were still 1970; spend the rest of the day wearing an in-the-know smirk; wonder when the cast of Toy Story is going to show up.

CHRISTGAU AND THE ALBUM
What does the Dean of American Rock Critics have to say?

As a rule, American songwriting is banal, prolix, and virtually solipsistic when it wants to be honest, merely banal when it doesn't. Newman's truisms--always concise, never confessional--are his own. Speaking through recognizable American grotesques, he comments here on the generation gap (doomed), incendiary violence (fucked up but sexy), male and female (he identifies with the males, most of whom are losers and weirdos), racism (he's against it, but he knows its seductive power), and alienation (he's for it). Newman's music counterposes his indolent drawl--the voice of a Jewish kid from L.A. who grew up on Fats Domino--against an array of instrumental settings that on this record range from rock to bottleneck to various shades of jazz. And because his lyrics abjure metaphor and his music recalls commonplaces without repeating them, he can get away with the kind of calculated effects that destroy more straightforward meaning-mongers. A perfect album. A+

How many words is that? 152.

What are your favorite words or phrases? "banal, prolix, and virtually solipsistic"; "fucked up but sexy"; "straightforward meaning-mongers"; "A perfect album"

How does the A+ grade compare with other albums from the artist?
Christgau likes the Randy Newman. Two later albums don't receive letter grades, but Newman scored four A's, two A-'s, 3 B+'s, and a B. If only my college transcript were as good.

ANY OTHER NOTABLE INFO?

Christgau Fancy Word of the Day: Bonhomie

Not reviewed by Christgau.

One of several features I plan to include in this blog is the Christgau Word of the Day. (No, I don't plan on having a Christgau Word of the Day every day.)

The point of this feature is to find words, usually those classified by the less-literate (like myself) as "S.A.T. words" (regardless of whether they would actually appear on an S.A.T. exam), that Christgau uses and which might be one reason his reviews infuriate so many people.

This time around I picked yet another word that sounds very cool but which I've never had the opportunity to use in practice mainly because up until this moment I didn't know the exact definition and didn't want to risk embarrassing myself in the company of smarter people or less-smarter people who are still smart enough to know that I'm not using the word correctly.

That word is bonhomie.

The first part of the definition sounds redundant: "Cheerful friendliness." I suppose that there are other kinds of friendliness that aren't cheerful, such as:

• Hostile friendliness
• Fake friendliness 
• Drunken friendliness
• Reluctant friendliness 
• Talking-to-the-cop-who-just-pulled-you-over friendliness
• Held-at-gunpoint / Stockholm syndrome friendliness 
• Friendliness in the way you'd be friendly to a pig that you're about to slaughter for some fresh bacon

...and so on, but my friendliness is usually cheerful. Unless it's at work, where it's just easier in the long run if you're minimally friendly to most of your coworkers.

Bonhomie comes from France, according to its listing on the Online Etymology Dictionary, based on bon (good) + homme (man). If you have even a rudimentary knowledge of French and enjoy the hip-hop music, you can say it literally means "good homey." And who doesn't want a good homey?