A new discovery; haven't stopped playing it since seeing them at the Fillmore.
How many words is that? 13.
How does the A+ grade compare with other albums from the band?
The A+ is an anomaly, because Christgau graded five later Procol Harum albums C+, C, B-, C, and B+.
One of several features I plan to add 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 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.
Today's word is jejune.
Jejune is a ripe, pretentious word that has many uses in everyday conversation:
At work: "Frank, your presentation on the sales figures was so jejune that you actually relaxed my spastic colon."
At home: "It's not that I don't enjoy sex, Honey, it's just that sex with you is rather jejune unless we invite one of your hotter Facebook friends to join us."
Christgau uses jejune in a single review. I really expected more. Here's an excerpt from the full review:
Modest Mouse, The Lonesome Crowded West. Although their glimpses of a cockroach world living on its own discards may seem jejune to some and homely to others, the lyrics are observed, informed, and explicit enough — in fact, as brave and beautiful as the blues, albeit at a more rarefied level of cultural specificity.
The word also appears a couple of times in his longer pieces. His wife, Carola Dibbell (some of whose writing appears on Christgau's site) wrote an article for the Village Voice in 2000 about a preview of Lou Reed's Ecstasy album (eventually awarded four stars by Christgau in Rolling Stone, or an A in the Consumer Guide) at the Knitting Factory, and uses the word in a lengthy sentence that sums up Reed's personae up to that point:
Reed, who's been something of an androgynous poet himself at times, has been making middle age look OK since he passed from jejune student minimalist to dubious glitter queen to raging substance abuser and found his niche: neurotic-but-wiser New York bohemian artist.
What I think this all means is that somehow, it all comes back to Lou Reed.
One of the many (all right, few) ways that I browse the Robert Christgau site is to look up albums generally considered the Greatest Of All Time Ever. You might (or might not) be surprised that Robert Christgau doesn't always agree with the consensus.
I'm sure that if I asked 100 people (or, in a more realistic way that reflects the number of people who would actually indulge my request, six people) to guess an album that must be on the A+ list, more than half would pick Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, a no-brainer masterpiece boasting the broad popular and critical cachet in the way that a movie like Citizen Kane does for serious film fans.
Never mind that some folks would argue that Revolver or The Beatles (aka The White Album) are better. We're talking about consensus, which is why if you want to win an Oscar pool you pick Dances With Wolves and not Goodfellas.
But Robert Christgau is not a consensus-follower, dammit, therefore...
Lots of people, apparently. Maybe you do, too, and don't even know it.
Cracked has one of several articles that describes why some of his attitudes and tastes might rub you the wrong way, assuming your "right way" is counter to The Christgau Way.
The WFMU blog, which I enjoy for reasons beyond Christgau, posted "The Ultimate Negative Christgau Review," which is "a text composed from thousands of negative words and phrases assembled
from 13,090 reviews by Robert Christgau and turned into a single review." Here's how it begins — I've also linked to the reviews from which these quotes were pulled:
As I've said before and will say again, I have (almost) no musical taste. I know what I like and will sometimes even defend what I like, but I don't possess encyclopedic knowledge about most music. When I was in high school and even college, I couldn't tell the difference between a song by The Cult and a song by The Cure and probably even a song by The Clash and yes maybe even Blue Oyster Cult.
That being blogged, I can (sort of) boast that I owned a few of Christgau's A+ albums before I'd ever heard of Robert Christgau.
And I mean "a few" literally. Of the 114 albums, I own[ed] three:
James Brown, Star Time. Got this boxed set during my boxed-set binging when I was in the Columbia (or was it BMG) CD club in the mid-1990s.
Magnetic Fields, 69 Love Songs. Bought this wonderful collection off eBay maybe in 2001.
Honorable mentions include Licensed to Ill and Born in the USA, both of which were owned by my brother, so it was as if I owned them too, even though they weren't mine.
Not all A+ albums are alike. (Well, duh.) The A+ albums cover a wide range of music genres, from hip-hop to rock to soul to electronic to jùjú, as one would expect. (All right, maybe you're not expecting jùjú, but you're probably not surprised to see it on the list.)
The albums also avoid apples-to-apples grade comparisons because some are compilations and soundtracks, which Christgau himself places in a separate list. (There are currently 11 A+ albums in this category.) What Christgau doesn't do is further classify his list of albums to distinguish between "regular" releases (Born in the USA) and "best of" collections (A Man and a Half: The Best of Wilson Pickett).
To use a sports analogy, it's like comparing a player's particularly spectacular season with another's hall of fame career.
A pair of A+ Als.
Then there's Al Green, who has a "regular" album (Call Me) as well as a Greatest Hits release in the A+ universe. (If you're interested, three tracks from Call Me — the title track, "Here I Am," and "You Ought to Be With Me — appear on Greatest Hits.)
I'll eventually get around to discussing the Al Green albums (and Christgau's review of them) in more detail, but as I did my minimal research for this post, I listened to "Here I Am," which is one of several songs that I've heard so many times but will be listening to with "new ears."
I'll be revisiting this fact over and over again, but many "classic" songs don't resonate with me the way they should because I heard them when I was too young to appreciate them, or they've appeared (either out of context or watered down or both) in a television commercial or I've become too familiar with an inferior cover version. "Here I Am" is an example of this, since I'm pretty sure it was in a commercial in the late 1970s or early 1980s that ran during The Price Is Right, and then UB40 covered it, which further distorted my memory.
I think what stands out as I listen to it again is how the vocal starts off sounding almost chilling or stalker-ish, enunciating every syllable of "I-can't-be-lieve-that-it's-real...the-way-that-you-make-me-feel." Until the delivery changes a bit after the first few lines, you wouldn't be surprised if the song were actually something darker, giving the title "Here I Am" a slightly different meaning.
As of today, there are 114 albums that received the A+. To put that in perspective, let's look at the breakdown of albums and their grades:
Grade
# of Albums
A+
114
A
731
A-
2,612
B+
1,985
B
1,198
B-
968
C+
871
C
440
C-
246
D+
95
D
65
D-
20
E+
5
E
15
E-
2
These numbers don't include the albums that Christgau awarded a non-letter grade using a system that he launched in 1990. I probably won't discuss those grades or the albums attached to them, but anything's possible.
Although this blog is supposed to be about the A+ albums, those D- and worse releases are likely going to warrant some kind of mention.
