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.