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: