What Is a Christgau A+ Album Like?

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.