some rockcrit shit

cat at the stoogeshow was asking me why i didn't write anymore, and whether i'd rather play in a band than write. i told him no and yeah, but it's rilly more complicated than that. just a li'l bit.

gotta love the intarweb: through it, one can access what seems like all of the knowledge ever created. or in my case, all of the music and music-related scrawl. so as i sit in mi casa in between forays to the market to take money from the ruling class and (less frequently these days) to prac pads and gigs, i can sit listening to neu! and j.a. caesar and trying to decide whether i think something else or village green is the greatest kinks alb, stumbling on youtube vids by obscuro japanese bands, and perusing old robert christgau consumer guides.

christgau is one of those rockcrits that i always took for granted and whose worldview (styled himself "the dean" of 'meercun rockcrits) i found hard to relate to, as useful and practical as his consumer guides were. the scribes i've felt more -- nik cohn, st. lester, and more recently, joe carducci and julian cope -- operated from the awareness that they were expressing a minority position, and what i really dug about their work was the way their frame of reference was so obviously circumscribed by their personal prejudices (the way carducci, in his epic tome rock and the pop narcotic, devotes so much space to sst bands, f'rinstance). last night, in the throes of insomnia, i was reading a perfect sound forever piece about how full of shit cope's krautrocksampler is because j. cope is _just_ a fan, not a participant, so he doesn't "know" what was important. (tell it to paul williams, klaus.) which just reinforces the idea that there's _always_ a gap between the artist's intent and the audience's response, and _neither_ p.o.v. is "more" valid than the other.

i've been examining my own prejudices a lot lately (e.g., kinks good, van halen bad; at least sir steffin agrees with me on that one) and in the course of surfing bob's old cg columns, it occurs to me how, in the ones from '69 to '71, almost everything seems good and interesting. things start getting lamer in '72 (around the time i started working in rekkid stores) and by the time he picks up again in '74 (his old newsday capsule reviews, which i read compiled in creem, haven't made it online yet), things have gotten pretty bland indeed. (at the time, i was too busy abuusing substances and playing in bands to notice.) things start getting interesting again in '76 with the advent of punk, but with a difference: there's a definite division between corporate rock, the "new wave," disco, and jazz (and later, "world music"); demographic marketing lines have been drawn. i find it interesting that between the early '70s and early '80s (when i kinda lost the thread during the decade i spent guarding freedom's frontier), christgau had transferred the enthusiasm he once held for the new york dolls to ornette coleman and the indestructible beat of soweto.

it's kinda like i told a customer at the market who complained that she kept getting bottles of wine that were too dry when the beer and wine dude at the store kept telling her they were sweet: taste is really subjective, and you have to find a "critic" whose preferences pretty closely coincide with yours. otherwise, like we usedta say in the airforce, "opinions are like assholes: everybody's got one."