Recently by Robert Christgau

My wife and I chose the hours of 11 a.m. Thursday through 11 p.m. Friday to take off for a much needed escape to Brattleboro, Vermont, where we ate a supernal $100 meal, two excellent $30 meals, and a free, late motel breakfast; swam in the full-size motel pool and a secluded private pond owned by the widow of a Dartmouth classmate; sat in the motel hot tub; shopped briefly for books and clothes during a rainstorm; listened to a lot of music in the car (Crazy Horse! Mamani Keita! Wussy!) and some by the pond (Mbuti Pygmies!); and did the other things couples do on much needed escapes. We had a great time.

Luckily, time was so short I decided not to bring my laptop, no newspapers were on sale, and the computer in the motel breakfast room had bitten the silicon. On the way to the restaurant Thursday night, however, our 24-year-old daughter called and told us that Michael Jackson had died. For Nina this was a big deal, and after dinner we called again and talked about how disorienting it felt--for her, this pop loss was a first, an oddity worth pondering. Post-grunge, there were lots of deaths (not just Kurt Cobain but Lynn Staley, Elliott Smith, lesser lights), but she was a little young for that and has always been a pop person anyway. And in that pop generation (not hip-hop, obviously), there's been trauma aplenty but, so far, no deaths unless you count Rob Pilatus of Milli Vanilli. Even Britney Spears has made it through. It's been said often and truly in the past few days that MJ made the post-identity aesthetics of such raceless yet r&b-contoured pop possible. It's also been said that he heralded a return to showbiz, an overstatement--arena-rock offered showbiz aplenty (read Fred Goodman on Dee Anthony in The Mansion on the Hill)--that's relevant here. Pop has transmuted into a strange profession that rewards hard work and personal discipline, making self-destructiveness less likely among its practitioners. And it's also been said that MJ was the last pop star everyone could share--a universal signifier whose like we will not see again. Many reminiscences from LA and NYC have recounted how ubiquitous his music instantly became.

As a point of information, then, I should mention that not once in Brattleboro--a sizable old-hippie town that harbors quite a few liberal NYC retirees, though its countercultural presence was one vegetarian restaurant when my friend bought his patch of woods 40 years ago--did I hear a scrap of Michael Jackson's music or even his name. He wasn't even brought up by the webwise r&b recording engineer from down the dirt road who surprised us by biking in for a dip. I'm not saying the reports of ubiquity were inaccurate or meaningless. But universal is BIG.

When Andrew Sarris got offed at The Village Voice about 20 years ago, I'm chagrined to admit that the main thing that upset me about it was the precedent. We were both institutions at the paper by then, but he was certainly the bigger one, and if he could go, so could I. Never a big gossiper, I don't know whether management in general (as opposed to then film editor Karen Durbin) had it in for Sarris--probably there was a new blood thing in there somewhere, but I doubt that was enough of a reason. The guy was a legend. Of course, he  was also and quite possibly still is an annoying person--imperious, thin-skinned, highly territorial. He harrumphed a lot, and had taken to quoting himself in his reviews. ("Never do that," I warned myself, and I've been pretty good about it.) I remember once he'd just learned of the existence of disco and couldn't resist gloating to me in a putatively jocular way about how rock and roll was dying--when I told him I thought disco was rock and roll he didn't know what to say. Also, I was a Kaelist back when that was a hot topic--disapproved of the genius theory buried not too far from the surface of auteurism.

When I had to prepare a syllabus for the course in cultural journalism I taught at Princeton in 2007, however, I needed to revisit the Sarris-Kael debate because I was teaching it. And re-rereading some of Sarris's reviews--not an easy thing to do, as I'll explain--I found that I liked them much more than I remembered. Not that I'd ever stopped using The American Cinema--still haven't. But the individual reviews were often more insightful (and funny) than I would have imagined. Born in 1929, Sarris never understood hippies, but he knew he didn't understand them, and rather than being all sour grapes about it, he found a tone that self-mocked as it carped. Also, his stubborn insistence on taking popular movies every bit as seriously as (probably more than) Kael has worn well--often he gets at essential virtues in flicks others simply don't think through if they think about them at all.

Thing was, finding his reviews wasn't so easy. Unlike Kael, every increasingly captious and willful word of whom has been recycled and oft rerecycled, he's basically unanthologized--the last collection ends in 1969. I bring this up now because the New York Observer  just destaffed Sarris in a June 5 massacre whose details remain remarkably murky for the Nothing Is Sacred but the Salmon-Colored Truth contingent. (For the record, books editor Adam Begley, whose enjoyable Begley the Bookie column I had been missing, emails me that he resigned in March to write his John Updike bio. He adds, however, that if he hadn't he would have been fired June 5.)  Even before I did my Princeton research I'd noticed that I was enjoying Sarris's NYO reviews far more than I'd anticipated. Especially cheek by jowl with Rex Reed (and that's a whole lot of jowls), he was remarkably lively and down-to-earth, still forming crushes on ingenues and tracking the track records of directors four decades his junior. He turned 80 last September, and I actually think he wrote better in his seventies than in his fifties.

So some university press should do a big book. Maybe his firing--like Reed, he will now "contribute," we are told, but we'll see how often--will get people's attention. I mean, he's a legend, and his Wikipedia entry is a damn stub. Even his wife Molly Haskell gets a real article (albeit a comically ill-written one, should anyone have the stomach to check). Wonder if some online site will take him on. Won't pay, but for sure it will open up career opportunities.

While awaiting the new collection of critical essays Dave Hickey assured me was in the pipeline when we saw each other in Las Vegas last August for the first time in 30 years--during 12 of which the guy who once wrote me Aerosmith and Kinks reviews was known to the world as the author of Air Guitar, the finest such collection since the halcyon days of Kael and Sontag--I thought I could do worse than take a look at the University of Chicago's new edition of his shorter and less stunning 1993 The Invisible Dragon. The main thing I took away from it the first time was the unfashionable and to my mind self-evident notion that works of art--most specifically Robert Mapplethorpe's photographs of fisting and other such arcane sexual acts--were, among other things, acts of advocacy. Formal elegance my ass, comme on dit.

The new edition, however, is in fact new. Hickey did in fact revise--when I looked back to see whether I'd marked the same passages this time as last time (because he's so free with the bon mots, the answer was often no), I noticed a lot of rewriting. Not only has he excised considerable throat-clearing and marginal verbosity, he's expanded on ideas here and there. He's also added a fifth essay, "After the Great Tsunami: On Beauty and the Therapeutic Institution," as well as an uncommonly substantial "Introduction to the New Edition" (and I enjoyed the acknowledgments too). And he's changed the subtitle slightly, from "Four Essays on Beauty" in small type to "Essays on Beauty" in large type--and in red.

Especially in the wake of the new material, that's the nub. Hickey believes not in art that is good for you but art that is, as Ashford & Simpson once put it, good to you. And he believes that beauty constitutes an argument for whatever content happens to be beautified. Myself, I've always preferred to cite "pleasure" when launching such points--about, say, M.O.P.'s robbery rap "Ante Up"--but since Hickey's focus, especially in this book, is the visual arts, beauty is the pertinent term for him. He reminded me that my late friend Bob Stanley, one of two painters I've known well, changed his tune about a decade into our friendship. Early on in his tutelage he was all over flatness and concept. But by the early '70s, painting trash and trees and his friends, he was talking mostly about beauy. Bob devoted the last ten years of his life to female nudes. These never gained much commercial traction--which, by the way, Hickey would probably hold against them. In addition to believing in beauty, he also believes in the market. Not capitalism, he is careful to specify here--the market.

So, some bon mots. "Many artists of consequence, like Degas and Picasso, are found guilty of profiting from the theft of proprietary iconography." "Anyone who has loaned work to a museum exhibition can tell you that the work in the museum is something other than the work in one's home. Visiting the exhibition can feel like visiting an old friend in jail. The work hangs there among a population of kindred offenders, bereft of its eccentricity, yet somehow, on account of that loss, newly invested with a faintly ominous kind of parochial power." "Art is not idolatry, [curators] argue, nor is it advertising. Advertising and idolatry, however, are indeed art, and the greatest works of art are always inevitably a bit of both."

It was pushing midnight and I wanted to do a Consumer Guide review of an album by "Ethio-jazz" proponent Mulatu Astatke, which I'll also be covering for Bob Boilen at NPR, who turned me onto it. The title: Information Inspiration. But after I examined the CD, a creditless promo, and the PR release, a one-sheet with vague performance details, there was still a lot I needed to know. I'd read the very good liner notes to Ethiopiques 4, which I knew from Rhapsody featured Astatke even though there it was spelled Astatqe and that series almost never highlighted artist IDs in the interest of promoting its brand name, and I'd Googled around and found pretty good stuff about the British outfit the Heliocentrics, Astatke's collaborators. So I emailed Astatke's label publicist and started Googling some more. Found maybe a dozen reviews, half totally useless, half worth printing out, although only Richard Miller's in Dusted was high quality. Poking out of one, in fact, I found the following lede, as my people used to spell it:

Is it shameful to say that I've never listened to a full Mulatu Astatke record? That's I'm largely unfamiliar with the Heliocentrics? Or that the greater portion of my knowledge entering into this review consisted of a making-of-the-album vid that I streamed off the Internet? The beauty of Inspiration Information is that it convinces me that my critical foible barely matters , , ,

Without reading too much into this--it's one self-described "hip-hop head" at one less-than-prestigious online venue--I was appalled. Some information, then.

1) The title is actually part of a series on the Strut label supposedly inspired by a song and album by Shuggie Otis. The song was covered nicely by Sharon Jones, her chronic overstatement balancing Otis's chronic understatement, on Red Hot + Blue's  Dark Was the Night. I rejected Shuggie Otis in his original hippie-era manifestation, which had plenty of promotional muscle behind it and flopped anyway, and was unconverted by his rediscovery--though I must say the Strut series counts for something.

2) Typically, I'd say, though I watch as few as possible, the promo video is dreadful--cut to shot of tape; cut to shot of cables; cut to shot of musician talking; cut to shot of musician playing; cut to shot of rain coming through roof and collected in plastic bucket (a new percussion instrument, someone joshes har har). Soundbites include: Astatke says record is "unique and different"; Heliocentric says Astatke is "ultimately a true artist"; Heliocentric (I think--not going back to check) observes "often the best music comes from taking risks." Inspiration-wise, those are typical. Ethiopian instruments are named, which is good, but quickly, which isn't--especially since, duh, they're not spelled.

3) For the video-addicted, there is a four-minute YouTube clip of Astarte playing with the Either/Or Orchestra. It's so easy to access that I watched it myself. Learned something, too.

What can I say? The hip-hop head wasn't getting paid, and had some vagrant thoughts about how inspiration doesn't require knowledge that he wanted to expound on. He's right, too--sometimes exciting music proceeds from ignorance. Sometimes good criticism even does. But it's damn rare. And it isn't old-fartism to conclude that ignorance is even more common on the web than in print, more common in unpaid writing than paid. What was the head's editor/facilitator thinking? I'm glad I found that Richard Miller piece, which wouldn't exist without the web. But I'm not mollified.

Brian Raftery has been a staffer at Spin, EW, and GQ, which means he's a smart guy who knows how to make writing go down easy. More recently he was an editor at Idolator, which didn't work out, as it hasn't worked out for a lot of people--good luck Maura, see you in a later post. Now he's published a memoiristic cultural history called Don't Stop Believin': How Karaoke Conquered the World and Changed My Life, and the fact that it goes down easy--as befits his training, Raftery is partial to chapters that function as sidebars and chapters constructed as lists--doesn't mean it has nothing to say. In fact, it's one of the more substantial documents of the rise of the song aesthetic, a subject that's generated a great deal of piffle over the past five years.

I've been pro-karaoke ever since I read Charles Keil's 1984 essay about it a decade late in his great Music Grooves collection--anything that helps fans take control of music is good by definition, although sometimes only in theory. Raftery's book--together with the fact that my daughter and her best friend, a native of the karaoke-crazy Philippines, are into it--has certainly intensified my curiosity. One thing you can say for karaoke song connoisseurs as opposed to MP3-blog song connoisseurs is that for them songs are anything but disposable--they value a durable melody and a clever structure. One thing you can say against them is that their performance needs are hell on extended instrumentals and strophic forms. Like Raftery, who really shouldn't take Rolling Stone so seriously, I scoff at the idea that "Like a Rolling Stone" is the greatest single of the modern era. It's not in my top 500. But that doesn't mean I don't like it. I wonder how many karaoke obsessives can see, I mean hear, its virtues as clearly as Raftery claims he does.

This is one of several critical issues that Raftery glances off rather than exploring. It always saddens me when a smart guy who knows music has a book to write and avoids putting any criticism in it. For sure he could have shortened the takeout on the esoteric realm of karaoke video to make room. Most interesting to me is a question he never really addresses at all, which is--what is a "good singing voice," anyway? Wasn't rock and roll out on earth not to obliterate that notion but to broaden it so the pitchmongers could never grab hold of it again? Does karaoke contravene conventional notions of the good voice? Or does it reinforce them with its choice of material, the presentational gifts of the karaoke-specific local stars it produces, and its sometimes candid, sometimes ironic admissions of amateurism and the professionalism that amateurism implies? I wish I thought there was much doubt.

I have been gone forever. I feel bad about it. I had a birthday in April--maybe I'm finally getting old. In any case, teaching at NYU plus two substantial monthly columns plus occasional work for NPR and the late Blender and creating a weekly playlist for Rhapsody--yes, that's work too, people talk about these things as if they're bagatelles but if you respect them a little they're not, one reason I missed a couple of weeks--was as much as I could handle and a little more. Which sad plaint pertains to the story I am about to tell.

Early in May, after my teaching was done but in the midst of grading and editing 29 2500-word final papers, I hied with my wife to the second of three Dinners With Friends in a seven-day period--a surfeit unmatched since Christmastime. This one was on the Upper West Side. We were exitbound on the IRT at 96th Street when we were hailed by an old acquaintance--a first-rate journalist I've known for about 30 years and like a lot to this day. He had a new job--editing an NYC section at a widely read website that will remain nameless. And he had an offer for me. How would I like to blog for his section? He needed music coverage. True, he mentioned with admirable dispatch, I wouldn't be paid. But it would open up a lot of opportunities for me.

Politely, I hope--genially, I hope--I told him I had too much work to do as it was and would have to decline. In the intervening weeks, however, I've actually had second thoughts. With both my Village Voice columns currently (knock on wood) available at venues--online-only venues, it is only fair to note--where as far as I'm concerned they're at least as good as at they were at my dead-tree stomping ground, the main thing I miss about the Voice is the opportunity for advocacy. I could make a difference for artists I thought deserved attention--writing a slam-bang Voice Choice for the great Cincinnati band Wussy, who Southern-Ohio-born-and-bred Rob Harvilla just doesn't get (too young, maybe), or going to see the Defibulators dominate the Asylum Street Spankers at this vast new venue in Gowanus (wherever that is--besides Brooklyn I mean--Smith and 9th on the F, though I arrived by taxi after subwaying to Williamsburg by mistake) called the Bell House and then lobbying to write a short about them. And of course I would always have an in to gigs as well, instead of having to luck into a Leonard Cohen ticket which turned out to be one of the greatest concerts I've seen this decade--number two, I think, after D'Angelo at Radio City, though maybe I'm forgetting something and maybe Cohen was even better, this is only a damn blog.

Which is, of course, the point. Here I work for nothing--and disappear for two-three months. I do it because I believe in the NAJP and what it represents and because I want to represent--with my such-as-it-is prestige for NAJP, and for the vernacular arts in general and rock and roll in particular at NAJP, which like all arts orgs is prey to creeping gentility as well as the nasty elitist kind. Even at that I'm uncomfortable with how fast I write here, because I'm a firm believer that even in journalism the best writing is done slowly. And even at that I think I write better than most bloggers I read--not so much here, where the quality is remarkably high (Anawalt, we miss you), but at most of the websites I frequent, including the one where I was offered a--not gig, but spot, venue. Fact is, what blogs I read I read for content only. Only a few--Marshall, Sullivan, Huffington, all of whom, what a coincidence, are clocking major dollars at their web gigs--are pleasures to read as writers. Those who aren't I don't read much.

I am overgeneralizing. There are music bloggers--Maura Johnston at Idolator (who's also getting paid, though I bet not much) and Carl Wilson at Zoilus (who's writing less as his actual newspaper gig takes more of his time)--I read for pleasure, and others I'm sure I'm missing. But if I remain a skeptic in the matter of the web as the salvation of journalism, the fact that I was asked to write for nothing in the interest of furthering my career exemplifies why.

To be continued, I bet. Or hope.

With my customary Net 0.5 alacrity, a retrospective report on the 2009 EMP Pop Conference. I live-blogged this event last year. This year I a) got off the plane in Seattle Thursday April 16 with a 101.5 fever (yes, I had a thermometer with me) b) traveled with my family (my wife brought the thermometer) and c) quickly lost Internet capability on my laptop. Not that I would have filed if I had it. But that's a lot of excuses.

Napped all afternoon Thursday, briefly met, gret, and et, and in the next 24 hours skipped moderating a 9 a.m., publicizing the conference on a 5 p.m. radio show, and events involving (in declining order of regret) the late Robert Palmer, Diana Warren, and Nona Hendryx. At all these junctures, I rested or slept in my hotel room. Thus I somehow had the energy to enjoy a long-planned dinner with a dozen friends to celebrate my and my wife's forthcoming birthdays. Woke up Saturday 67 and 98.6. Good work, immune system.

And yet, and yet, where was my mind? I did attend presentations most of Friday, all day Saturday, and Sunday, when I delivered my own and proceeded immediately to the airport. Took many notes. Find I need them. So rather than a blow-by-blow, let me mention a few special highlights and observations. The announced theme this year was Dance Music Sex Romance: Pop and the Body Politic. This meant a lot of dance studies type papers, most of which failed to attract me away from the competition, and also, I guesstimate, a few more academics from the theory-of-desire axis than altogether pleased me. But the academics were jamming. My favorite presentation was by U.K. prof David Hesmondhalgh. The ominous title "Sex, Music, Pleasure and Politics" could have nnounced the direst theory, but he'd proffered a comment about boys dancing together that I liked the cut of so I took a chance. In about 12 minutes Hesmondhalgh had politely demolished all existing academic theories of rock and pleasure, basically on the grounds that they were too totalizing and too committed to the margin--all power-pointed, one of those living outlines. Explaining how he got to what I will call the normalization of pleasure in pop music is beyond my capacities, although when I told him I thought that his sane notion of talking about specific genres rather than music as a whole could be rendered even saner if we talked about artists within genres, he concurred; I'll have to email him for the lecture, which was not written out (damn academics with their coherent extemporization) but may be by now.

Other special faves were EMP first couple Ann Powers and Eric Weisbard, Ann making her most eloquent appeal to date for a criticism in which emotional needs were expressed and formally exploited, Eric locating the Adult Contemporary audience in a housewife demographic he followed into Friday-night listening clubs and Monday-Friday workplaces--began as research, ended as sermon. Academic newbie Carl Miller offered a survey of abortion songs that topped out with brief testimony based on his own experience in abortion counseling, academic oldie Daphne Brooks showed performance video that demonstrated conclusively why folks are gaga for that not terribly good Janelle Monae record, journalistic tag team Jon Caramanica and Sean Fennessey celebrated Soulja Boy video, my MSN editor Sean Nelson contemplated the sexlessness of early-'90s alt-rock, Jody Rosen illustrated early Tin Pan Alley cheating songs with an endless procession of sheet-music covers, my buddy Tom Smucker power-pointed a history of Pentecostalism from Acts to Sarah Palin. There was more good stuff, but instead I'll advise filmmaker Jim Jabara to edit both his footage and his remarks before presenting in public again. I hung in there because I wanted to see Smucker, but the only rule at a conference as rich as EMP--and in my experience most conferences aren't--is to vote with your feet and walk out whenever you're bored, because there's generally something better a room away.

My own presentation, which followed Miller's and Rosen's, was entitled "The Old Folks Wished Them Well: A Secret History of Romantic Marriage in Rock and Roll." I'm glad Carola and Nina were there to hear it. Felt almost like a renewal of vows--and though I mean to Carola first of all, of course, I also mean to meaningful journalistic criticism, specifically of the sort Ann Powers called for and still so often manages to bring off in the context of a daily newspaper.

I recent caught Chai Vasarhelyi's Youssou Ndour: I Bring What I Love at a sparsely populated Magno Screening Room in Manhattan. Ran into an old friend who expressed the hope that the music would be like (1990's) Set and not (1994's) The Guide as if N'Dour's decade at the Nonesuch label hadn't existed--and who knowing that smidgen was more expert than 95 if not 100 percent of the other film critics who'd cover the film if the film got lucky. It deserves to. Just by offering onscreen translations, Vasarhelyi clarifies stuff about N'Dour that even someone as expert as moi doesn't always remember--basically, how didactic and moralistic his nevertheless catchy and kinetic songs are. We also meet his extended family, especially his stern dad and feeble, heroic 96-year-old griot grandma, who died while the film was in process--but never the wife who produced the son who eventually accompanied him to mosque. Vasarhelyi herself was new to the music and making it up as she went along, hitting N'Dour just as his 2004 Egypt project was coming to fruition. First thing I learned was something I don't recall the Nonesuch publicity of the time making clear--that the Cairo sessions where most of Egypt was recorded were pre-9/11, then held till the time seemed right years later. (Did I ask anybody that question when I covered? Didn't occur to me. I was pretty busy boning up on Sufism.) The other was that Egypt was very controversial in Senegal, where N'Dour is a major hero but where clerical hotshots condemned him for integrating religious lyrics and secular music.

Illustrating the controversy were shots of Senegalese newspaper stories, their headlines subtitled. I thought I'd been taken out of the film when I was unable to provide similar paper-and-ink documentation of the column I wrote about Egypt, but apparently the Voice finally came up with a copy, and there I was telling N'Dour how his album documented the variety of not just Islam but Sufism (next time I'll wear a nicer shirt). I wonder what the digital equivalent of this cinematic trope will be. (ZOOM IN ON KINDLE). And speaking of obsolescent cultural artifacts, the climax of the film comes when Egypt wins a Grammy. (CLOSE-UP OF GRAMMY TV COVERAGE IN DAKAR, WHERE IT IS PROBABLY ABOUT 5 IN THE MORNING. PHONE RINGS. NDOUR'S AMERICAN REP INFORMS HIM THAT HE WON GRAMMY EVEN THOUGH TV SHOW NEVER MENTIONED IT.) Somehow, the Grammy defused the Senegalese situation. There's a hilarious shot of that silly piece of brass going through the X-ray machine at the Dakar airport. There's a parade. N'Dour is invited to a state dinner with the president. He gets to duet with the nation's most prominent religious singer. (RELIGIOUS SINGER LEAVES ROOM. CAMERA FOLLOWS. HE IS WEEPING, APPARENTLY WITH JOY.)

Film crits, those who survive--worthy of coverage. Music crits--back your colleagues up or volunteer yourself. Assuming you know something about N.Dour. Which by now you probably should.

So finally a magazine folded out from under me. Blender, where I was a contributing editor, an elastic term I'll get to shortly, was where I went after Rolling Stone fired me in 2007. It was a good magazine--intelligent and irreverent and lots of laughs. It was renowned for the quality of its editing. And yesterday it went out of business. Oh wait--it will still have a "digital presence," which means that the last reviews I wrote for it will be available online. Sorry, today I'm an old fart. I am not mollified.

The chronology of how I signed on at Blender has confused folks who blogged about it without actually calling anybody up, so let me clarify. I got my staff writer's job at Stone shortly after I was fired at the Village Voice on August 31, 2006. Jann Wenner hired me and Jann Wenner fired me because he's the guy who runs the joint, but I haven't spoken to him since his sister's wedding in 1979 or 1981 or something so it would be foolish to speculate on his reasons. The crucial fact is that after I was fired my rabbi there, Joe Levy, a dear friend and former Voice music editor who I've known since he roomed with my nephew in college in the '80s, joined with his boss Will Dana to secure me another three months as a kind of severance. A few weeks into that extension, I called the editor of Blender, Craig Marks, and in three minutes cut a verbal agreement that in return for some limited exclusivity and my name on the masthead I'd get a very good word rate at Blender after my term at Stone was up. Two weeks into that deal in January, before I'd published a thing in Blender, Levy replaced Marks there, which had been in the works since November or something unbeknownst to me. Everyone assumed my buddy Levy had brought me with him, as he did Stone's Rob Sheffield. In fact it was a complete coincidence.

Except, of course, that we both really liked Blender. I know to the outside world Stone is a Cadillac and Blender,  insofar as anyone has ever read it, was a Hyundai trying to be a sports car--a cross between Maxim, which owned it (and where Levy will now be editor-in-chief), and one of those celebrity papers they sell on checkout lines. But in fact the mag Marks created was bright and original. I was treated well at Stone, though I hated the mag's intrusive, tin-eared, prissy copy department. The money was good, I was allowed to say what I wanted, the mag's stature magnified my critical authority, and every once in a while I got to write something longer than 150 words--700 on the Shins, whoa! Also, after years at a supposedly radical weekly where only a few dogged and heroic local reporters (plus its lead critics--me and James Hoberman especially) got to pursue an explicitly radical agenda, I admired Wenner's temerity in running a large-circulation national magazine that opposed Bush and the war in Iraq, with fervor and from the git. But once I was part of it I was tremendously uneasy with the music coverage. It didn't help that the year was 2007, inspiring Wenner to devote not one but three issues--out of 24!--to the 40th anniversary of the Summer of Love. Jesus. I did some rather good work for one of those issues. Fun, too. But I was so embarrassed.

So even though my income was plummeting, I felt enormous relief to be out of there. Blender was trivial and deeply into lists and really liked artists who had pretty breasts. Its politics were deeply buried or altogether nonexistent, although both Marks and Levy are savvy and deep-feeling progressives in their personal beliefs--and although no one ever tried to censor my barbs, which given the formal limitations of the 135-word record review weren't as numerous as I would have preferred. But it was also, as review editor Rob Tannenbaum put it in his mass email, "the most entertaining, informative, reliable and comprehensive music magazine in the world," and under Tannenbaum its review section was vastly more sharp and varied than the ones at Stone, Spin, Vibe, or the Voice; where most mags have a beat and depend on staff, Tannenbaum reviewed everything and used good writers from everywhere. But ad revenues slipped even as circulation increased, and so naturally the review section shrunk, increasing the proportion of what Tannenbaum liked to call the "poptastic" records at the core of the Blender sensibility and also staff contributions and making it far less "comprehensive," especially generationally. The shrinkage cut seriously into my assignments there, which means I'm not taking as big a hit as some of my friends and colleagues, notably staffers Tannenbaum, Jonah Weiner, Josh Eeels, and--especially missed by me--Jon Dolan, who regularly managed to say more in 135 words about records I couldn't get a handle on than an entire phalanx of the netzine blowhards aggregated by Metacritic. But Marks and Tannebaum always liked to say that their favorite rockmag was the legendary Creem, and for sure Blender--with all commercial compromises and vulgarisms acknowledged (for its time, Creem had plenty of those as well)--came much closer to that ideal than any other current mag. It was intelligent yet written for ordinary fans, very funny, and the Sheffield column that Levy instituted was some of the best work he'd ever done. I was happy there, and I'll miss it as a writer, a reader, and a rock critic elder. After a long downturn, Spin (which Marks also once edited) has gotten better over the past few years, but I wouldn't bet it'll have the humility to morph over toward the Blender model as it continues to do battle with the also-shrinking Stone. In this economy not to mention tomorrow's, who's hiring?

I wrote a draft of this Thursday night then started shaving and sharpening it today (what, you can't tell?). Midway through I was interrupted by a phone call that seemed pretty eerie in context: an editor from Rolling Stone asking me if I wanted to do reviews there. Took me aback, I gotta say, but I was flattered and told him so. Decided the only appropriate thing to do was post what I'd written (well, I changed a verb and added a detail, but would have done that anyway, I swear) and see if the offer stayed open. If it did, well, in this economy, why not?

Then I got another call, from Jon Dolan. He's a friend and a kind of protegee, a year into fatherhood. We talked for an hour. Terrific writer--just Google him. Try to find that blog he did on New York State politics for New York before the 2006 election--brilliant stuff. He needs work. Maybe Blender was the wrong "model," but I'm not sitting still for that bullshit today. I like journalism as a fulltime career. Preferably on paper. Grrr.

As one of my readers at this site just reminded me--not that I haven't been reminding myself more or less daily for weeks--I've been AWOL for a while. There have been things I might have blogged about, too. No Depression, the quality alt-country whose conversion into online-only I followed here last year, is no longer online-only either. It claims it's still alive, and I'm not arguing, but in apparently its life is some kind of social-networking thing that I somehow doubt will help alt-country diehards act naturally. There's also news that the quality L.A.-based dance/hip-hop mag Urb is in its death throes, which its editor denies, but not without deniability if you know what I mean. At the same time I wanted to thank all those who responded to my "Anuncios de Servicio Publico" post--responses that in toto constitute the guide to RIAA-certified Spanish-language pop I said someone should publish, so that all somebody needs to do know is compile all the knowledge, spruce up the writing a bit, and fill in a full holes and, well, publish it somewhere. Good luck.

The reason I've been AWOL is simple--I've been working an 80-90 hour week since my term teaching at NYU's Clive Davis Department of Recorded Music began January 29. As I announced here, though maybe I should start flagging the results (Google "christgau `remembrance of seasons past'" for the most recent installment), I am now the fortunate freelancer with two substantial monthly columns, the Consumer Guide at msn.com for more than two years now but now also the brand new Rock & Roll & at the Barnes & Noble Review. Since I don't just knock any writing off--though I am trying to make an exception right now--this leaves me with not much time on my hands, and when I'm teaching that time reduces to some kind if negative number, When I slept seven hours last night it was the first time I'd reached that blessed goal in weeks.

I always prep my classes hard even though this is the fifth time I've taught the always evolving but basically stable history part of the course. But what really takes the time is that I'm supposed to teach these sophomore recorded music majors, for whom my course is required, how to write at the same time. And I want to blow off a little steam about that before I try to make it two seven-hour nights in a row.

These kids are not stupid and a fair number in this particular class (it varies) have some idea how to write. What interests me, in view of those two facts, is how little their required freshman writing courses helps them develop this ability. At one point I thought I should try to get a fulltime job at NYU myself and was offered a freshman writing course as part of the package. The deal was that I would lecture my students on whatever I wanted and TA's would mark the papers I would assign. I know people who've taught this way and some of them tell me it works pretty well, but I don't believe it. I've read a fair amount of writing by people of TA status--which is to say talented graduate students with an active interest in cultural matters, often from a cultural studies perspective--and most of it isn't that good. Moreover, as anyone who'd worked with dozens of editors knows, the ability to write (which most editors in journalism can claim) is not the same thing as the ability show other people how to do it.

So here's how I teach my 29 sophomores. Three papers constitute 55 percent of the course grade--5, 15, and 35. Each of the first two papers is written three times. The first one is 300 words and graded only on the final draft, the second 750 words and graded on each draft, the third 2500 words handed in the final day of the term and written only once (although I offer guidance to those who get a sufficiently early start). Each of the first two papers gets a complete pencil edit from me (yes, that's literal, I use pencil). I deal when necessary with overall construction, with theme and general coherence, but I also challenge word choice, series order, sentence structure, damn right punctuation. I lay some Strunk & White on them as well as my own theories about hierarchies of verbs and Latinate as opposed to Anglo-Saxon diction. It's very time-consuming. Most of them tell me nobody, including those TA's, has ever told them about such stuff before. The lesson for arts journalism at any level of monetary compensation should be clear, though how one locates much less pays 100,000 competent line editors beats me.

Did I talk about :"who"/"whom" versus "that"? Maybe I can devote a post to just that. But there's also a book I'd like to tell you about.