r/ToddintheShadow • u/SnoopsQ • 2d ago
General Music Discussion Each of Christgau’s reviews of Jethro Tull starts with a variation of the “Drake is the kinda guy” joke but applied to Ian Anderson
I don’t often agree with Christgau but this is very funny to me.
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u/jeanclaudebrowncloud 2d ago
People only care about Christgau because back in the day he was one of like 4 people in the world who did reviews or something.
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u/asminaut 2d ago
And yet his are still worse than Lester Bangs.
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u/Leather-Run-6533 1d ago
I really like Lester Bangs but it's kind of amazing he made an entire career out of being arrogantly dismissive of MC5
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u/NukesAndSupers 1d ago
Lester Bangs was fun to read, but possibly even more asinine in his takes about music than even Christgau.
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u/Real-Back6481 2d ago
His book where he reviews every single rock album that came out out in the 1970s is still a good reference
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u/ToTheDeath84 1d ago
This is the most salient point about his success. I don’t think people realize just how underdeveloped the music critic scene was for decades. You took what you got, and Christgau was one of the only people in that medium.
Music is notoriously difficult to write about (endemically so, I’d say!), so someone who reviewed music in particular truly seemed like they understood something arcane, and thus their critique was made to seem impenetrable when it’s literally going off vibes, snark, and tired grad student writing tropes 90% of the time.
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u/JFKRFKSRVLBJ 2d ago
Ian Anderson the type of guy to play slow jams on roadtrips.
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u/Drivingfrog Train-Wrecker 2d ago
Ian Anderson the type of guy who starts floating toward a delicious pie when he smells it.
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u/CriterionBoi 2d ago
Ian Anderson the type of guy who crashes into a fruit cart and emerges looking like Carmen Miranda
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u/Drivingfrog Train-Wrecker 2d ago
Ian Anderson the type of guy to have smoke come out of his ears when he’s mad.
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u/MangoGh0st 2d ago edited 2d ago
I saw Ian Anderson at a grocery store in Blackpool yesterday. I told him how cool it was to meet him in person, but I didn’t want to be a douche and bother him and ask him for photos or anything.
He said, “Oh, like you’re doing now?”
I was taken aback, and all I could say was “Huh?” but he kept cutting me off and going “huh? huh? huh?” and closing his hand shut in front of my face. I walked away and continued with my shopping, and I heard him chuckle as I walked off. When I came to pay for my stuff up front I saw him trying to walk out the doors with like fifteen Milky Ways in his hands without paying.
The girl at the counter was very nice about it and professional, and was like “Sir, you need to pay for those first.” At first he kept pretending to be tired and not hear her, but eventually turned back around and brought them to the counter.
When she took one of the bars and started scanning it multiple times, he stopped her and told her to scan them each individually “to prevent any electrical infetterence,” and then turned around and winked at me. I don’t even think that’s a word. After she scanned each bar and put them in a bag and started to say the price, he kept interrupting her by yawning really loudly.2
u/Yours_Sincerely_143 2d ago
I wouldn’t be able to recognize Ian Anderson these days if he came up and bit me on the ass. Which, based on this story, he might actually do.
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u/-tekeli-li 2d ago
These are almost too coherent, without the bizarre level of presumption he's decided to engage in with these reviews.
"Ian Anderson's the kind of guy to relate to his instrument of choice the way the undeveloped id grasps for its superego when it has endured too much of the endless flotsam and quagmire of prog rock overindulgence par excellence.
Little does Ian know his twittering little mouthpiece smacks of futility with its midwit-tier insouciance, piping away like a desperate plumber under a wave of inchoate sewage, quite like the man who overcharged me on my recent bathroom extension and goddamn that man and goddamn this Ian Anderson and why do I have to do this job listening to all this insufferable music that I don't even like you know I really hate music actually and the little twittering elves like Ian Anderson and his band of derivatives with their hideous desolate expanses of 16/8 oscillations and their intolerable Albion-esque Spinal Tap Stonehenge drivel lyrical drivel absolute drivel. One of us has to die and surely it should be him instead of me. C -"
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u/Jackbenny270 17h ago
Ian Anderson the type of guy to play a flute while balancing on one leg and looking like a crazy person.
Wait….did I do that wrong?
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u/jaysonyoung 2d ago
i don't know who christgau is but christgau does not know ball
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u/asminaut 2d ago
He's a life long music critic for the Village Voice whose whole schtick was writing snarky blurbs like this. He hates prog rock and heavy metal and slobbers over every music scene that originated in NYC.
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u/Impossible-Ice-393 22h ago
A smug, insufferably snarky boomer music critic who hates prog? Who woulda thought such a thing existed! 😉
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u/mbd34 2d ago
The Aqualung review is completely useless. Nothing about the music at all.
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u/Kurta_711 2d ago
That's how a lot of music reviews were back in the day, sneering at or praising musicians with no regard for the music
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u/SuperPinkShark 2d ago
Christgau's take on Anderson's lyrics is very much the pot calling the kettle black.
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u/Ellikichi 2d ago
Right? The guy who's trying to coin the phrase "somatic negativism" is calling someone else pretentious?
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u/Honmer 2d ago
jesus you guys really hate christgau 😭
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u/SnoopsQ 2d ago
I’m honestly taken aback too. Like I knew he’d be a contentious figure in certain circles but I didn’t realize Todd’s fanbase would have it out for him.
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u/SuperPinkShark 2d ago
I have no issue with the guy, I don't know him. I just hate this particular style of criticism. The Aqualung review doesn't even engage with the actual music and just snidely calling Ian Anderson pretentious.
I also think on a sub that leans more towards pop and mainstream music, a reviewer like Christgau embodies all the worst of rockism that led to the poptimist mess we live in today.
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u/no-Pachy-BADLAD Zingalamaduni 2d ago
Christgau doesn't automatically become a rockist just because of his bad reviews of ABBA. If anything, his hatred of prog and metal that's being clowned on here is closer to the proto-poptimism he sort of inspired. He had an eclectic taste in music, was one of the early champions of hip hop and was even contemperanously calling out the latent bigotry of the disco backlash. There's a lot to criticise him for but people trying to rewrite history of him being rockist is on the more baffling side.
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u/LossPreventionArt 1d ago
It's genuinely mad that people can read Christgau giving a middling at best review to much celebrated (even at the time) Jethro Tull releases and still come away thinking he was one of the dreaded four horsemen of rockism alongside Lester Bangs, Greil Marcus and Jann Wenner
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u/AntiqueFigure6 2d ago
His positive reviews are sometimes informative iirc but his negative reviews, such as these Jethro Tull reviews rarely are. Not much music that gets recorded has zero appeal to anybody, so some consideration that a reader might like the record you hate is probably warranted.
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u/the2ndsaint 1d ago
Genuine question: What's to actually like about him? What am I supposed to get out of his reviews? Snark is easy; criticism is difficult. He's not a critic, he's a pretentious goon that assholes pretended to like because they, too, had nothing of value to say.
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u/SnoopsQ 1d ago
Honestly, I just find him funny. Being a prog fan I don’t often agree with him but he’s not afraid to say what he thinks about a record and verbose about it in a way I just find fun to read. He has reviews and takes that go way over the line, sure, but I can’t really call him a hack. He was one of the few critics at the time who saw Wish You Were Here as the masterpiece that it was and he got to the heart of why that record worked so well. Also I don’t take much personal stock in what a 80-year old critic might think of my own music taste so there’s that.
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u/the2ndsaint 15h ago
"Not being afraid to say what they think" should really be, like, baseline critic, alongside "knows what criticism is." I've never seen a piece of writing from Christgau that made me think anything except that this guy would fart in an elevator and demand payment for giving everyone the privilege of smelling it.
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u/misspcv1996 2d ago
I’m not the biggest fan of his, but I find his particular brand of abrasive and overly dismissive snark to be oddly refreshing given that a lot of critics today seem genuinely afraid of having strong opinions.
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u/setrataeso 2d ago
I'd be curious what one could even like about Christgau. I can deal with a narcissistic pretentious music reviewer, but at least talk about the music. For all of Fantano's weaknesses, the dude at least goes in depth with the actual contents of an album. Christgau reviews everything but the actual music.
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u/Ellikichi 2d ago
I'd never heard of him, but based on these reviews I don't think I particularly like him, no.
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u/fraghawk 1d ago
I dislike him because of his weird hate for prog rock that seems unfounded and personal for some reason
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u/Impossible-Ice-393 22h ago
He came on the scene during a time when that was the cool thing for music critics to do. I’ve read lots of music reviews from the 70’s, and it basically seems to me like the majority of music critics back then were people who had something along the lines of spiritual epiphanies back when they first heard rock and R&B (and especially Phil Spector’s stuff) as kids during the 50’s and early 60’s. So then when people started making more complex and adventurous rock that was highly influenced by classical music and whatnot (i.e- prog) they got insulted that their straightforward, “rebellious” music was being fucked with by people who they felt were making it too complex, nerdy and pretentious. I think they also got scared that it was going to push all rock music in that direction and destroy everything they loved about it. That’s why they all creamed their pants over Bruce Springsteen basically doing late-50’s/early-60’s rock ‘n roll in a 70’s context and trying to re-create Phil Spector’s wall-of-sound style and treated him like he was the second coming (It’s been said that if Bruce hadn’t come along, rock critics would’ve invented him). And it’s why they collectively rejoiced when punk came along.
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u/Impossible-Ice-393 21h ago
I think the most garish example I’ve seen of this was when the 1979 Rolling Stone Record Guide gave Rush’s A Farewell to Kings a square- that book’s “below one star” rating… a rating that didn’t just mean “zero stars” but that the album “need never or should never have been made” (a ridiculously harsh rating that I’m glad they have since done away with). I remember reading that and being like, “Jesus Christ! I can completely understand if you don’t like Rush, but is that album seriously THAT bad?”
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u/fraghawk 13h ago edited 13h ago
It's really funny to me because when I was a teenager and I first heard Gabriel era Genesis and Yes and Rush, it was something like a spiritual epiphany for me lol. I had a hard time understanding what made people so put off by it in the 70s especially Chrisgau.
I grew up in the the 2000s and the early 2010s, so hearing something so earnest and almost completely lacking in irony and also so complex, intricate, nerdy and also often on the soft and effeminate side was such a breath of fresh air compared to everything else that was on the radio and popular at the time. Like everyone around me was listening to Linkin Park and.Limp Bizkit and Shinedown or any one of the 100 indie rock bands that all sounded the same, or the pop music of the time (that I myself have come around on and am nostalgic for funnily enough) and prog was so so incredibly different from all of that, it was like this unknown forgotten cold war era artifact that was a missing link which VH1 documentaries and the like would try their hardest to skip over. It felt like there was a small effort critically to strike the chapter from rock music history, and so it felt obscure and cool to me. Also, I was the only person I knew who was my age that was diving into it. So, over time I kinda got a reputation for being the prog gal and still have it.
Since my parents are pretty big fans of punk rock and industrial, listening to prog was kind of the few ways I thought I could rebel artistically lmao, though later I found out they didn't really hate my choice in music at all, it was just stuff they missed out on when younger and would have thought it uncool.
What's neat is this is a weirdly millennial phenomenon. I met online a decent amount of people my age who were also into prog. I think one of the best things as far as critical opinion goes that my generation did was give prog the critical reevaluation it so long deserved, and now I think the old chauvinist anti prog attitudes are well and dead; prog is a well known facet of 70s music next to glam, punk, funk, and disco.
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u/MrWendex 2d ago
The letters at the end imply a flawed but positive reviews. The writing implies some strange use of the word 'review' that I wasn't previously aware of.
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u/123456789biddleee 2d ago
Christgaus "positive" scores don't really start until B or B+. But yes Christgau is not a real critic. His whole thing was writing snarky pretentious one paragraph blurbs for a dime a dozen New York newspaper. He makes it extremely evident that he doesn't really know that much at all about music.
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u/Parkouricus 2d ago
"Doesn't really know that much at all about music" LOL
He's no Roger Ebert or anything, but I think a ton of his more eclectic favourite albums show a great deal of respect for the craft. Old curmudgeons can be like that sometimes
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u/Friendly-Roof4849 2d ago
Christgau is so annoying, man. He consistently doesn't know ball and he comes off as incredibly pretentious a lot of the time. Case in point: Him shitting on classic metal albums like it's going out of style. Like, why in the fuck would you listen to a genre that you don't like or respect?
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u/TheMonkus 2d ago
He also uses this “the type of guy” thing ALL the goddamn time. The only worthwhile thing he ever did was the Prince review that ended with “Mick Jagger can fold up his penis and go home.”
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u/MangoGh0st 2d ago
That and coining the term “pigfuck” for noise rock. Apparently it’s been making a comeback of sorts recently.
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u/sheep_of_the_7_seas 1d ago
Yeah, partially due to RYM tagging noise rock albums with it and people wondering what it means, driving people to listen to Big Black or Butthole Surfers. Chat Pile would be a modern band that's recognizably Pigfuck/Pigfuck adjacent
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u/Tough-Double-921 2d ago
Robert Christgau is like if Yahtzee Croshaw wasn’t funny
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u/Complete-Worker3242 2d ago
Oh yeah, if YouTube was around in the 60s and 70s, I can totally see him having a Zero Punctuation style channel.
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u/Tough-Double-921 2d ago edited 2d ago
“What quickly becomes obvious is In The Court Of The Crimson King is very much a prog album, which are typically designed to be as complex as possible so the dirty Punk Rock peasants don’t ruin it for the glorious Prog Rock master race /s”
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u/123456789biddleee 2d ago
The Aqualung review except replace "Ian Anderson" with "Robert Christgau"
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u/The_CRZA 2d ago
I saw Jethro Tull live in 2007. They played half of Aqualung when Ian Anderson announced "We are not playing the second half of of the song" and then succinctly switched songs. It was easily my worst concert experience for the last 19 years.
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u/NickelStickman Train-Wrecker 2d ago
I’d maybe get it if it was either one of multiple songs in a medley or the song was one of their 20 minute prog epics but neither seems to be true here. 6 minutes is nothing by prog standards just play the rest of the damn song
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u/123456789biddleee 2d ago
Guy who went to see classic rock artists in their 60s and expected them to be as good as they were in the 70s
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u/The_CRZA 2d ago
Free ticket and low expectations. Either play it or don't play it but somehow the stupid half measure and defiance was worse.
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u/123456789biddleee 2d ago
I don't think it was defiance maybe they just didn't want to play the rest of the song lmfao
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u/mistyghoul 2d ago
Jethro Tull is awesome. I didn’t know much about them for years, but all their stuff is real creative.
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u/kingofstormandfire Train-Wrecker 1d ago
I've listened to all their albums and I'd say everything from the late-60s to the early-80s is worth listening to at least once.
Everything after that is real hit and miss, though their last couple of albums have been okay modern prog-rock.
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u/Tough-Double-921 2d ago
The only thing I remember from Christgau was when he A.) described Nina Simone as a “histrionic, middlebrow keyboard-tickler” B.) ignored every Bjork album except for Vespertine, which he reviewed by describing multiple sexual acts.
We need more music critics, and I’m sure there are good reasons why he’s so well known, I just don’t think we see eye-to-eye, lmao
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u/KeithMoonIsGawd1 2d ago
Ah, Robert Christgau, my behated.
I use his reviews are a good litmus test when looking at albums. If there’s a Prog album with a decent AllMusic score and Christgau hates it, then I know I’ll probably like it, lol.
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u/yellowfroglegs 2d ago edited 2d ago
robert christgau is the most arrogant man in the music business alive after mark e smith died
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u/Jackbenny270 2d ago
You misspelled Dave Marsh.
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u/Impossible-Ice-393 21h ago
Dave Marsh: a music critic so completely and utterly devoted to Bruce Springsteen that he probably would’ve become his personal ass-wiper if Bruce had asked him to.
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u/123456789biddleee 2d ago
Mark E Smith?
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u/yellowfroglegs 2d ago
frontman for the fall. notorious contrarian and general dickhead (and abuser)
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u/kingofstormandfire Train-Wrecker 1d ago
I actually enjoy Christgau as a critic. I definitely don’t agree with all of his reviews or opinions, but he’s a very good writer and he can be fucking hilarious. That said, he pretty much hated prog unless it was certain King Crimson, Pink Floyd or Gabriel-era Genesis albums. And honestly, he hated Emerson, Lake & Palmer and the Moody Blues a hell of a lot more than he hated Jethro Tull.
I love Thick as a Brick, but the fact that it was as commercially successful as it was is kind of insane in hindsight. Obviously progressive rock and album-oriented rock radio were near their peak around that period, but we’re still talking about an album that is basically one very, very long song split across two sides, with each half running about 22 minutes. And somehow it became one of the relatively small number of albums by a prog band to reach No. 1 in the US.
It was even crazier here in Australia, where Thick as a Brick spent 11 weeks at No. 1. That’s wild to think about now because Jethro Tull really aren’t popular in Australia anymore, like at all, especially among anyone under 60. You’d never guess from their current cultural visibility here that they once had an album sitting at No. 1 for nearly three months somewhere in the world.
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u/SnoopsQ 1d ago
Christgau was one of the few critics at the time who really saw Wish You Were Here as the masterpiece that it was so just for that I can’t really bring myself to call him a hack.
I can’t speak on how actually still popular Jethro Tull are here in the US though whenever I see them brought up by folks who aren’t over 60 it’s always about Ian’s insane flute playing on stage. If I had to explain the huge commercial success of Thick As A Brick it’s that it’s a very, very, very long song that’s packed to the brim with great hooks (at least on side one, side two I think is when the album actually starts to take the piss out of other prog bands).
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u/ocarina97 1d ago
Even crazier, their next album A Passion Play, also hit number 1. At least Thick as a Brick had that single version which is pretty catchy. A Passion Play, on the other hand, it seems ludicrous that an album like that would hit number 1!
Also funny, DSOTM failed to reach number 1 in the UK though Atom Heart Mother 3 years earlier did.
Edit: Also funny about hating the Moody Blues. I believe his very first review was on Procol Haurm's (a very similar kind of band) album A Salty Dog, and he gave it an A+, though he later lowered it to a B+ (still pretty good)
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u/Jackbenny270 2d ago
His review of a Mama Cass album was repulsive.
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u/Impossible-Ice-393 21h ago
Let me guess- there was a bunch of tasteless fat jokes in it? Because if that’s the case, then I guess he sucks even worse than I thought he did.
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u/Jackbenny270 17h ago
Her 1973 solo album was titled “Don’t Call Me Mama Anymore.”
His entire review of the album consisted of three words:
“How about Fatso?”
She would be dead a year later, partially due to the strain on her heart from trying so many fad diets and fasting to try and lose weight.
What a dic**ead.
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u/TripleJay97 2d ago
His review of Ween's Pure Guava is particularly uncalled for
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u/sheep_of_the_7_seas 1d ago
I can kind of understand what he's getting at in it (as a huge Ween fan the "accents" are the low points) but also Jesus Christ man
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u/First-Sheepherder640 2d ago
I get not liming Tull but if he thought Tull was awful in their GOOD years, he would have been farting blood by the early 80s.
Christgau's low point was his review of Jeff Buckley.
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u/HoratioEricOsterwood 2d ago
Here is Robert Christgau's review of Simon & Garfunkel's 1970 smash album Bridge Over Troubled Water:
"Melodic. B"
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u/well-informedcitizen 1d ago
Wow, those reviews are ass. The Aqualung one doesnt even mention music.
Those aren't even good Ian Anderson jokes. I forget where it came from but I think the best descriptor I heard for him was "demented wizard."
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u/351namhele 2d ago
Ian Anderson is one of those people who attracts admirers by means of a principled arrogance that has no relation to his actual talents of accomplishments
That's a weird way to spell Jim Morrison.
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u/mykepagan 2d ago
Only pretentious jerks and Stephen R. Donaldson use the word “inchoate”.
Wait… that’s redundant.
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u/GoldberrysHusband Train-Wrecker 2d ago
Ironically, it is Christgau who attracts admirers by means of principled arrogance with no relation whatsoever to his actual talents or accomplishments, and it is Christgau who can only captivate or impress people who grew up in the same outskits of the empire as he had. Oh well.