Flying Lotus/Eskmo

Dean (Xgau), If Sgt. Pepper is A+, then I guess you'd agree that the top 5 albums of 1967 must be: 1. Beach Boys - Wild Honey , 2. Hendrix - Are You Exp? , 3. Beatles - Sgt. Pepper , 4. Who - Sell Out , 5. Moby Grape ?  (with apologies to Between the Buttons, John Wesley Harding, and the debuts by the Velvets and the Grateful Dead).?

I think many of us were drawn to Christgau first by the recommendation of good records - or the fact that he was championing records we loved - or perhaps trashing the records we hated?   While the writing will hold up over time - I've got to be selfish here - I first read The Dean to find great music for me.

How many of us try not to peek at the grade at the bottom of the review?

Sometimes we can't help it - but in the end when we often agree on the shared grade, Christgau's review means much, much more.   The economy and choice of words ("dense" - I believe was a comment in "Rock and Roll Animal") can make for some challenging reading on occasion, but concentration is often rewarded.

The first gift is the recommendation, then the review.  That's pretty special - and not as common a connection as you might expect from most criticism.

In college (1989), I loaned all of my Beatles CDs to a friend for a practicum project.  After graduation, he immediately moved out of town - we lost touch - and I didn't get the CDs back until 1996.  So to celebrate their improbable return - I played them all in order over a snowy January weekend - LOUD!  I graded them too.   It was a nice change of pace after working on a year end list and a year end show for my college radio station.  (Favorite '95 album, by the way:  "To Bring You My Love").

While I can't find the notebook - I know that A Hard Day's Night, Revolver and Sgt. Pepper were A PLUS (possibly Abbey Road).  There were only three A MINUS albums:  Please Please Me, Beatles For Sale and Let It Be - and all of the others were "A" by me.

These albums have been burned into my skull as the soundtrack to my teen years - so I doubt I've played any more than one or two straight through since (though I did bite on that mono box - with the Pepper mix quite yummy), but I do get knocked out by most of the random Beatles tracks when they pop up on my Ipod - when I cut the lawn or shovel the snow.

No band ever did so much in so little time - but we all know that.  

Would we really be up to 95 comments if the sole topic of discussion was "DJ prog?"  I think not.  Tidy boxes are for the neurotic.  Let's keep it as free flowing as possible!

Didn't mean to insult anyone's intellegence re my last comment.  "Sex Pistols" and "great junk" were great ways for Xgau to describe that debut.  But individual reactions to music, based on subjectivity, can be interesting, useful, and even enlightening, not just an objective "here's where it fits in the musical pantheon."  What bothers me about RS writers -- Fricke, especially -- is that he drops a whole bunch of trivia, but not a lot of explication or analysis.  Great criticism does traffic in explication and analysis -- Martin Amis explains the P-Furs just as much as the Sex Pistols.