SMiLE [Nonesuch, 2004]
There are many things I don't miss about the '60s, including long hair, LSD, revolutionary rhetoric, and folkies playing drums. But the affluent optimism that preceded and then secretly pervaded the decade's apocalyptic alienation is a lost treasure of a time when capitalism had so much slack in it that there was no pressing need to stop your mind from wandering. Brian Wilson grokked surfing because it embodied that optimism, and though I considered the legend of Smile hot air back then, this re-creation proves he had plenty more to make of it. The five titles played for minimalist whimsy on Smiley Smile mean even more orchestrated, and the newly released fragments are as strong as the whole songs they tie together. Smile's post-adolescent utopia isn't disfigured by Brian's thickened, soured 62-year-old voice. It's ennobled--the material limitations of its sunny artifice and pretentious tomfoolery acknowledged and joyfully engaged. This can only be tonic for Americans long since browbeaten into lowering their expectations by the rich men who are stealing their money. A+

>>126710844 (OP)
eat shit retard

sneed

>>126710844 (OP)
kek

>>126710844 (OP)
Isn’t this guy a literal cuck? Like his wife fucks other guys

>long hair, LSD, revolutionary rhetoric, and folkies playing drums

Oh yeah those things are AWFUL!!

>>126710844 (OP)
>There are many things I don't miss about the '60s, including long hair, LSD, revolutionary rhetoric, and folkies playing drums.

what a dumb loser. all those things are great!

>>126711256
>>126711289
What's even more bizaree is Christgau was a left-wing activist hippie with long hair well into the 70s so he's blatantly lying

>Hating on christgau
You never stop fantano posting cringe retarded fantano grippers. Joke's on you.

>>126711337
what if i hate both of them?

>>126711327
People can change over time.

>>126711337
I dont care whatever this granny says. I hate the bot that posts this thing over and over

>>126711337
Fantano is the Christgau of the 21st Century. Both self-important hacks who think they are smarter than they actuall are

Big Mac [McDonald's, 1967]
The would be People's Commissars of high snobiety aren't wrong--this is pure economics, using two standard patties instead of introducing a double sized one, and par for the course for a chain that has long since traded adolescent expansionism for slick iconicism. But they reveal their poseurtude by refusing to acknowledge what formalists rightly get so worked up about: the middle bread, a carbohydrate hint towards honesty from an establishment that has always drawn more from the midnight sandwich than the BBQ. And hey, who ever thought Marxists knew anything about fast food, anyway? B+

>>126711211
it's okay if he fucks other chicks too

>>126711553
He doesn’t. He’s a big believer in male monogamy

>>126711389
except at least Cuckgau got to experience cutting edge music firsthand. all Fantano has to review is Kendrick Lamar.

>>126711256
You wouldn't be saying that if you ended up getting brain damage from LSD abuse like Brian did.

>>126711602
Nop

>>126711946
>Nop
Is the x86 instruction when you just want to waste a clock cycle or two.

>>>/g/

>>126711355
>t fantano white knight

>>126711256
>>126711289
Hey look the Minnesota gunman is on /mu/. Buddy, give yourself up to the cops while you still can. Seriously.

>>126710844 (OP)
Amazingly that's not even the most obnoxiously pretentious review of BWPS.
>Sacred or silly? Sublime or ridiculous? Disney or Zappa? Dali or Rockwell? Mozart or Mancini? If Smile had appeared when it was meant to, it would have been an LA orchestral pop masterpiece that, like the tacky English pop masterpiece Sergeant Pepper, would have been a breathtaking example of ultimately banal thinkers attempting self-consciously to make art, a square version of freaking out, musically sophisticated, aesthetically conservative. Now, it sounds like a goofy souvenir of a white, nostalgic, middle-American leisure music that burnt up in the LA sun halfway through the Vietnam war. It is a kitsch classic, both for what it is and what it yearns for. It's Wilson brainwashed by perverse musical archivist Van Dyke Parks [the album's lyricist]. It's a camp combination of the bygone, the neo, the exotic, the folksy, the showtune, the corny. It's pure artificial Hollywood in the way it patches together the inauthentic, the whitewashed, the brazenly commercial, the sentimental, the censored. It feels like drowning in the Pacific and having a sweetened history of mid-20th-century American life flash before your eyes. I needed a quick shower of Ramones, Dre and Hendrix afterwards, just to rinse away the clingy bits of fake myth.

>>126711327
he did always hate folkies though lol

Is hating Christgau just a meme here? He’s not very good anymore but he was actually insightful from 1968-2010 or so. Scaruffi is what this board accuses Christgau of being tbqhwyf

>>126714486
>He’s not very good anymore but he was actually insightful from 1968-2010 or so

Bridge Over Troubled Water [Columbia, 1970]
Melodic. B

One Man Dog [Warner Bros., 1973]
James Taylor with panache. C+

Rid of Me [Indigo, 1993]
Never mind sexual--if snatches like "Make me gag," "Lick my injuries," and "Rub 'til it bleeds" aren't genital per se, I'm a dirty old man. And if the cold raw meat of her guitar isn't yowling for phallic equality, I'm Robert Bly, which is probably the same thing. She wants that cock--a specific one, it would seem, attached to a full-fledged, nonobjectified male human being, or maybe an array or succession of cocks, it's hard to tell. But when she gets pissed off, which given the habits of male human beings happens all the time, she thinks it would be simpler just to posit or grow or strap on or cut off a cock of her own. After which it's bend-over-Casanova and every man for him or herself. A

>>126714486
>He’s not very good anymore but he was actually insightful from 1968-2010 or so
Draw that back to 1990 or so because in the 90s he got lazy and began using bomb and scissors symbols instead of writing actual reviews. Also by that time he was getting increasingly bored with conventional Anglosphere pop and was spending needless amounts of ink on world music/African shit.

>>126714656
do you blame him for not wanting to review the latest garbage AC ballad Lou Gramm solo album?

Actually yeah I'm surprised when I look at many of his CG columns from 87 to 94 or so and find that a third of them are reviews of like Nigerian or South African pop musicians. Was he that bored of American/British music by that point?

>>126710844 (OP)
>Smile's post-adolescent utopia isn't disfigured by Brian's thickened, soured 62-year-old voice. It's ennobled--the material limitations of its sunny artifice and pretentious tomfoolery acknowledged and joyfully engaged.
Ok
>This can only be tonic for Americans long since browbeaten into lowering their expectations by the rich men who are stealing their money
Lol

>>126712107
>I needed a quick shower of Ramones, Dre and Hendrix afterwards, just to rinse away the clingy bits of fake myth.
Kek

>>126714486
>he was actually insightful
Snide remarks aren't insightful, the worst part is that he never focused on the music itself

Chicago's Live at Carnegie Hall where he reviews the album cover and admits he didn't even actually listen to it.

>>126715263
https://www.robertchristgau.com/xg/rock/steely-75.php

>>126710844 (OP)
what a weird review, it doesn't feel it was written by him
i guess his style changed a lot from the 60s/70s to the 2000s

In a Poem Unlimited [4AD, 2018]

If she's so smart, why isn't there one about Trump the racist dickwad to balance off the one about Obama the warmongering "coward"? (working theory: because that would be corny) ("Rage of Plastics," "Pearly Gates") *

>>126717173
>Obama the warmongering "coward"?
What did he mean by this? Is he still a fan of Obama?