Consumer Guidance

Sorting new music in the dog days of summer

When Robert Christgau started his Substack newsletter (And It Don't Stop), his original plan was to publish monthly Consumer Guides on the second Wednesday. That schedule has faltered somewhat this year, but when I woke up on August 12, I rather expected to find a new one in my inbox (or, as it was broken by then, Yahoo). When it didn't appear, I figured I should rush out my own Music Week (8:2), if nothing else to clear the air.

I had three less than completely obvious A− records I thought he was likely to weigh in on sooner or later: Rolling Stones, Foreign Tongues; Madonna, Confessions II; and Pussy Riot, Cyka. The first two are major artists from bygone eras. While I like the new albums a lot, they don't break new ground, and they're unlikely to ever get more than a tiny fraction of the play that their signature albums got — especially now that I hardly ever find time for old albums that I love. It no doubt helped their grades that they reminded me of those older albums. On the other hand, a more discerning critic — which Christgau certainly is — could focus more on their shortcomings, dismissing them with lesser grades, or possibly ignoring them altogether.[1] I rarely hear from readers, but one did write in to complain about the Madonna grade: "Her voice is weak and there are no bangers. In my book it's less than a B+." Not my problem, but could be yours.

I regard all of my grades as provisional: best estimates based on limited exposure, often just a single play. A more precise grading system would qualify the grade with the number of plays, but every play is different, where distractions and mood are obvious factors. As they're not equivalent, the value of tracking them pales in comparison to the overhead. Even so, as I noted, my Pussy Riot grade was exceptionally uncertain. That uncertainty is part of the reason I'm curious what Christgau thinks: he has championed the group in the past, rating their early EP higher than I did; he has an anti-Putin, pro-Ukraine thing I don't quite share; on the other hand, I find his reactions to political music tend to diverge from my own in ways that are hard to characterize; and there's a prog aspect to the music that may rub him the wrong way.

I was less concerned about the fourth non-jazz album I reviewed: Iceage's For the Love of Grace & the Hereafter. He's never reviewed anything by them. I only played this one after it got high AOTY ratings. If he did the same, and liked it about as much as I did, I doubt he would write it up: I have 204 albums graded B+(**) so far this year. He has 9. He's a harder grader than I am — he has 53 A-list grades so far this year, where I have 118 (93 new music, 25 old music, and I'm not counting 2025 or earlier releases I only got to this year) — but below A− my grades look like a bell curve,[2] while his tail off radically. Of course, if he put the time and effort into Iceage (which I played, but probably not twice) he might have come to like the record more than I did. That happens, and fairly often. When it does, I may go back and try it again, and may adjust my grade, but not very often.

There are other non-jazz albums in my full Music Week that I could have included, but didn't mostly because I didn't think the reviews were strong enough: Johnny Blue Skies, Kiss Facility, Ravyn Lenae, Arlo Parks, Strokes, Syd, Wiki, Yard Act. Christgau hasn't reviewed any of those yet, but he has noted most in the past, with fairly recent A− albums from Wiki and Yard Act — the latter resulted in my upgrade for Where's My Utopia?, but nothing for Parks, whose last two albums were A− in my book.

While I try not to care how my grades line up with his, it's hard to say they have no effect. When I stick my neck out with a high grade, especially on an an album that's not really in my wheelhouse, it's gratifying to find out that he likes it too. And when I'm playing something he's already recommended, I'm inclined to shade my uncertainty in his direction — especially if my doubts involve lyrics, which I have never had a good ear for. But also I've known him for a long time, and I appreciate the breadth of his interests and the depth of his commitment, so it's almost inevitable that I should gauge my work by referring to his. That said, I've always sought my own way, which should be clear by now. That we overlap a lot is largely a function of us both trying to encompass as much music as we can stand. But also we have some background affinities, and shared history.

I should note that my rock & jazz writing career is almost totally due to his patronage and friendship. (Don Malcolm and Michael Tatum also had critical moments, as did Francis Davis; I could mention a couple more who took some interest, but not many, and not much.) I got into this in 1974 by writing what I thought of as a pan of his first book, arguing that anyone could be a rock critic, and volunteering to prove my point by writing several sets of CG-style reviews. Malcolm talked me into sending some of this writing to Christgau, who responded by asking me to review a Bachman-Turner Overdrive album. I was thinking of how much my brother liked their albums, and tried to reflect that in the review. Christgau seemed to have been attracted to the class politics — probably the same thing that drew him to Dave Marsh (more on him later). I wrote a few pieces for him in the late 1970s, and got to know him better when I moved to New York in 1977. Much later, in 2003, he asked me to write some more, including a Jazz Consumer Guide column from 2005-10 (which he generously continued to edit even after the Voice fired him).

Much of what I've written since then has been in the Consumer Guide format, although it could be characterized as a mere diary that has been formatted to look like something more substantial. I had done some open source software development in the 1990s, but after 2000 I thought producing content might be more useful. I had taken the early openness of the internet seriously, so I thought that posting my scattered ramblings might be some kind of public service, a way to do some good in the world. Not clear whether I was right, but I've stuck at it. Probably the biggest difference between us is that he's always written/edited for a living, even though he's maintained considerable leeway in deciding what he wanted to write about, while I have never made any sort of living writing. I can comfort myself with that famous Marx quote about what life without alienation might be like, and the thought that few other people have managed to so totally free themselves from the exigencies of capital.

Christgau finally published his August Consumer Guide on Saturday. My usual first thought was to compare what he reviewed with what I had already reviewed. Then I looked at what he found that I wasn't aware of, and my sense of inadequacy kicked in. The former list (his grades in bold; my grades in brackets):

1. Emperor X: Unified Field (Bar/None) A [**]
2. Golems of the Red Planet: Surf Masada: The Compositions of John Zorn (Heyday) A− [***]
3. Paul McCartney: The Boys of Dungeon Lane (Capitol) *** [**]
4. Gurf Morlix: Cobwebs & Stardust (Rootball) *** [**]
5. Hemlocke Springs: The Apple Tree Under the Sea (AWAL) B+ [***]

I liked Emperor X's 2011 album Western Teleport and one more, but I didn't get much out of this one, or his 2022 The Lakes of Zones B and C (another Christgau full A). Probably worth a revisit, as it seems like everyone I know likes the new one. I've already bumped my McCartney review up a bit. I found myself turning against him even before the Beatles were done, and I've heard less than half of his solo albums, liking very few of them. But I liked his Stephen Colbert finale appearance, and the new album seemed well-regarded, so I gave it a chance just before Christgau's review appeared. (I then moved on to Ringo Starr's Long Long Road, and having played even fewer of his records, I went back to his first three.) My other grades are close enough to stick with.

That leaves eight albums I haven't heard yet:

1. R.A.P. Ferreira and Kenny Segal: The Night Green Side of It (Backwoodz Studioz)
2. Lalu: Lalu (self-released)
3. Low Cut Connie: Livin in the USA (Contender)
4. Mary Lee's Corvette: Blood on the Tracks (Bar/None '02)
5. Glenn Morrow's Cry for Help: Our Final Album Vol. 1 (Bar/None)
6. Margo Price: Days of Unrest (Loma Vista)
7. Tipps and Obermiller: Little Kid Heart (self-released)
8. Neil Young & the Chrome Hearts: As Time Explodes (Reprise)

Those divide into three groups: albums I was vaguely aware of but hadn't prioritized (Price, Low Cut Connie, and Mary Lee's Corvette — I was only aware of the latter due diligence after July's Mary Lee Kortes review, but didn't consider playing it given how much I've always hated Dylan's 1975 album); albums I was unaware of by artists I knew (Ferreira/Segal, Young); and artists I had never heard of (Lalu, Morrow, Tipps and Obermiller). I will get around to these albums in future Music Weeks. I'm always catching up. Christgau may be primus inter pares of the dozen or so sources I consult regularly, but he only budgets himself 13 albums per month. When you average 30 albums a week, you need others to triage the torrent of at least ten times that many albums that come out each week.

The thing is, most of those sources are so busy catching up with each other that they don't generate a lot of discoveries. What's really remarkable about Christgau's Consumer Guide is how often he still finds things that nobody else has written about. You can see that in this particular CG. And, I suspect, many more. Wondering whether I could gin up some statistics on this, I dug through my 2025 metacritic file[3] and found that he had graded 63 albums (2025 releases of new music) at A− or higher. Of those, roughly a third (17) were widely reviewed (10 or more reviews in AOTY, like CMAT, Billy Woods, and Lily Allen); another third (23) were lightly reviewed (1-9 AOTY reviews, with Tyler Childers, Patterson Hood, and Craig Finn near the top); and the other third (22) had no reviews in tracked publications. Let's list the artists: Buck 65, Kasambwe Brothers, Mahotella Queens, Public Enemy, Jubal Lee Young, Margaret Glaspy, Todd Snider, Tommy Womack, Bill Scorzari, Jeff Evans Porkestra, Nandipha808, Grant Peeples, Helene Cronin, Gurf Morlix, Saint Pierre, Rory Block, From the Dirt, Michael Hampton, Peter Stampfel, Hamell on Trial, Nakibembe Embaire, K.A.A.N.

Some of those names seem like they should be well known by now, but most of them I first heard about from him. Public Enemy is the obvious exception among the 22. The only other ones I'm sure of are Block and Hampton, although I'm also pretty sure I wasn't aware of any of those 22 albums before reading Christgau's Consumer Guide. On the other hand, I was probably aware of nearly all of the first group of 17 albums, and had reviewed most of them before seeing them in a Consumer Guide. What I am doing is more in the spirit of the original Consumer Guide, but the task of doing it now is not just more difficult; it's impossible. But I usually manage to listen to everything in the top 100 in my metacritic surveys, close to half of the second 100, and maybe a quarter of the third and fourth.[4]

Back in the early 1970s, I noticed that most of the people I visited had pretty much the same records, which suggested a common vocabulary. As someone with "no social skills whatsoever," I found I could cut the ice with a bit of knowledge, which was easy enough to gain. Christgau invented his Consumer Guide in 1969, so he could weigh in on the records others were more officially reviewing. He was the first to attempt to cover it all. When he was wrapping up his 1970s book, he expressed to ambition to include every B+ or better rock album in the decade, as if that was real enough to be possible. I grew up with a similar ambition to master everything, so I found his scope really useful. Indeed, I still like his early 1970s quickies more than the arguably better crafted review style that he developed later.

But in the 1980s he started feeling getting more selective and idiosyncratic, and less concerned with the rapidly-decaying popular consensus. And in the 1990s he gave up on "listening to bad records so you don't have to"[5] and turned the column into kind of treasure hunt — sure, he still noted "duds," "neither," and "choice cuts" from uneven albums, but eventually those too eventually sunk into a category he found in the 1980s: "distinctions not cost-effective."

I've followed a similar trajectory, partly because I followed Christgau during my non-critic years (1980-2005), but more because the universe expanded at such a rate it became incomprehensible, leaving us isolated bits within our grasp, and also because I never had any professional responsibilities to satisfy publishers or markets, so I never had to stick with something until I made sense of it. Or maybe it's just that I never worked as hard at being a rock critic, or a writer. And time is running out for both.

Dave Marsh died last week. I was surprised to find that he was only about 7 months older than me. We both came out of midwestern working class backgrounds, had left politics, and gravitated toward hard rock while remaining very fond of Motown. He seemed older because he got a quick start on life, founding Creem at 19, moving quickly through every publication that counted in the 1970s, then finally latching on to Bruce Springsteen's rise to fame and wealth. He was one of the five featured in Robert Christgau's 1976 essay, Yes, There Is a Rock-Critic Establishment, which was mostly about how everyone was so smitten with Springsteen. I read quite a bit of him during the 1970s, and disagreed with much of it, but I rarely ran across him after that — I noticed him in Counterpunch, but don't recall reading much. Looking around my shelves, the only book I found was The Heart of Rock & Soul: The 1001 Greatest Singles Ever Made, which came out in 1989, so is mostly in safe territory (Springsteen at 24 and Van Halen at 28 are the only post-1970 top-40 songs, followed by good picks from Prince and Madonna).

I reacted very poorly to Springsteen, and to Marsh. Looking back over the latter piece, it's hard to discern the context. I circulated the piece around a bit, and had one offer to publish it, but I let it slide, suggesting I wasn't very happy with it. I don't know whether Marsh saw it, or anything else I wrote. I always wondered whether his characterization of Queen as the "real fascist band" was a reaction to my review of ELP (title, which the Voice changed, "Up From Fascism"). If so, he mistook my point. Either way he was wrong about Queen (although I wasn't much better until Mike Myers uncovered the joke in "Bohemian Rhapsody").

I was, ultimately, wrong about Springsteen. Malcolm and I were very enthused by the English "pub rock" of the early 1970s, which I now see as an early postmodern return to the fundamentals of 1950s rock and roll. That's pretty much what Springsteen was trying to do, but on a much grander scale, with an extra helping of bullshit. When he took a more modest tack, on The River (1980), I started to like him, and had no problem with the more pop-savvy albums that followed. I doubt that would have made much difference to Marsh, who often struck me as a guy who would rather cast people out of church than welcome them in.

I am sorry to hear of his death, and especially that he seems to have suffered severely in his last years. I found my post-Marxist intellectual community in the mid-1970s among rock critics, and whatever differences we had, he was definitely one of us.

Footnotes:

1. Most of what Christgau listens to never gets a mention, much less a grade, so it's never totally clear whether he's heard a record and chosen not to write about it, missed it completely, or just sampled a cut or two and decided not to pursue it. As the stats page shows, he hasn't flagged a "Dud" since 2010, nor has he registered a "Neither" grade since 2001. (I snagged those from a scratch file in 2001. He's never offered to update that list, and may not even track that grade.) On the other hand, I try to note every complete album I've listened to, so you can get a pretty good sense of the range of my listening, what I'm missing, and what the albums I hear are being compared to. I wish more critics did that, but it's a lot of extra paperwork, and isn't easy to access or make sense out of. I even have a "limited sampling" category for parts of albums (and conceivably for singles), but I rarely bother with it. With streaming, I have plenty of whole albums to review.

2. Of course, my grades don't form a proper bell curve, mostly because my sampling isn't random — I actively look for albums I might like, and avoid ones I'm pretty sure I won't like — but also because the universe of recorded music isn't anything like a normal distribution: this is especially true in jazz, but pretty much everywhere you look, you find musicians with real skills and/or creative ideas. The vast majority of people who don't almost never go to the trouble of recording. Of course, it's also possible that I've mellowed, or just grown more tolerant of styles and personalities I once judged more harshly. Switching from letter grades to my numeric scale (which I use in my compilations), my current 2026 grade distribution is: 10: 3; 9: 90; 8: 174; 7: 204; 6: 134; 5: 32; 4: 7; 3: 1. So the median is 7, or B+(**), but the skew is evident in that 267 albums have higher grades, while only 174 have lower grades. I'll also note, and these are just swags, that about two-thirds of these records are jazz, and that nearly half of the jazz records I listen to are picked for me by publicists. But about half of my A− albums are non-jazz, where I get virtually no promos, so I'm picking those exclusively by reputation and hunches.

3. I collected this file during 2025, and factored in many EOY lists (see the Legend link inside the file), but in early 2026 I stopped, and I haven't gone back to recheck anything, so chances are I've missed AOTY reviews. I've done similar files in previous years, often deeper than my 2025 effort. I haven't been compiling a similar file this year, which leaves me somewhat less aware of what's come out recently. The 63 albums differ significantly from his 2025 Dean's List, which includes many albums released earlier but only reviewed in 2025, and excludes albums released in 2025 but only reviewed later. My file also excludes new albums of old music, compiled separately. That would have added 6 more albums, none with AOTY reviews, by: Hüsker Dü, Luke Bell, Edna Martinez, Joseph Kamaru, Grace Potter, and Eli "Paperboy" Reed.

   Needless to say, my metacritic files are biased toward my own interests: I give more weight to critics I like (including myself), and I find more of their lists. Still, they offer a view of common reality, and it's easy enough to look at them and get a sense of what other people are thinking.

4. Those were guesses: actual 2025 figures for unheard albums in each of the first seven hundreds: 2 (Necks, Agriculture), 9, 25, 30, 38, 47, 46. By that point, the skew is actually pushing things I've listened to up the list, so you don't really get to majority unheard blocks until much lower. My total of heard and rated 2025 new music releases is 1590.

5. Not his line, but something memorable I picked up elsewhere. I'm not sure it ever made much sense, given that "bad" often says more about the listener than about the music. I'm not saying it's all subjective. I'm certainly not saying one should never listen to "bad" music — how else can you figure out what "bad" is? — and I'm not saying one shouldn't write negative reviews. They give you a better a critic's orientation than puff reviews. But maybe I just find critics as interesting than albums. In any case, the reason for following a critic's advice isn't whether the critic thinks the album is good or bad, but whether your interest is piqued.