Christgau's Consumer Guide: Albums of the '90s
Christgau's Consumer Guide: Albums of the '90s is a music reference book by American music journalist and essayist Robert Christgau. It was published in October 2000 by St. Martin's Press's Griffin imprint and collects approximately 3,800 capsule album reviews, originally written by Christgau during the 1990s for his "Consumer Guide" column in The Village Voice. Text from his other writings for the Voice, Rolling Stone, Spin, and Playboy from this period is also featured. The book is the third in a series of influential "Consumer Guide" collections, following Christgau's Record Guide: Rock Albums of the Seventies and Christgau's Record Guide: The '80s.
Covering a variety of genres within and beyond the conventional pop/rock axis of most music press, the reviews are composed in a concentrated, fragmented prose style characterized by layered clauses, caustic wit, one-liner jokes, political digressions, and allusions ranging from common knowledge to the esoteric. Adhering to Christgau's mainstream tastes and some personal eccentricities, the guide favors music on standards of catchiness, rhythmic vitality, and practical significance, while generally penalizing qualities like sexist content and hour-plus album lengths. It also introduces a new grading system Christgau developed in response to the proliferation in music production over the 1990s, an event he cites as a reason why this project was the most difficult of the three "Consumer Guide" collections.
Critical response to the guide was divided, with praise given to the quality of writing and breadth of coverage but disapproval of the novel rating schema and aspects of Christgau's judgements. The collection has since been referenced by both academic and journalistic works, with commentary noting its anticipation of increased fragmentation in popular music. Along with Christgau's other writings, its contents are freely available on his website – robertchristgau.com – created with fellow critic and web designer Tom Hull, who also adopted the book's grading system for his own review website.
Background
Christgau's Consumer Guide: Albums of the 90s is the third in a series of works collecting and editing Robert Christgau's album reviews, most of which were written for and published in his monthly "Consumer Guide" column in The Village Voice. The first two books in the series, Christgau's Record Guide: Rock Albums of the Seventies and Christgau's Record Guide: The '80s, had influenced young music critics after their publication. He has said that the 1990s guide, collecting reviews written between 1990 and 2000, was "in many ways" the hardest to develop because of the decade's proliferation in music production and the growth of the record industry's market – he estimated approximately 35,000 albums were released each year worldwide.As the music industry and record production expanded through the end of the 1980s, Christgau found himself overwhelmed by records to listen to and review for his "Consumer Guide" column. In September 1990, he abandoned his original letter-grading scheme on a scale of A-plus to E-minus, as B-plus records had become the most commonly reviewed works while albums rarely received grades lower than C-minus in the column. Instead, he decided to focus on writing reviews for albums he deemed worthy of A-minus to A-plus grades, with A-minus becoming the most common due in part to his sense of grade inflation, while works that would have ranged from B-minus to C-plus were largely ignored. This change was made because, as Christgau later said, "most of my readers – not critics and bizzers, but real-life consumers – used my primary critical outlet for its putative purpose. They wanted to know what to buy."
In this new format, records that Christgau deemed B-pluses were only reviewed occasionally and most were filed under an "Honorable Mention" section, featuring one short phrasal statement for each album alongside its recommended tracks. Records he considered poor were relegated to a list of ungraded "Duds" or featured in a special Thanksgiving Day column dedicated to negative reviews, with the highest possible grade a B-minus. Under the new format, Christgau was also able to dedicate longer prose to graded reviews in the "Consumer Guide".
Christgau refined his new format further as the 1990s progressed, anticipating the decade's rapid increase in music recording and the diversification of the CD into archival releases and longer album lengths – from the traditional 40-minute average to upwards of 60 minutes. In 1992, he started a "Neither" category denoting albums unworthy of an "honorable mention" but better than "duds". The following year, an argument with fellow critic Eric Weisbard persuaded Christgau to review in each column a "Dud of the Month", which, in comparison to "Turkey Shoot", highlighted "a fair number of dull, disappointing, or overhyped B's".
Content and scope
Christgau's Consumer Guide: Albums of the '90s collects approximately 3,800 album reviews. In preparing the original reviews for publication in book form, Christgau revisited many albums and made some grade changes, later citing the tendency of cultural items to "fade". For certain album entries, he also incorporated text from his other 1990s writings for the Voice, Rolling Stone, Spin, and Playboy.The book's body of reviews covers a range of musical styles within and beyond the traditional rock/pop focus of the music press, including alternative rock, grunge, hip hop, techno, electronic, mainstream and alternative country, jazz, reggae, Afropop, worldbeat, Latin, dance, and boy band music. Christgau, whose past critical work had a strong focus on rock music, said by the time of this book his enthusiasm for the genre had become less exclusive yet still just as capable of exciting him as before.
Of the guide's aim, Christgau writes in the introduction that he intends to cover albums deemed worthwhile rather than a comprehensive discography. Having many years ago lost interest in trying to listen to every record made, he adds that the amount of recorded music produced each year is greater than the time it would take to play in succession, making it impossible to fulfill the ambition of his original 1970s "Consumer Guide" collection. In spite of this, Christgau says "the value of a shared culture" helps realize the concept for this book: "It's a real opening experience, being forced to hear genres that warrant public attention, even if we're not attracted to them."
According to journalist Scott Manzler, in the guide Christgau functions not as a completist but as a "generalist" who "tends to favor breadth over depth" of musical discovery and strives to "sample and process as much 'good music' as possible" from a decade which saw an "exponential surge in product... in the wake of digital revolution and cultural fragmentation". In the introduction, Christgau states, "the book's subject should be your albums rather than my opinions", which journalist Joshua Klein calls a "snarky" claim to "populist objectivity".
The guide also has extensive entries on many of the 1990s' most influential acts, such as Nirvana, Public Enemy, Sonic Youth, Sleater-Kinney, and Pavement. Reissues of older recordings are also highlighted, including the guitar-centric benga music compilation Guitar Paradise of East Africa, the 1991 Memphis blues compilation Wild About My Lovin': Beale Street Blues 1928-1930, the 1997 CD edition of Harry Everett Smith's Anthology of American Folk Music, and ESPN Presents Slam Jams Vol. 1, which repackages pop hits such as "One Step Beyond" by Madness and "Dancing with Myself" by Billy Idol.
Sensibility
In regards to critical sensibilities, Christgau says he has mainstream pop tastes and a fondness for "stupid, catchy songs with a lot of energy and life to them". Pick identifies "the pleasure principle" as a unifying theme throughout the critic's appraisals in the book, along with concepts of groove and practical significance. Generally speaking, he "tends to enjoy music that weds rhythmic vitality with catchy presentation while saying something original and worthwhile", Pick says. Mark Jenkins, meanwhile, describes "the Christgauian view of pop critics" as having "an obligation to take seriously stuff that sells – to deal with the marketplace, pop's only quantifiable consensus", which Jenkins qualifies is typically not the domain of serious music writers.The book's section of A-lists ranks releases from each year that are graded "A-minus" or higher. At the top of these lists are albums that Christgau says will ultimately determine a listener's agreement with his sensibilities and, by extension, whether or not the book will be useful to them. His most essential albums from the 1990s, as mentioned in the guide, include Fear of a Black Planet by Public Enemy, Nevermind by Nirvana, Maxinquaye by Tricky, The Score by Fugees, and Car Wheels on a Gravel Road by Lucinda Williams.
Among Christgau's subjects of complaint is the kind of violent and thoughtless sexism he says had been popularized by heavy metal and hip hop. He finds panning such content on "its own terms" easy and enjoyable, particularly "as a foul-mouthed person who's still very deeply interested in sex at age fifty-eight", as he told Rolling Stone in 2001. In regards to sexism in rap, he refutes the commonly held notion among African-American critics that "young black men should have absolute carte blanche to say what they want" because they are "thoroughly fucked over" by a racist society. However, he admits there are rappers who employ sexist content in an artful way that offers insight into its pathology, citing Eminem and Ghostface Killah as examples. He has also expressed discomfort with album lengths much longer than the 40-minute standard of past decades, analogizing it to the rarity of a symphony to surpass the same length of time, which he says gives insight into the average person's attention span: "And of course the symphony is a nineteenth century form when people had more time. So I think there's something really weird about the seventy-eight-minute album."
Overall, these sensibilities sometimes lend the book a contrarian attitude. For instance, favorable reviews are given to critically neglected albums by the likes of Collective Soul, His Name Is Alive, the Bottle Rockets, Shania Twain, Garth Brooks, the Backstreet Boys, P.M. Dawn, Kris Kross, and a variety of African musicians, while many conventionally acclaimed releases are appraised negatively, including those by Radiohead, the Flaming Lips, Elvis Costello, Dr. Dre, Snoop Dogg, Nas, Marilyn Manson, Son Volt, and Emmylou Harris. Christgau says, however, that he usually dislikes writing negative reviews as it requires him to get in a "bad mood" in order to write engagingly and vividly about an album that fails his personal standards.