“Barring miracles unlikely to ensue, this is the final edition of Christgau's Consumer Guide.”  With those introductory words this month, Robert Christgau, long-time “dean” of pop music critics, announced that he would be retiring the record review column he’d been doing for most of the last 41 years, mostly in the Village Voice, the last few years for the MSN website.  (Here's the link to his website.)

    

This saddens me greatly. I’ve been reading his column almost from the beginning (yes, I'm that old). As the music industry fractures in all different directions, recording capability is as close as your laptop, and recorded output swamps the number of hours in the day, I’ve relied more and more on Christgau’s judgment to separate the wheat from the chaff, especially in genres where I dip my toe gingerly, like hip-hop and world music.  All of a sudden, I feel stranded.

  

Certainly I didn’t need him to tell me whether or not the latest Bob Dylan was worthwhile, and I learned to recognize blind spots (no matter hard he tried, I just don’t get M.I.A.).  However, his reviews did stimulate my love for lesser-known artists like Amy Rigby, Todd Snider and the Mountain Goats.  Most importantly to me, he triggered my love for world music artists like Astor Piazzola, King Sunny Ade and Orchestra Baobab. 

   

Sometimes, when I’m proofreading a potential OS post, I see his writing style in mine, with sentences containing too many subordinate clauses – or clauses separated by a dash.  But his writing also affected my content, teaching me to trust my own gut - not just in music - and not get seduced by conventional wisdom.  He taught me, to paraphrase Public Enemy, “Don’t believe the hype;” like me, for example, he was unmoved by the critical huzzahs for Radiohead’s OK Computer.  He taught me that even cheesy, teen-oriented pop confections had merit; he listed the Backstreet Boys’ “I Want It That Way” the best single of 1999 and he’ll get no argument from me. 

   

For several years, I privately wrote bite-sized record reviews in a poor imitation of his style.  Here are six of them, all records I enjoyed and would never have encountered without Christgau’s enthusiasm. So, Mr. Christgau, thank you for the hundreds of hours of listening pleasure.  Now I’m going to go listen to my out-of-print copy of the glorious Guitar Paradise of East Africa.

  

WIDE RIGHT: Sleeping On the Couch:  Wide Right’s singer/songwriter, 40-year-old Leah Archibald, writes no-frills bar-band rock with smart lyrics so evocative of her Buffalo roots that I was surprised to find out she left there for good 17 years ago, and now lives in Brooklyn with a marketing day job she considers more important than her music, a book-editor husband, and two kids, one with cancer in remission (which strengthens the importance of a good day job).  Still, you can take the girl out of the rust belt, but you can’t take the rust belt out of the girl.  In “Junior High School Dream,” she admits to still being “a sucker for a Midwestern guy who plays guitar and wears his hair in his eyes” (“I’m 37 going on 13”).  In “Laws of Gravity,” a 15-year-old girl gets fired from her first job for complaining about being hit on.  “Flicker Film” skewers an artsy-fartsy moocher who won’t get off her couch and steals her cough medicine (“Get out of my refrigerator”).  I especially like the gender reversal in the lead track, “Dishrag,” where the narrator wants her partner to forget the dishes and come watch the football game.  Of course, she could merely be writing from a male point of view, which she also does in “Blue Skies Ahead,” which depicts an aspiring actor talking on the phone to his disappointed mom (with its memorable line, “soon I’m gonna meet the lady who is just the one for me and can ignore all my gay porn”).  So I’m not surprised that her one cover version is Loretta Lynn’s “The Pill,” about that moment when women began to gain control of their sexuality.    

JESUS H CHRIST AND THE FOUR HORNSMEN OF THE APOCALYPSE:  Jesus H. Christ and the Four Hornsmen of the Apocalypse:  If you’ve never heard of them, the name probably suggests angry punk.  But if anything, it’s punk-cabaret - with their tunefulness and skewering humor, they’d make a great double bill with Nellie McKay. [NOTE: I later saw them as a double-bill with Nellie McKay.] Risa Micklenberg’s vocals alternately sound horny, angry, amused or contemptuous, in a half-spoken approach that often reminds me of the late Patty Donahue of the Waitresses.  (If you don’t believe me, try “Obviously.”)  She nails bored suburban promiscuity (“Connecticut’s For F*cking”), the artsy-fartsy hipoisie (“Vampire Girls”) and inappropriate lust for a newly mourning widower (“Do Me”).  It helps that she has better punch lines than Weird Al.  It also helps that her band is eclectic, stretching from Brazilian tropicalia (“Crazy Guy”) to Fountains of Wayne power-pop (“She’s a Six”) to sugary Partridge Family pop (that’s the one called “Nipples”).  It makes me wonder how much excellent music is floating around the Internet under the critical radar.   

VARIOUS ARTISTS: The Rough Guide to Boogaloo:  World-music aficionados hold this bastardization of salsa and Sixties rock in contempt (“boogalosers,” sniffs Songlines, “I cannot imagine anyone wanting a whole album’s worth” of this relic from “the cultural junk pile of the 60s.”)  Me, I love the cheesiness.  With rhythms that evoke go-go dancers and with Spanglish lyrics heavy on “grooviness,” it sounds like the Telemundo version of Hullabaloo.  Maybe the naysayers are embarrassed that serious Latin musicians like Tito Puente, Celia Cruz, Charlie Palmieri and Willie Colon stooped to cut tracks that aspired no higher than fitting on AM radio between the Capitols and Herman’s Hermits.  If you ever wondered what “Good Lovin’” would sound like with a salsa beat, here’s your answer.  All right, maybe I can’t defend “Batman’s Boogaloo,” though I like that one too, but I insist that cuts like Ray Barretto’s “A Deeper Shade of Soul” and Joe Cuba’s “Oh Yeah” would have sounded just perfect between the Capitols and Herman’s Hermits.

 

BOBBY PINSON: Man Like Me:  He may wear a cowboy hat, but his guitars are sometimes too loud and blaring for country.  He gives props to “Haggard and Hank,” of course, but in the same breath, “Sting and Springsteen” (not to mention Hendrix and Led Zep), and I hear Bruce in his gravelly vocal tone and, especially on the quiet “I Thought That’s Who I Was,” the way he fades the end of a phrase.  Lyrically, he doesn’t break new ground, but he often provides his own twist – in “One More Believer,” he has faith because God provides him a good woman even though he’s a fuck-up, and in “Don’t Know Ask Me How I Know,” he takes the traditional pieties of country (favorite line: “Don’t rush off when your Mama calls / You ain’t that busy”), treats them as hard-earned wisdom, tacks on a “Boys of Summer” guitar riff, and creates one of the best singles of the year.  On the joyous “Started a Band,” he sounds not too far removed from hauling his cheap equipment in a “Dodge van with no exhaust” between “those same ol’ dives” – heck, for all I know, he’s not removed at all.   I like the little details, like the Welcome sign missing the ‘O’, in “Nothin’ Happens in This Town,” and I like how the maturity of his songs are haunted by youthful mistakes, like his buddy’s drunk-driving death, so I’ll look the other way when the middle tracks get a little squishy.  I don’t know if he has another record this good in him, but most artists don’t even have one. 

BUCK 65: Talkin’ Honky Blues (Warner Canada):  Has there ever been a more aptly named record?  Talkin’: his rap is mostly a monotone, and his words are conversational.  Honky: this is probably the whitest rap record ever, about “a road hog with an old dog” who says, “My idea of heaven, I enjoy the fixing of a flat tire,” who likes to drive his truck with “a little Johnny Cash in the tape deck,” fish and play baseball, backed by occasional banjos, pedal steels and spaghetti-western guitars.  Blues: several of the tracks, especially the remarkable “Riverbed 3,” portray country people down on their luck and living day-to-day (“These people don’t die, they evaporate slowly”).  Richard Terfry’s rap skills are rather mundane and his beats won’t be found on the dance floor (though I’m addicted to the bounce of “Wicked and Weird”), but his self-awareness and sensitivity (“without sunshine and rain, the grass won’t grow”) are exemplary. 

GIRL TALK:  Feed the Animals:   Beyonce, the James Gang, LL Cool J, the Bangles, En Vogue, Soul II Soul, Hall & Oates, Rick Astley, Jackson 5, Beastie Boys, Nine Inch Nails, Rick Derringer, Trick Daddy, Busta Rhymes – they’re the artists sampled in just the first minute of one track on this deliriously entertaining mashup, courtesy of Gregg Gillis, a 27-year-old Pittsburgh native who studied biomedical engineering in college, but has given up that career to re-engineer musical DNA instead.  Music 1, science 0.  Gillis has the unerring knack of finding the hook, the riff and the vocal shading that sticks in your ear, all while matching the meter.  Enjoy it as a steroid-injected version of Name That Tune, if you wish - the samples are all listed on one lengthy Wikipedia page that resembles a Billboard chart - or enjoy it, as I do, as an ode to the hedonistic fun driving every form of pop music.  If you’ve ever wondered what Jay-Z rapping over Radiohead sounded like, or Queen backing the Jackson 5 or Busta Rhymes over the Police, here you go.  My favorite moments: when Three Six Mafia backs the chorus of “Jessie’s Girl” with the vulgar “but I’d rather get some head,” and when Gillis makes Eminem sound drunk by putting his rap over the Yael Naim piano heard in the Apple ad.   Now morphing the Carpenters into Metallica – that’s just showing off.