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I have to admit I have never understood much of anything Robert Christgau has written. This could be because he is 39 years older than I am and I have never listened to any rock album recorded between 1970 and 1979* all the way through—unless you count that time I was cleaning my apartment and my roommate was playing Led Zeppelin III – but I am still bummed for him that he got fired from the Village Voice.

And yet…there is something sarcastic and vindictive in me when it comes to professional writers with semi-cushy jobs/regular incomes. Reading Joan Didion, I sometimes want to say “Oh, that must have been so hard when you had to fly to Hawaii for a few days on someone else’s dime.” I’ve grown to hate the cosmopolitan tone I hear in the writing of people who live, even part-time, in New York or Los Angeles. I dig for meaning and find little. My deficiency? Maybe that’s why the biggest market I write for is Sacramento.

Actually, Jody Rosen points out exactly what it is I don't like about Christigau's writing:

At various times, the Voice music section embodied the worst aspects of Christgau's influence, publishing articles that were lumpy goulashes of rock-crit arcana and in-jokes. Christgau is probably too peculiar a writer to be an ideal model. His imitators can't match his chops. Christgau's secret weapon, though, is old-fashioned lefty-secular-humanist warmth. He overflows with love for music and a joie de vivre that makes his fits of critical pique more principled than mere hipsterish provocations. The truth is, Christgau's writing does shut out a lot of readers, but it has helped to create, and to fortify, a community—the brotherhood and sisterhood of music obsessives.

In short: Christgau helped shape music criticism into an impenetrable fog navigable only by a tiny in-crowd. Well, any case, here are my contriubution to the fog this week: Hem in the Mercury, Sufjan in the SN&R. Also a not-very-interesting preview of a dashed decent show here.

(*Yet I still get paid to do this sort of thing. Unfair?)