THE CHRISTGAU CONSUMER GUIDE
This was supposed to be a natural. So often I play a record I once knew well and hear it snap into place —suddenly, I feel that I’ve never really comprehended it before. Perhaps I find myself liberated from assumptions that seem absurdly limited or shortsighted in retrospect, or finally grasp the assumptions some prescient artist arrived at years ago—something that happens frequently with black music, where my understanding lags chronically because my familiarity with the culture it is part of is so secondhand.
THE CHRISTGAU CONSUMER GUIDE
A Guide to 1967 (1967?)
This was supposed to be a natural. So often I play a record I once knew well and hear it snap into place —suddenly, I feel that I’ve never really comprehended it before. Perhaps I find myself liberated from assumptions that seem absurdly limited or shortsighted in retrospect, or finally grasp the assumptions some prescient artist arrived at years ago—something that happens frequently with black music, where my understanding lags chronically because my familiarity with the culture it is part of is so secondhand. There are auteur effects, too: An artist's subsequent career can make his or her early work seem newly expressive, for better or for worse. The test of time, it's called, and while its ultimate truth value is dubious, we’re all mortal creatures who have to live with it. So it seemed not only easy but appropriate to go back to 1967, the watershed year for what was once called rock culture, and find out how all those supposedly epochal Works of Art had fared over what will soon be a decade.