Which leads me to Christgau the rock critic, who once wrote of Costello “all wordplay as swordplay” –a phrase I still use. As is this one, which only I own since he said it in reference to a pan of Visage (more or less –I think I was a little ambivalent) I’d written for the Voice: “They aren’t invading Poland”…. A phrase I’ve used ever since whenever somebody is over reacting. And… MICK JAGGER SHOULD WRAP UP HIS PENIS AND GO HOME.
Christgau bludgeons the reader with endless dives into various intellectual rabbit holes (his “theory of pop,” Dostoyevsky, Theodore Drieser, etc.) and recalls then discredits every slight he has ever received. If you are purchasing this book for his writing on music, forget it.
The problem with VV is it is such a pale facsimile of what it once was, it just… it is like when somebody has been really sick and while they are better they haven’t bounced back. The Village Voice haunts itself; it looks at itself in the mirror and it is gaunt and tired and shaky and a terrible read
