He spends too much time on world music, too, at the expense of genres more pertinent to music “consumers.”

But he is a superlative writer, and has earned his authority.

His “perch” is secure, at msn.com

The trouble is that Xgau himself came to this conclusion almost four decades ago. Which suggests that he has created his own canon, which is then perpetuated over and over again. Fresh thinking and emerging facts threaten the hegemony he’s built up over forty years.

but I guess he backed off from the “psychedelic uncle tom” judgment around a decade ago, in a Voice essay where I believe he did not address said slur and carried on as if he thought Hendrix was great all along.

sadly for him, he no longer has the perch from which he makes his pronouncements.

I think many crits have a schoolboy crush on the guy. He’s who they want to be when they grow up. Which is odd, because he’s one of the most arrogant individuals I’ve ever been around in person.

Besides, the true test of a great critic isn’t whether you always agree with him — how boring would that be? — but that he gets you examining your own likes and dislikes from a new angle, in the process maybe learning something about them or even about yourself.

Hell, he even made RS’s “Recordings” section readable for a brief while there. Now that’s heroic.

XGau’s “core values” = not being able to ever change his mind about anything, barring deciding that the King Sunny Ade rekkid he reviewed in 1985 should get an A rather than an A—…

He hit his teenage years around the time of the big bang of Berry, Lil Richard and Elvis and obviously his view is that “rock music” done correctly should oppose a status quo, i.e. parents, Richard Nixon, polite society. So when Journey and Styx and Boston roll around, rock music has been around for 25 years and, in the case of those acts, the kind of confrontation and otherness that Xgau’s aesthetic is completely invested in is absent. I would also think that those bands values were premised on notions of professionalism that offends him: “refinement” on the part of white musicians probably reminds him too much of-oh I don’t know- classical music and other art forms championed by highbrow types he thinks he’s different from.

Journey spoke to white teenagers who lived outside of XGau’s frame reference (Lower manhattan), were mainly concerned with drinking Budweiser and getting a piece of ass in the back of a Camaro, and were otherwise were beneath his contempt. This may also explain his metal problem.

People out in the real world, who listen to pop music? No, you’re right, their opinions haven’t changed (though, thanks to that Sopranos finale, there are surely more of them).

But “people” like the staffers at Rolling Stone, who invented the term “Corporate Rock” 25 years ago and dumped on Journey (not entirely undeservedly) all through the 1980s? Yeah, I think Maura and Anonocritic are right–these are people who wouldn’t have tolerated Journey’s presence on a greatest-anything list as recently as May of 2007.

Read this exchange from Slate last December to see how Robert Christgau–not an RS guy strictly speaking but definitely an avatar for all of Wenner-era criticism–feels about Journey. Because Bob isn’t a total tool and is confident in his opinions, he actually hasn’t changed his mind about Journey (and says so, emphatically); but it’s not a stretch to imagine that his more impressionable peers softened on the band after David Chase’s endorsement.

Actually, I’ll bet those voters don’t think those gals’ music is terrible. That’s because they’re probably different voters from the RS lifers.

If this poll is indeed as un-rigged as you say it is, then it probably contains votes by industry types and pop singers who unabashedly, and unironically, love Houston et al.

The 2003 500-album list–as suspect as aspects of it were–featured numerous albums that the RS brain trust would never have advocated, from Whitney Houston to Janet Jackson’s The Velvet Rope. It was pretty easy to spot which albums were voted on by the likes of, say, David Fricke and which by other non-magazine poll-respondents like, say, Clive Davis or Britney Spears.

Lately I’ve found myself favoring GQ over RS because GQ can at least pique my interest in things going on fashion wise. RS does not give any space to soon-to-be-breaking-artists. It’s a bummer because I think they have good writers. I just got so sick of the insanely one sided political coverage. They write about politics like a bully on the playground. They point and call names.

Nice piece.

And I know at least one surefire way you can tell this ballot wasn’t completely rigged: Al Green outranks Mick Jagger, even if it’s a narrow margin.

Plus… BB King #90-something? and, no Levi Stubbs? No Bon Scott? No Weird Al?

OK, feeling much better now… rant over.