I used to always enjoy reading the results and accompanying essays of the Village Voice's Pazz & Jop Poll. This year (though i had i been more attentive in previous years i am sure i would have felt similarly," i have an axe to grind with Robert Christgau, who sits atop the Voice's stable of music critics. [How the hell did the William Shatner-Ben Folds novelty album beat out Jean Grae, Summer in Abadon and The Black Album? How do the French Kicks trump C'mon Miracle? Are the critics the Voice polls really that lazy and self-satisfied? See below...] Christgau generally (in the Voice at least) favors soundbites over more developed analysis or exposition, so his essay accompanying the poll results in this week's VV is clearly meant to commemorate the importance of the voice's yearly ritual. Christgau purports to illumine for us less enlightened readers the politics of pop in this year of empire and torture and wardrobe/body armor malfunctions and electoral triumphalism, for is this not the role of the cultural critic?

Christgau is fatally arrogant. His quick dismissals and flighty appraisals sometimes grasp at more complex possibilities but all too often come up wanting. Yet nowhere is Christgau so wrong as when he attempts to critique hip hop. This is not news to many, who read Christgau's hagiographic gushing over the long island white-girl hip hop trio Northern State in the summer of 2002 only to discover, upon the release of their debut LP Dying In Stereo a derivative, half-assed expropriation of hip hop's tropes with no understanding of its complex dynamics, a ironic colonization of black working class cultural production by white suburbanites. One critic wrote "Northern State sound like suburban brats playing with Ghetto Barbies." Of course, much of the ire directed at the trio had its own problems - positing hip hop as inherently male, or resorting to formalism and feminist-bashing when these were more convenient than looking at Dying in Stereo as a sort of liberal minstrelsy. Northern State and Christgau and their critics tended to erase or minimize the seminal importance of a long line of women rappers of color, from Roxanne Shante and Salt and Pepa to Missy Elliot and Eve, from Foxy Brown and Li'l Kim to Jean Grae, Rah Digga, L-Boogie, and Bahamadia, to name a choice few. At the root of Christgau's championing of Northern State was an ignorant cynicism, or maybe cynical ignorance of, at the very least 'mainstream' hip hop, something which is, of course, far more polysemous and difficult to categorize than Christgau would have us believe with his cursory dismissals of Li'l Jon and the ubiquitous Usher single "Yeah!" Perhaps there are more "spaces" with far greater possibilities than Christgau is willing to admit or able to percieve lying in the culture he dismisses so flipantly as failed, as conniving pussy magnets or cultivated poses, in the "crunk" which he dismisses as nihilistic if necessary escape. You know you're in trouble when a bunch of cartoon characters have more intelligent things to say about Blueberry Boat than you do.
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Valentine's day will suck. It will be less scatological than last year, but far lonelier. I will walk eight miles and try to ignore the window displays and couples necking. I have taken 40 pills and have 72 more to take. Today my stomach was constantly upset and it really sucked.